Here Is Queer: Nationalisms and Sexualities
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HERE IS QUEER: NATIONALISMS AND SEXUALITIES IN CONTEMPORARY CANADIAN LITERATURES by PETER DICKINSON B.A., The University of Toronto, 1990 M.A., The University of British Columbia, 1993 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Department of English) We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA December 1996 © Peter Dickinson, 1996 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of £AJ hsk. The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada Date gZ8 /?77~ ii Abstract This dissertation explores the relationship between the regulatory discourses of nationalism and sexuality as they operate in the cultural production and textual dissemination of contemporary Canadian literatures. Applying recent studies in postcolonial and queer theory to a number of works by gay and lesbian authors written across a broad spectrum of years, political perspectives, and genres, I seek to formulate a critical methodology which allows me to situate these works within the trajectory of Canadian canon-formation from the 1940s to the present. In so doing, I argue that the historical construction of Canadian literature and Canadian literary criticism upon an apparent absence of national identity—us encapsulated most tellingly in the "Where is here?" of Frye's "Conclusion"—masks nothing so much as the presence of a subversive and destabilizing sexual identity—"queer." The dissertation is made up of eight chapters: the first opens with a Sedgwickian survey of the "homosocial" underpinnings of several foundational texts of Canadian literature, before providing an overview—via George Mosse, Benedict Anderson, and Michel Foucault—of the theoretical parameters of the dissertation as a whole. Chapter two focuses on three nationally "ambivalent" and sexually "dissident" fictions by Timothy Findley. A comparative analysis of the homophobic criticism accompanying the sexual/textual travels of Patrick Anderson and Scott Symons serves as the basis of chapter three. Chapter four discusses the allegorical function of homosexuality in the nationalist theatre of Michel Tremblay, Rene-Daniel Dubois, and Michel Marc Bouchard. Chapter five examines how national and sexual borderlines become permeable in the lesbian- feminist translation poetics of Nicole Brossard and Daphne Marlatt. Issues of performativity (the repetition and reception of various acts of identification) are brought to the fore in chapters six and seven, especially as they relate to the (dis)located politics of Dionne Brand, and the (re)imagined communities of Tomson Highway and Beth Brant, respectively. Finally, chapter eight revisits some of the vexed questions of identity raised throughout the dissertation by moving the discussion of nationalisms and sexualities into the classroom. iii Table of Contents Page Abstract ii Table of Contents iii List of Figures iv Acknowledgements v Chapter One: A (Not So) Polemical Introduction 1 A Syndrome without the Symptoms 9 Sinclair Ross's "Queers" 19 Homo Porno 26 From There to Queer 36 Chapter Two: "Running Wilde": National Ambivalence and Sexual Dissidence in Timothy Findley's Fictions 56 Chapter Three: Critical Homophobia and Canadian Canon-Formation, 1943-1967: The "Haunted Journeys" of Patrick Anderson and Scott Symons 114 Chapter Four: "Pour exprimer un probleme d'identite": Michel Tremblay and His "Bastard Sons" 168 Chapter Five: Toward a Transnational, Translational Feminist Poetics: Lesbian Fiction/Theory in Canada and Quebec 226 Chapter Six: "In another place, not here": Dionne Brand's Politics of (Dis)Location 270 Chapter Seven: Learning New Tricks: Re-Imag(in)ing Community in the Two-Spirited Writing of Tomson Highway and Beth Brant 298 Chapter Eight: Nationalisms and Sexualities in the Classroom 327 F(l)ag Waving, or, A Queerly Canadian Coda 338 Works Cited 344 iv List of Figures Page Fig. 1. Rainbow flag 341 Fig. 2. Canadian flag 341 Fig. 3. UBC crest 341 Acknowledgements This dissertation was initially conceived during a directed reading course with Margery Fee in 1993. Dr. Fee not only encouraged me to pursue the project, she also agreed to supervise it. I am extremely grateful to her for the enthusiasm, guidance, and critical stimulation she provided throughout the long haul of its completion. I also benefited immensely from the advice and support offered by the other members of my committee: Alec Globe and Sherrill Grace. Time and again Dr. Globe's careful reading and bibliographic sleuthing forced me to reconsider my position or sent me off exploring in another direction altogether. Dr. Grace has been my teacher, professional mentor, and friend ever since I came to UBC as an M.A. student in 1991. I have learned enormously from her scholarly example, and her repeated exhortations to "return