Looking at the Function of Afterwords and Acknowledgements in Some Canadian Historical Novels Jessica Langston Concordia University

Supplementing the Supplement: Looking at the Function of Afterwords and Acknowledgements in some Canadian Historical Novels Jessica Langston Concordia University

But the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace. Jacques Derrida Of Grammatology

n perhaps the most well-known chapter in Of Grammatology, “… ThatI Dangerous Supplement …,” Jacques Derrida examines the concept of the supplement. Here, he uses Jean Jacques Rousseau’s work to show how writing complements/stands in for the speech act and tries to recapture the presence of the speech and the speaker: “It is the addition of a tech- nique, a sort of artificial and artful ruse to make speech present when it is actually absent” (144). Rousseau, Derrida goes on to argue, perceives writing as a dangerous means for capturing presence, but a necessary one: Writing is dangerous from the moment that representation there claims to be presence and the sign of the thing itself. And there is a fatal necessity, inscribed in the very functioning of the sign, that the substitute makes one forget the vicariousness of its own function and makes itself pass for the plenitude of

ESC 40.2–3 (June/September 2014): 155–172 a speech whose deficiency and infirmity it nevertheless only supplements. (144) Jessica Langston is The supplement is dangerous because it fools the reader into perceiving an Adjunct Professor at a completeness when, in fact, the supplement only ever points to a lack Concordia University. not only in the absence it is ostensibly rectifying but in itself as well. Der- Her specialities are rida’s notion of supplement, then, is one that plays with the space between contemporary Canadian presence and absence. Its very presence highlights its own absence; what literature and First is there highlights what is missing. Peoples literature. Her Supplementarity is perhaps a particularly useful lens through which recent publications to consider the end notes so often included in historical fiction. These include “Revolution afterwords or acknowledgements, as they are typically titled, potentially Night in Canada: occupy the infinite regression of the supplement in that they are them- Hockey and Theatre in selves supplements to novels which are themselves supplements to previ- Tomson Highway’s Dry ous narratives about capital-h history. Moreover, these paratextual devices Lips Oughta Move to simultaneously point to the presence of historical authority and archive Kapuskasing in Theatre as well as its absence in both the novel they proceed and in themselves Research in Canada as ostensible complement to that novel. At the heart of these afterword/ and a short article on acknowledgements there is an anxiety about the ways in which not just George Bowering in a history and not just historical fiction but the paratextual apparatus itself special issue of Capilano falls short. Review. She is currently Using Derrida’s discussion of supplementarity as a means of illumi- co-editing an anthology nating how the material of the afterword/acknowledgements functions on First Peoples’ online within historical fiction, this paper will examine the ways in which these presence with Jesse paratextual devices expand on, conflict with, and further complicate the Archibald-Barber of First issues of absence and presence with which a novelistic narrative of history Nations University. engages. Through a close analysis of the afterword/acknowledgements sec- tions of five contemporary Canadian novels—John Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright, Rudy Wiebe’s A Discovery of Strangers, Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic, Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road—I will explore how each engages with the problems of representation (problems also explored within the novels themselves) to varying degrees and in different ways. However, before unpacking the novels, let me first draw a more in depth connection between history, afterwords, and supplementarity. Although Derrida discusses the supplement within the context of language, it is a concept that is also applicable to representations of history. That is, when a historian presents a new account of the past, it is a supplement to those accounts that already exist—it both adds to and completes the existing records. However, there is a further complication with the supplement, for in its paradoxical function there also exists a latent sense

