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 lan- guage, 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 demon- strate 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, imperial- ist 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.

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