to the text" have on more than one occasion pulled me back from the brink of overly arcane theorizing. Legions of students owe their degrees (and sanity) to Rosemary Leach, tireless Graduate Secretary in the Department of English at UBC. I know that I would never have reached this stage without her sharp eye for bureaucratic details, her patient reminders about deadlines, and her presence of mind during unforeseen snow storms. Countless others have contributed in manifold and material ways to the writing of this dissertation. Among them are: Dennis Denisoff, M. Morgan Holmes, Marni Stanley, Marian Gracias, Gabriele Helms, Kathy Chung, Patrick Patterson and the entire staff at UBC's Interlibrary Loan office, Julie Beddoes, Karen Grandy and Anne Bailey, Terry Goldie, Barbara Gabriel, George Piggford, and Robert K. Martin, whose pioneering work in gay criticism and theory remains a constant source of inspiration. For their help in tracking down information on Patrick Anderson, I wish to thank W.H. New, Patrick Campbell, Patricia Whitney, and Orlando Gearing. I am especially indebted to Claire Wilkshire and Louise Ladouceur, both of whom took time out from their own theses to check my comprehension of the French language and to discuss with me feminist theories of translation. A special thank you to Beth Brant for answering my questions and for correcting my spelling. Generous financial assistance was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Finally, this dissertation could not have been written without the intellectual and emotional support of Richard Cavell: it is dedicated to him in admiration and love. Chapter One A (Not So) Polemical Introduction In the emerging narrative surrounding the canonization of Canadian literature—I am thinking, in particular, of the exchanges between Robert Lecker and Frank Davey, first in the pages of Critical Inquiry (1990), and, more recently, in Davey's Canadian Literary Power (1994) and Lecker's Making It Real (1995)—the discourse of (homo)sexuality, and its role (or non-role) in the formation and organization of a literary tradition in this country, is virtually non-existent. Instead, this narrative, especially as constructed by Lecker, has tended to focus on questions of "nationalism," "mimeticism," and some vaguely defined notion of "institutionality." It is only very recently that Davey has included "gay and lesbian writing" among those "Canadian literatures which evaded Lecker's [and, I would add, initially his own] notice" (Canadian Literary Power 76). And yet, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick reminds us in the sixth "axiom" of the introduction to Epistemology of the Closet, the "master-canons" of national literatures, and the dominant curricula of Western academic institutions, are filled with their own closets. When it comes to the sexuality—and more often than not the homosexuality—of "great" writers (Socrates, Shakespeare, Proust, to cite Sedgwick's examples), literary criticism tends to operate under a "Don't ask, don't tell" system of disclosure. I myself have never been good at keeping secrets. So allow me to let the cat out of the bag right away. In this dissertation I contend 1 2 that the identificatory absence upon which Canadian literary nationalism has long been constructed—the "where" of Northrop Frye's "here," for example—contains within it an invisible sexual presence: "queer." An important corollary to this claim is that if the discourse of nationalism has historically been gendered as patriarchal (a point I explore at greater length in chapter five), then it has also frequently been eroticized as homosocial. This is the "congruent" contradiction I attempt to bring out in subsequent sections of this introductory chapter, adapting the central thesis of Sedgwick's Between Men to an analysis of the triangulation of male desire in several of this country's foundational literary texts. Samuel Hearne and Chief Matonabbee; Jackie Denham and Tay John; George Stewart and Jerome Martell; Captains Vancouver and Quadra: Canadian literature is riddled with male couples who enact their love for each other—and their nation—by staking an indigenous claim to a necessarily feminized region or landscape. My own national narrative of Canadian homosociality I have divided into three sections, each corresponding with a specific literary-historical period (colonial, modern, postmodern), each announced by appropriate intertitles. I have deliberately sacrificed comprehensiveness in favour of focused attention on specific key texts. These texts (including John Richardson's Wacousta, Sinclair Ross's As For Me and My House, Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers, and Hubert Aquin's Trou de memoire) have been chosen as much for my own (and others') critical attachment to them as for their exemplary canonicity—and homosociality.