156 | Langston of continuity. We expect, in other words, that the supplement will be added to or further completed by other supplements. The supplement, therefore, is never enough. The supplement will always already require another supplement. This problem with the historical supplement is particularly apparent within contemporary historical fiction, a genre that exists to supplement history, while bearing within it an awareness of its own supplementarity. These novels supplement history by pointing to and telling the stories that have been marginalized by capital-h history. In this sense they both add to and fill the main body of history. At the same time, however, contemporary historical fiction, with its production located firmly in the postmodern era and, thus, bearing an awareness of poststructuralism, typically participates in a kind of meta-narrative. The contemporary historical novel is aware of its own constructedness and also the impossibility of ever entirely or truthfully representing the past. It acts as a kind of supplement to history in this way as well, then, in that it points to the necessary incompleteness of History while also suggesting its own incompleteness—the necessity that its own book requires: another supplement. Further, historical fiction is itself supplemented by the very body of work it supplements. It relies on the History that it is attempting to supplement. Such an incompleteness is reflected in the awareness of the writers of historical fiction that although they are supplementing history they are still not getting any closer to the real. That desire to access the real, however, is not put to rest at the end of the book. The afterword/acknowledgement is often an attempt at recuperating the thing that is escaping representation. The afterword is performed as though there is a possibility of conclusion or fixed boundaries. At the same time, however, the afterword contains an admission that something will always escape. That is, the first supplement is incomplete, but, of course, the supplement provided in the afterword is also incomplete. This contradiction is reflected in the list of archival sources the author of historical fiction typically provides, as if to demonstrate that he or she is using real history, a list which is then also framed by an acknowledgement that what he or she has written is fiction, so it is not real too. Derrida’s deconstruction of semiotics argues that there is no meta or ultimate signifier that will allow an escape from the trap of sig- nification. The afterwords in these historical novels function in the same manner; they suggest the inescapability of the limits of representation. While, undoubtedly, the afterwords in historical fiction from other nations participate in the supplementarity I have discussed above, I have chosen to focus particularly on Canadian texts. As a colonial country, Can-

Supplementing the Supplement | 157 ada has an especially fraught relationship with the past. Benedict Anderson argues that the ship of state needs to seem to “loom out of an immemorial past” (11), but with a history as short as Canada’s such a positioning is near impossible. The nation, then, is produced as under constant crisis,1 and history is employed as a means of both combating the crisis and reaffirming the nation as well as the source of that same crisis.2 Add to the problem of an abbreviated history the problem of questionable indigeneity, and we have a country whose citizenry feels disconnected from its own history. The ever-growing prominence of Native rights activism draws attention to the more problematic aspects of Canada’s founding, raising the inevitable question of whether or not Canada had, indeed, even been “founded” in the way that most white, Anglo-Canadians believed. “For almost three centuries White North Americans,” according to Brian Trig- ger, “assumed” that the New World had been relatively uninhabited upon the arrival of the Europeans and that the assimilation or extinction of its Native peoples was only a natural process given how few their numbers always were (3). However, beginning in the mid-twentieth century, the activism of Canada’s First Nations population has been raising public awareness in regards to their treatment both historically and currently. Not only, then, is the nation young, it is also founded on the space and place of many other nations whose treatment in the recent past (and still today) complicates the identity of Canada as benevolent nation. In an 1882 lecture, scholar Ernest Renan put it perhaps most succinctly: while “the essence of a nation” may be that its citizens “have many things in common,” it is also “that they have forgotten many things” (11). Canada’s national narrative has, perhaps unsuccessfully, attempted to forget its own problematic, imperialist past. These necessary omissions and the particular complications of a colonial past seem to require an ongoing supplementation of Canadian history and certainly make it a nation that is ripe for fictional re-visioning. The instability of historical truth as it is treated in Canadian fiction is Linda Hutcheon’s focus in The Canadian Postmodern. “Historiographic metafiction,” a genre that she defines as a postmodern novelistic genre that troubles historical narrative(s) by underlining the very fact that they are narratives, is celebrated by Hutcheon for its unsettling of the concept of

1 See Robin Mathews’s Canadian Identity (1988) and Ian Angus’s A Border Within (1997), as well as literary studies such as Gaile McGregor’s The Wacousta Syn- drome, T. D. MacLulich’s Between Europe and America, and Frank Birbalsingh’s Novels and the Nation. 2 See Eva Mackey’s arguments in That House of Difference or Robert Kroetsch’s arguments in “Disunity as Unity: A Canadian Strategy.”

