Like a Virgil: Georgic Ontologies of Agrarian Work in Canadian Literature
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Like a Virgil: Georgic Ontologies of Agrarian Work in Canadian Literature Jennifer Gayle Baker A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctorate in Philosophy degree in English Department of English Faculty of Arts University of Ottawa © Jennifer Gayle Baker, Ottawa, Canada, 2019 Baker ii Table of Contents Abstract ..................................................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................................... v Introduction: The Georgic, Ontology, and Imperialism ........................................................................... vii Chapter One: Settler Georgic: Colonization and the Scaling Up of the Imperial Georgic ......................... 1 Chapter Two: Queering the Farming Family: Agricultural Production and Family Reproduction in Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese and Frederick Philip Grove's Settlers of the Marsh .................................... 60 Chapter Three: The Provisional Georgic: The Accident and the Undoing of Imperial Georgic Time .. 108 Chapter Four: Relational Georgics: The Ontopolitics of Agrarian Work in the Anthropocene ............. 161 Conclusion: Ecological Crisis and the Ontological Turn ......................................................................... 234 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................................. 244 Baker iii Abstract In this dissertation, I argue that two dominant perspectives on farming in Canada—the technoscientific capitalist perspective on modern industrial farming and the popular vision of hard-won survival on the family farm—both draw on narrative and aesthetic strategies that have deep roots in distinct, but related variations of the georgic tradition, which arrived in Canada in the eighteenth century and continues to shape literary representations and material practices today. Critics of Canadian literature have tended to subsume the georgic under the category of pastoral, but I argue that the georgic is a separate and more useful category for understanding the complex myths and realities of agricultural production in Canada precisely because it is a literary genre that focuses on the labour of farming and because it constitutes a complex and multi- generic discourse which both promotes and enables critique of dominant agricultural practices. I argue that, despite its sublimation beneath the pastoral, the georgic mode has also been an important cultural nexus in Canadian literature and culture, and that it constitutes a set of conventions that have become so commonplace in writing that deals with agricultural labour and its related issues in Canada that they have come to seem both inevitable and natural within the Canadian cultural tradition, even if they have not been explicitly named as georgic. By analyzing a variety of texts such as Oliver Goldmith’s The Rising Village, Isabella Valancy Crawford’s Malcolm’s Katie, Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush, Frederick Philip Grove’s Settlers of the Marsh, Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese, Al Purdy’s In Search of Owen Roblin, Robert Kroetsch’s “The Ledger,” Christian Bok’s Xenotext, Rita Wong’s Forage, and Phil Hall’s Amanuensis, I recontextualize Canadian writing that deals with agrarian work within two distinct but related georgic traditions. As Raymond Williams and others have shown, the georgic’s inclusion of both pastoralizing myths and material realities makes it useful for Baker iv exploring ecological questions. The georgic is often understood in terms of what Karen O’Brien has called the imperial georgic mode, which involves a technocratic, imperialist, capitalist approach to agriculture, and which helped theorize and justify imperial expansion and the technological domination of nature. But as ecocritics like David Fairer, Margaret Ronda, and Kevin Goodman have argued, the georgic’s concern with the contingency and precariousness of human relationships with nonhuman systems also made it a productive site for imagining alternatives to imperial ways of organizing social and ecological relations. Ronda calls this more ecologically-focused and adaptable georgic the disenchanted georgic, but I call it the precarious georgic because of the way it enables engagement with what Anna Tsing calls precarity. Precarity, as Tsing explains, describes life without the promise of mastery or stability, which is a condition that leaves us in a state of being radically dependent on other beings for survival. “The challenge for thinking with precarity,” she writes, “is to understand the ways projects for making scalability have transformed landscape and society, while seeing also where scalability fails—and where nonscalable ecological and economic relations erupt” (42). By tracing the interplay between imperial and precarious georgic modes in Canadian texts that have mistakenly been read as pastoral—from Moodie’s settler georgic to the queer gothic georgic of Ostenso’s Wild Geese to the provisional and object-oriented georgics of Robert Kroetsch and Phil Hall—I argue that the precarious georgic strain has always engaged in this process of thinking with precarity, and that it holds the potential for providing space to re-imagine our ecological relations. Baker v Acknowledgements This thesis would not have been completed without a community of family, dear friends and colleagues, for whose support I am deeply grateful. I was fortunate enough to have benefitted from Dr. Robert David Stacey’s immense expertise in Canadian literature, and my project is infinitely better for his keen eye, engaged questions, patience, and friendship. This thesis was also made possible by Dr. Anne Raine’s generous and selfless support, near-magical gift for untangling knotty ideas, calm guidance, friendship and outstanding expertise in the field of eco-criticism. I owe a massive debt of gratitude to both. This thesis has also greatly benefitted from the expertise and careful attention of my examiners, Dr. Jenny Kerber, Dr. Jennifer Blair, Dr. Gerald Lynch, and Dr. Frans De Bruyn, whose comments have improved this dissertation and are valued in my continued exploration of this project and its future iterations. I am incredibly thankful for the enduring patience and generous support of my parents, Bill and Gail Baker, who kept me on an even keel through a long and gruelling writing process. Over the years, the support of my friends and colleagues in the Department of English helped shape my thinking and writing more through our lively conversations and commiserations than they likely know, especially my colleagues in Hamelin-322. I am grateful in particular to Rob Anderson, Zac Abram, Cameron Anstee, Breanna Keeler, Andrew Loeb, Paul Graves, Jody Cooper, Laura Nelson, Beth Hundey, Erin Joyce, Jessica Ballantyne, John Robb, Erin Kean, and David Currie, whose support and generosity, and willingness to read long, disorganized documents uplifted me and inspired me through this writing process exactly when I needed it the most. I am grateful to be surrounded by such excellent people. Baker vi I am grateful for the financial support I received for this thesis project through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of Ottawa. This thesis is dedicated to the memory of my grandfather, Don Parsons, and to my grandmother, Lenore Parsons. Baker vii Introduction The Georgic, Ontology, and Imperialism On August 10, 2018, a jury in San Francisco ordered agricultural conglomerate Monsanto to pay $289 million dollars in damages to Dewayne Johnson after ruling that Monsanto’s Roundup industrial herbicide had caused his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Three days later, Canadian farmer Tobyn Dyck published an opinion piece in Maclean’s Magazine defending the modern industrial farm’s use of Monsanto’s Roundup glyphosate-based herbicide and Roundup- Ready genetically modified seed.1 Although the case against Monsanto did not directly involve agricultural labour—Johnson himself was a school groundskeeper, not a farmer—Dyck was responding to the widespread and sustained consumer criticism of farmers for their use of Monsanto’s Roundup (introduced in 1970) and Roundup-Ready genetically modified seed (introduced in 1996), despite scientifically verified concerns over their safety for both humans and the environment. For Dyck, technoscientific conglomerates like Monsanto make the pursuit of agriculture financially viable because they eliminate the problem of weed competition and the over-spraying of other herbicides in industrial agriculture. This most recent Monsanto case highlights the many competing interests at play in the current field of highly technologized and corporatized industrial agriculture. The combination of genetically modified Roundup-Ready seeds and glyphosate2 use has increased the yield capacities for industrial farmers, many of whom claim, along with Monsanto, that it has provided a more environmentally friendly alternative to other harmful chemical herbicides, but has also been at the centre of a range of 1 Genetic modification is a process in which individual genes of one organism are transferred to the DNA of another organism to alter the organism at genetic level, in a way that would not occur through natural selective processes (ie.