158 | Langston historical truth. The historical novel,3 Hutcheon argues, no longer claims to provide any sort of direct access to the past through realist fiction; rather, through “using and abusing” the conventions of realism and history, historiographic metafiction (the current form of the historical novel) We cannot read challenges the notion that we can know the past (8). While historiographic metafiction may incorporate historical facts, Hutcheon insists that it never these texts as “assimilates” them. It is, in fact, the largely unsuccessful attempts to assimi- late history that these texts foreground (A Poetics of Postmodernism 114). straightforward Historiographic metafiction, by focusing on “collecting and attempt[ing] to make narrative order” of historical data, highlights the “paradox of the indictments and reality of the past” and its relative inaccessibility to the present, except through textuality or discourse (Poetics 114). rejections of Like Hutcheon, Herb Wyile traces the manner in which contemporary historical fictions subvert notions of empirical history, although where history. Hutcheon tends to be optimistic about the radical potential of these revi- sions Wyile identifies a surprising “conservatism” in Canadian historical novels of the past few decades (253). He ties this conservatism to a desire to reconstruct as opposed to wholly deconstructing the past (254). In his conclusion, Wyile suggests that this movement toward a narrative recon- struction of Canadian history in recent novels compromises their postcolonial critique because they “run the risk of becoming consolatory narratives compensating for the sins of official history” as well as “encouraging simplistic approaches to the legacy of colonialism” (261). Wyile argues that, in its eagerness to “ ‘correct’ official history,” the revisionism of these novels4 “implicitly or explicitly asserts a more authentic version … a stance that jeopardizes its own contestation of the ‘truth’ of official history” (262). We cannot read these texts as straightforward indictments and rejections of history, nor can we read them as simple celebratory reinstatements of Canadian nationalism. They are both and neither. The afterwords of the particular historical novels I have chosen reflect this tension through their desire to disavow their historical verity and their simultaneous need to assert their own importance. While certainly a number of Canadian texts, including not just novels but poems and plays,5 3 Among the novels that Hutcheon discusses are Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear (1973) and Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers (1966). 4 Some of the novels that Wyile considers include Rudy Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear (1973), Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981), Jane Urquhart’s Away (1993), and Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Englishman’s Boy (1996). 5 See, for example, Margaret Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie,Jon Why- te’s Homage, Henry Kelsey, Wendy Lill’s The Fighting Days, or R. H. Thomson’s Lost Boys.

Supplementing the Supplement | 159 could be illuminated through the framework of Derridean supplementarity, I have chosen to focus on John Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright, Rudy Wiebe’s A Discovery of Strangers, Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic, and Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road for a few specific reasons. These five novels are representative of three specific periods in Canada’s history: exploration, settlement, and early twentieth century. Moreover, all five novels attempt to recover marginal histories by revisiting the past from the perspective of Aboriginal peoples and women or by troubling and revising a nationalist mythology. Finally, these texts focus on real historic personages, although in the case of Marlatt and Boy- den that focus is not necessarily foregrounded in the narratives themselves. This focus on historic people and events necessitates a certain fidelity to official records but also highlights the absence within these records and the failure of both the records and the novels themselves to access the “real” moment(s) of the past. These historical novels (any historical novel) are engaged in a negotiation, a juggling act between the real and the representational. As Robert Holton has demonstrated in his extended study of theories of history, Jarring Witnesses, this tension between fact and interpretation has bedev- iled debates about modern historiography since at least the nineteenth century. While in the eighteenth century history was “most commonly thought of as an orderly narrative,” Holton explains that “[m]ore recently … the academic and scientific respectability of historians has at times been impugned on the basis of dubious truth-claims that can be made for the works of scholars whose main task may appear to be ‘mere’ story-telling” (3). Acknowledging the necessarily interpretive nature of historical analysis need not extend to a rejection of the existence of facts, but, on the other hand, this admission cannot be equated with the idea of unmediated access to these facts. Flattening history to so much fiction distorts rather than complicates these tensions, as does the opposite impulse toward empiricism. If, as Holton suggests, the theoretical work of influential historiographic writers from F. H. Bradley to Hayden White has turned compulsively on this tension, literary texts, as overtly fictional works, may be uniquely positioned to explore these questions. The historical novel, precisely because it is a fictional genre that draws on factual sources that are then subjected to a fictional framework, can be seen as emblematic of the ongoing tension between history as representation and history as accessible fact. Historical fiction is caught up in the tension between historical fact and the force of narrative, between the instability of know-

160 | Langston ledge and the search for some verifiable facts or truths attainable in and through history. Using the notion of the supplement, what this negotiation means is that these novels point to an absence within official versions of Cana- dian history and work to fill it. They are attempting to create presence where before there was absence. The fact that they are supplementing history points to its inadequacy. History, however, is also functioning as a supplement to the novels themselves, as without the presence of official accounts of Canada’s past there would be no material to supplement and no material from which to work. This complication creates a kind of fissure within the texts in that they are both challenging and relying on national history. This fissure is itself represented in the novels’ acknowledgement of their own supplementary nature and the awareness that the narratives they present will require further supplementing. That is, these writers work to complete history while knowing, all the time, that their texts will themselves be incomplete, that the presence of history within the novel points to its absence. The constitutive tension whose effects I am identifying in these various literary works—between a fidelity to the past and a self-reflexive awareness of the contingencies implicit in any narrative about that past—is doubled by a second-order narrative that circles around the same problem. In the paratextual apparatus included at the end of many of these novels, their authors dwell on the archival materials that have formed the basis of their stories. These framing narratives tend to remove the authors from the scene of writing by reversing their own fictionalizing impulse in the body of the texts, emphasizing instead the persuasive force of the historical documents themselves. In that sense, then, these afterwords tend to undermine the novel as a necessary supplement to history, suggesting instead that the novels are a supplement more in terms of complementing the existent records. The afterwords, of course, also suggest that history is somehow incomplete or limited and, thus, point to the novel that precedes them as a necessary antidote to the limitations of official history. By escaping the rules and conventions of history due to being fiction, the novels, it is implied, somehow access a more truthful version of the past. However, as with the texts whose contents these afterwords attend, these final pages also rehearse the necessary impossibility of any capture of history, both within the official records and within the novels themselves. As such, these afterwords seem to require yet another supplement as history in any concrete or tangible sense seems to evade representation even here.

Supplementing the Supplement | 161 That said, the role of the afterwords within these texts is particularly complicated and not entirely consistent. As Gerard Genette points out in Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, “not all prefaces ‘do’ the same thing” (196), so the function of paratextual material is always a bit murky.6 Moreover, as Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek argues, the preface always contains within itself a self-consciousness or self-awareness of its own possible failure; it is marked by the anxiety that it won’t supplement entirely or properly (x). Also, the preface is always reliant on the very text that it purports to supplement. As such, it is always submissive to said text and is, therefore, coloured by it. While I would argue that the five afterwords I will be looking at are all inflected to varying degrees by the impetus to supplement, I certainly do not mean to suggest that they go about it in the same way or with the same results. The first two novels, John Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright and Rudy Wiebe’s A Discovery of Strangers, return to Canada’s exploration period with the aim of de-romanticizing the figure of the explorer/rugged settler. Wiebe wants readers to reconsider what happened to Canadian northern peoples (the Dene) in the name of settlement and discovery. He is struggling to come to terms with Canada’s historical record through creating a polyvocal novel that incorporates not just the voices of the white explorers but also makes use of Dene source material (that is, oral documentary material rather than written). Further, Wiebe foregrounds in a self-aware manner the fact that, as the author, he has final interpretive authority; his novel reveals a self-reflexive engagement with his role as rep- resenter and his impossible-to-fulfill desire to depict this history as truthfully as he can. While Wiebe’s reimagining of Canada’s colonial origins is a serious attempt to consolidate the beliefs and stories of its two nations in and through narrative, Steffler’s re-visioning of history involves an expul- sion of its sordid details. The Afterlife of George Cartwright imposes a con- fessional model on the imagined narrative of Cartwright, and the colonial past becomes the material of Cartwright’s apology. Cartwright, as a sort of figurehead for the exploration period and the Canada and Canadians that have developed from it, goes through the process of repentance and atonement, ultimately seeking and receiving forgiveness from the land for the exploitation that accompanied European colonization. The afterwords of both novels, then, have a key role to play in unpacking the dialogue with history that takes place in the preceding text. What that task means is a

6 It should be noted that Genette uses the term preface to signal a paratext that comes before or after the main text, as does Tötösy de Zepetnek.

162 | Langston necessary balancing act between providing evidence of their grounding in official records and unpacking how they disrupt these official tellings. Steffler’s acknowledgement that his version of Cartwright’s story is “fiction, not history” (268) is mitigated, for instance, by his insistence in What that task the appended author’s notes that the novel “springs from Cartwright’s own account of his life,” and is, in places, a “verbatim” reproduction of the means is a original journal (268). This gesture to the sovereign force of the archive is reinforced by his related suggestion that the narrative had a mind of necessary its own: “his [Cartwright’s] story grew as I handled it, following its own inherent tendencies as well as mine” (268). While, on one hand, Steffler balancing act is here acknowledging the influence his own “tendencies” had on this version of Cartwright’s story, he is also disavowing responsibility for the between final product by claiming that it unfolded according to its own internal logic. The narrative, Steffler would have his reader believe, developed providing organically from the source material, from Cartwright’s original words; in some ways, then, the narrative, in these author’s notes, is depicted as evidence of their having developed from Cartwright himself. Like Derrida’s supplement, the novel is meant to mark or replace the absent figure it is representing. It grounding in is also intended as a complement to the historical records that informed Steffler’s novel, as indicated by an almost exhaustive list provided toward official records the end of his notes. Steffler’s fiction is working to make the history it is telling present and alive for the reader—to give it presence. This list has a and unpacking dual role: it both supplements the novel by grounding it in “real” history and points out the novel’s own supplementary act as somehow complet- how they ing this abundance of textuality. Of course, such an enumeration also implies a failure of previous accounts to make Cartwright and his history disrupt these fully present, which underscores the anxiety of the paratext on which Tötösy de Zepetnek remarked. Especially in Steffler’s citation of his own official tellings. previous work—“parts of Chapter 10 appeared in Fiddlehead” (268)—this “Author’s Note” acknowledges a possible lack in the novel’s reimagining of Cartwright, the possibility that it, too, has failed to render history present. A final point of interest is the manner in which Steffler closes his notes. Steffler marks the page as an explorer might mark the landscape. He leaves his name, locale, and date of writing, “December 1991” (269). Steffler’s final words on the blank page remind the reader of Cartwright’s constant naming and claiming of what he perceived as a blank territory. It is as though Steffler is, in this gesture, marking some ending of textuality, the desire to finally complete the supplementarity in which the book participates. However, in marking his material presence in the pages of the book, Stef- fler is simultaneously marking not only his absence but also the absence of

Supplementing the Supplement | 163 anything solid or concrete. Steffler’s likely intentionally ironic replication of Cartwright’s imperialist desire to mark space and time points to just how impossible such an action is and, therefore, underlines the constant evasion of history from the infinite regression of supplementarity, of representation. In A Discovery of Strangers, Wiebe’s acknowledgements section, which follows the novel proper, also echoes the exploration tradition of naming and marking the land. Here Wiebe thanks “the intrepid members of the Land, Air and Water Expedition of 1988, Edmonton, Alberta to Obstruc- tion Rapids, Northwest Territories” (np). Wiebe then recreates for the reader the note that he and his fellow travelers left in a cairn “on the highest point of Dogrib Rock” (np). The note lists the expedition members’ names and links their trip to Franklin’s 1821 journey that is the basis for the novel. After a moment, Wiebe tells the reader, the phrase “A Land Beyond Words” was added to the note (np). This section of Wiebe’s acknowledgements is emblematic of the paradox with which the entire novel struggles. On one hand, Wiebe is trying to pin down the experience of exploration by actually following the same route as Franklin’s expedition; this desire to pin down is suggested by Wiebe’s own attempt to leave his mark on the land. Of course, this leav- ing of a note is also reflective of the imperial activities of exploration and charting that his novel troubles. In some ways, then, Wiebe’s journey is an attempt to move past the documents and archives of history into a personal encounter with the past. That said, the appendix that appears at the bottom of the note left on Dogrib Rock complicates this idea of pin- ning down anything—the land, the experience of exploration, history. This idea of the North and its history as somehow “Beyond Words” signals the central concern with representation that Wiebe explores in A Discovery of Strangers through the character of Robert Hood. In his afterword, Wiebe reminds the reader of the impossibility of ever representing this space and time, the impossibility of ever recreating in narrative what really happened and the people, both First Nations and explorers, who experienced these events. History, and the land that it demarcates, develops and exists, for all intents and purposes, outside of language. In other words, the supplement of the novel, the supplement of acknowledgements, will only ever point to a deferring of meaning, to further need for supplementarity that will also never lead to any completion or conclusion. Language will never create presence. We can see this reluctance to claim his novel as authoritative in Wiebe’s desire to detach himself from the narrative he has written. As with Stef-

164 | Langston fler, Wiebe attributes the story he has penned to another. He labels this “Greenstocking’s story.” The narrative, then, becomes almost detached from the author, signaling the importance of the silenced Dene voices in the original historical records. Wiebe does not want to participate in the type of narrative that Keskarrah describes as English: “they had heard only their own telling, as told to themselves” (15). He wants to avoid being yet another white man writing about and to more white men. Wiebe wants to create a supplement to the national mythology of the explorer by adding to this narrative the voice of the country’s First Peoples. Nonetheless, Wiebe wants to claim some sort of authority, if only to point to the historical veracity and materiality of his narrative. In both Steffler’s and Wiebe’s closing notes, there is a list of various source texts. These writers want the reader to know that they have done their research, that, despite their claims that these novels are “fiction, not history” (Steffler 268), they are, in fact, firmly grounded in documented history. Wiebe and Steffler, -not withstanding their conscious engagements with the paradox of historical representation, seem to be claiming some sort of transparency for both their processes and their products. They both supplement their fictional novels with “real” historical texts, the very same texts that their novels are meant to supplement. The paratextual apparatus of Wiebe’s and Stef- fler’s novels highlight the fact that both works straddle postmodernist/ poststructuralist and postcolonialist ideology. In the end, these authors want to point out the self-awareness of their texts, that they are aware of the constant possibility of never accessing what is absent, of never making it present within the body of the novel. However, these narratives are also invested in a reconsideration of history from a perspective that questions imperialism. If they are going to take an ethical or even political stance on the project of colonialism, they must be grounded in materiality. In the end notes of both A Discovery of Strangers and The Afterlife of George Cartwright, this tension between a disruption of and a reliance on histo- ricity is nicely reflected. Atwood’s Alias Grace and Marlatt’s Ana Historic are meant to function as supplements to a primarily male-dominated account of history. Marlatt, in particular, makes this function clear early on in her novel, having her protagonist, Ana, state, “there is a story here” (14). Using scant documen- tation—Marlatt making a brief mention of a Mrs Richards, schoolteacher, within the pages of regional history, Atwood to newspaper accounts and a reference in Susanna Moodie’s papers to a Grace Marks, house servant and suspected murderess—these two novels ostensibly uncover the marginalized experiences of two women from Canada’s settlement period and act

Supplementing the Supplement | 165 as a corrective to the previous historic records which largely silenced and/ or ignored the female experience of establishing homes and communities in the New World.7 Nonetheless, Marlatt and Atwood, like Wiebe and Steffler, are aware of the impossibility of ever accessing and fleshing out history, for if every document or text is incomplete, so, too, are their own narratives. What this means, of course, is that the novels operate around the same central tension discussed above: they both do and do not attempt to complete capital-h history. The novels’ end matter, while engaging in the same tension, also works to resolve it. As such, the afterwords of these texts, much like those of Wiebe and Steffler, become supplements to their own supplementary reading of history and, in so doing, take up a complex positioning vis-à-vis the novels they conclude. Atwood begins her afterword by immediately identifying the fissure at the centre of historical fiction: “Alias Grace is a work of fiction, although it is based on reality” (463). This “reality,” however, is then further complicated by Atwood’s “historical” account of the Kinnear- Montgomery murders, an account which provides names, dates, and other material. Presented as a narrative, Atwood’s more factual account of the events is filtered through a variety of texts, including the popular press, a number of history texts (for example, Kingston: Building on the Past and Essays in the History of Canadian Medicine), and Susanna Moodie’s Life in the Clearings. Of course, this narrative is also filtered through Atwood’s own investment in the story as a marker of a patriarchal society that represented and delimited the feminine in a particular way. As Atwood recognizes in her closing remarks, both her own version of events and that presented by the “commentators” from whose documents Atwood draws have “fictionalized historical events” (466). However, such an admission of fictionalizing is then complicated by Atwood’s claim to have not “changed any known facts,” a claim then subverted by an awareness that “few facts emerge as unequivocally known” (467). In other words, Atwood has both relied on the official history while remaining ambivalent about whether or not history can ever be known. In the face of such uncertainty, Atwood tells her reader that she “tried to choose the most likely possibility” (467), but “where mere hints and outright gaps exist in the records, I have felt free to invent” (467). Atwood’s novel is characterized here as a supplement to history, one that fills “gaps” with fiction, but also one that complements history by re-representing its events.

7 Atwood, of course, is also uncovering another type of marginalized history by focusing on a house servant, that of the lower class.

166 | Langston Such an admission of invention is, perhaps, undone in the acknowledgement section that follows Atwood’s afterword. Here, we have a supplement to a supplement to a supplement, a space in which Atwood tries, finally, to capture history within the limits of her novel. A list of sources, including various Ontario newspapers and a number of anthologized let- ters and essays, is how Atwood opts to end her novel, a choice seeming to signal that, despite her disavowals of any knowable history, her rewriting of them is ultimately supplemented by them. This last instance of supplementarity almost undoes the previous casting of the novel as supplement to history by underlining the primacy of the original historical document. Atwood’s acknowledgements expresses a fidelity to the ideology of historical authority, a deference to the notion that history can finally be knowable, although it does not claim that Alias Grace has necessarily attained that goal. What Atwood’s paratext seems to demonstrate is an empirical approach to history that suggests it can be made present by way of myriad supplements. While Marlatt’s novel closes with merely a list of historical sources, her final page functions in a different manner from that of Alias Grace. As with the novel itself, Ana Historic’s paratextual material largely occupies a space of subversive feminist indeterminacy. Marlatt’s list of documents and her mention of the City of Vancouver Archives and the Historic Photographs Collection of the Vancouver Public Library could be read as evidence that the text is firmly grounded in more traditional means of accessing the past. So, too, could the bibliography Marlatt provides, which is reminiscent of the academic essay in providing author’s name, book title, publisher, and date of publication. For a novel that avowedly plays with the cred- ibility of historical sources, Ana Historic strangely ends with a list that might initially suggest the validity of Marlatt’s own re-imagined account by providing a list of works cited, including a number of historical texts on Vancouver and two early newspapers, The Moodyville Tickler and The Mainland Guardian. That said, I would contend that in her final notes Marlatt is once again playing with the expectations of her reader. Coming after a novel that so avowedly bucks convention, Marlatt’s abrupt investment in the typical formalities of an afterword throws the entire work off balance yet again. Part of Marlatt’s feminist project has been a refusal of definition—particularly since definitions have so often been part of the patriarchal process of fixing and confining women—yet now with her paratextual material she is supplementing the uncertainty of the novel with an acknowledgements section that, through its very participation in the generic codes of the paratext, further defies any concrete conception

Supplementing the Supplement | 167 of the novel it follows. Further, it seems that by asserting the possibility of historical presence, the acknowledgements is unsettling the novel’s continual refrain of its absence. Moreover, this seeming reliance on real history is undercut by Marlatt’s odd claim at the bottom of her acknowledgements that “this is a work of fiction; historical personages have been fictionalized to possible and/or purely imaginary lengths” (np). The meaning of such a sentence is diffi- cult to unpack. This difficulty of language is in keeping with the novel as a whole since Ana Historic operates within a feminist language practice, attempting to undo the conventions of a system that produces and is produced by patriarchal culture. Throughout the novel, Marlatt plays with syntax, grammar, and word choice as a means of writing a marginal history in a more marginal language, writing a (her)story that exists outside of the language of (his)story. This last line of her acknowledgements may then function as a final act of supplementarity, ending her novel by playing with the conventional statement that precedes a work of fiction: “This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to people living or dead is purely coincidental” (np). As she has been doing in the narrative itself, Marlatt is here defamiliarizing language in order to create a means of communica- tion that might lie outside of patriarchal rules. What this refiguring of the traditional disclaimer actually says, however, is worth consideration. Marlatt seems to be suggesting that there are no lengths or limits to the practice of fictionalizing history, that any limits to representation are “purely imaginary.” Such a limitlessness aligns with Derrida’s theory of supplementarity in that it points to an endless number of supplements, a continuity outside the fixed limits of the text and of history. Of course, this understanding of Marlatt’s statement is itself supplemented by a second possible reading. As is the case with so much of the language and phrasing in the novel itself, Marlatt is here highlighting the multiplicity of meaning, the shiftiness and trickiness of language: that every use of language requires a supplement of more language. The supplement is never complete. But in her disclaimer, Marlatt nonetheless seems to express a desire that the supplement is complete in the space of her novel, that the supplement has completed, that she has pushed history to its farthest “possible … lengths” (np), and also that she has reeled it back in again in the space of her acknowledgements, which seeks to complement/validate the imaginary of her novel through its list of supplementary readings. In its closing pages, Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road, perhaps because it belongs more to the realist genre, expresses a more explicit desire for

168 | Langston fidelity to the truth of history than does Marlatt’s novel. This fidelity’s importance is underscored by Boyden’s stated mission to “honour the Native soldiers who fought in the Great War, and in all wars in which they so overwhelmingly volunteered” (383). Boyden’s choice of the word “honour” is significant, signaling as it does both the wish to express respect and an admiration for these soldiers as well as the desire to somehow do right by them, to perform a sort of hereditary duty toward them. In other words, Boyden has tasked his own narrative with a dual function of highlighting the heroism of these men, a task which will require a particular slanting of the historical record, a reading and re-presenting of history in a particular way, as well as first recuperating this history in order to correct the omissions and marginalizations of the past. Boyden, then, is working with existing histories at the same time as he is supplementing them by filling them in and retelling them in a certain way. Boyden goes on to speak directly to “Native soldiers,” assuring them that their “bravery and skill do not go unnoticed” (383). It is a paradoxical comment as it implies that the original historical records have kept track of their bravery, while also implying that Boyden’s narrative is a corrective to the absence in capital-h history of such information. History both does and does not need supplementing. This paradoxical action of both unwriting and rewriting history continues as Boyden explains: “I especially want to honour Francis Pegahmagabow, sniper, scout, and later chief of Wasauksing First Nation (Parry Island). He is one of Canada’s most important heroes” (383). On one hand, Boyden is charging his historical fiction with the role of supplementing the records of war heroes, while assumedly still relying on historical documents for the information he has about Pegahmagabow—that he was a sniper, scout, and chief. On the other, Boyden is asserting that Pegahmagabow is always already “one of Canada’s most important heroes,” in which case this novel is merely adding to the man’s status. Three Day Road, then, both complements (supplements) existing expressions of respect and makes up for/acts as a corrective to (supplements) history’s omission of this war hero (while still relying on historical records to supplement the novel’s corrective aim). Boyden’s acknowledgements don’t merely serve to highlight the function of the novel as supplement; they perform a kind of supplementarity themselves. For one thing, they supplement by clearly stating the novel’s purpose, as though the novel itself was not enough to re-write/right history, as though Boyden needs to clarify the objective of the novel. Further, the acknowledgements, by thanking R. James Steel and identifying him as “among our country’s best World War I historians” (283), supplement

Supplementing the Supplement | 169 Boyden’s imaginative retelling with a veneer of reliability. Such reliability is furthered in the naming of “Greg Spence of Moose Factory, Ontario” (283) for his translation of English to Cree and in the mention of various Not just the Cree First Nations peoples with whom Boyden stayed during his “northern travels” (384). Not just the historical details are being foregrounded historical details here; Boyden is also suggesting a sort of authenticity to this marginal history by demonstrating his personal connection with Canada’s Cree are being population. What possibly escapes the novel, Boyden’s investment in the politics of the project, is captured and expressed in the supplement of his foregrounded acknowledgements. The acknowledgements, thus, represent an anxiety on Boyden’s part that the novel did not do its work. However, what I find here. particularly fascinating here is what Boyden seems to be declaring that work to be. While the end notes of the other novels I have focused on make use of metanarrative to question not only the broad project of narrating history but also their own specific project of narrating it, Boyden, in his stated purpose to “honour” figures of the past, seems to suggest that such a thing is possible. In the paratextual apparatuses of the first four novels I have looked at, there is an implied or explicit awareness of the failure of representation to create presence. Boyden is distinct in his apparent understanding that the supplement can and does address and fill an absence in/of history. Boyden’s postcolonial politics necessitate the possibility of recuperating history in order to attain a holistic picture, one which does justice to everyone who played a key role, particularly to the First Nations people who are so often absent from the official records. Of course, what is captured in the afterwords of these novels, ultimately, is also always escaping, always pointing outside itself to the need for further supplementarity. Expanding Derrida’s originally linguistic conception of the supplement is useful for considering these paratextual apparatuses as they, in their very nature, are always already supplements to another text. There is a particularly interesting regression of supplementarity created within the afterwords of historical fiction because historical fiction is itself a supplement to other texts, other discourses. Certainly five novels I have looked at do not all participate in the supplementarity in the same way, just as none of them say exactly the same thing about history or about fiction. What the analysis of this paper does suggest, though, is that the endless deferment of the supplement is particularly active and apparent within this nesting textuality, as is the endless hope of somehow getting closer to the real, to the truth, to more than simply representation.

170 | Langston Works Cited

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