The Politics of the Centre in “Reading Maritime”

“Lest on too close sight I miss the darling illusion”: The Politics of the Centre in “Reading Maritime” Tony Tremblay “It’s hard to think of anyone else who can cast a spell the way Alistair MacLeod can.” — Alice Munro unro’s lines above became the tagline — much pro- filed and quoted on posters and dustjackets — that wel- M comed Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief into the pan- theon of great Canadian books. In as much as endorsement can add momentum, this particular endorsement accelerated an already fren- zied drive that brought MacLeod’s novel to national and international acclaim. To the casual observer, such praise always seems innocent enough: in this case, one of our leading short fiction writers welcoming another of her ilk into the canon of notables that fiction alone merits. That Munro was not a novelist but, like MacLeod, a serious artist of the short form, simply added the legitimacy of hard-won confraternity to her words of praise. Easily missed in Munro’s good will, however, is the politics of exclusion that endorsement confers. What does the tagline’s exclusionary utterance (“it’s hard to think of anyone else”) imply about the many other major “else[s]” who cast signature spells in Atlantic Canada and other regions of the country? How do we read the special circumstances of Munro’s status in consigning such legitimacy? And to what extent does such praise become extradiegetic, a parallel narrative that forms outside the main story that, over time, becomes the story itself, forcing upon other unrelated narratives something of the bias and authority of its own intentions? In this essay I am interested in exploring these questions by exam- ining how Maritime literature has been read by critics, reviewers, and centralists who endorse our books. For the sake of brevity, I am limiting the focus of my essay to the practices of reading Maritime literature; however, what I say about the literary politics of the three Maritime 24 Scl/Élc provinces can be applied to the literature of Newfoundland with some adjustment for the greater cultural autonomy of the island, as other essays in this collection will explain. Why read the critics rather than the literature? Because as Northrop Frye asserts, “while value judgments tell us nothing reliable concerning the [writer] about whom they are made, they tell us a great deal concerning the cultural conditioning of the person who makes the judgement” (465). My objective, then, is to study that “cultural conditioning” by reading regionalism backwards — that is, as a construction of the centre rather than the margins. My goal in doing this is to think about the practice of professional or expert reading with a mind not only to how we “read region” in this country, but also to how we negotiate the production of our national mythos. Because all reading is ideological in the sense that it is a social practice mediated by forces inside and outside the text — by diegetic and extradiegetic authors — it is ultimately that mediated practice that I wish to open up here for consideration. I Since reading as illocutionary act (as noun and verb: doing and saying) is an ideological function rooted in the authority of instruction, canon, authorship, and a variety of other highly politicized seductions meant to bring meaning back to the centre, it seems only logical to open this essay by situating Maritime reading practice within the realm of post colonial theory. That theory, particularly its African Marxist variant, seems especially well suited to an understanding of how and to what purpose text is read across large tracts of territory loosely governed from the centre. The uncanny fit of African theory with our own contempor- ary Maritime writing and literary reception suggests a compatibility that prompts me to view Maritime writers much as Chinua Achebe viewed African novelists: that is, as enjoining art with social practice. In an important essay called “The Novelist as Teacher,” Achebe identified the key difference between African and European writers as the degree to which each used art for social rather than personal or aesthetic functions. African novelists, he argued, used writing for political and moral pur- poses on behalf of their communities much more deliberately than did their European counterparts, whose own work, often equally political, tended to mandate personal over social freedoms and justice. “Perhaps what [we] write is applied art as distinct from pure art,” Achebe said, Reading Maritime 25 “[B]ut who cares. Art is important and so is education of the kind [we] have in mind” (qtd. in Ashcroft 126). Achebe’s point was not simply to identify education as the site of protest, but to declare art’s social (and therefore provincial) function in a late-imperial world still subsumed by eighteenth-century Christian notions of the innocence and political naïveté of non-western peoples. The overtones of Achebe’s essay thus reverberated for African writers and European readers alike. The response in Africa and Europe to Achebe’s notion of social function has important implications for our work in Canadian studies. The response centered on what I will simplify by calling the intelligibility quotient. In Africa, writers buoyed by what they took as Achebe’s affirmation in the face of homogenizing pressures from outside the continent further entrenched their localisms. Some, like Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o, decided to write solely for an African audience, thus decolonizing literary language and reading practice by making it inaccessible to the west. Ngugi’s own reflections on this decision are instructive: Wherever I have gone, particularly in Europe, I have been confronted with the question: why are you now writing in Gikuyu? Why do you now write in an African language? In some academic quarters I have been confronted with the rebuke, “Why have you abandoned us?” It was almost as if, in choosing to write in Gikuyu, I was doing something abnormal. But Gikuyu is my mother tongue. The very fact that what common sense dictates in the literary practice of other cultures is being questioned in an African writer is a measure of how far imperialism has distorted the view of African realities. It has turned reality upside down: the abnormal is viewed as normal and the normal is viewed as abnormal. I believe that my writing in Gikuyu language, a Kenyan language, an African language, is part and parcel of the anti-imperialist struggles of Kenyan and African peoples. (82) What might first appear to be Ngugi’s rather narrow personal statement has wider political implications in a postcolonial universe: namely, that in its demand for homogeneity, cultural imperialism fosters provincial- ism every time. The European response to this snub to universalism — a universalism defined, quite unconsciously, through the lens of a self-evident pan-European experience — was predictably swift and hostile. There were calls for African writers, newly discovered and democratically wel- comed into the commonwealth of literatures, to avoid the indulgences 26 Scl/Élc of the tribe for universal intelligibility. Otherwise, what was the point of emancipation? Why free a man or a nation into solipsism? The mes- sage was clear enough: the canon was open for new membership as long as its European standards, tastes, and archetypal tropes were observed. And to ensure that they were, the engine-room of literary production — that vast apparatus of First-World, western-based publishing houses, editors, reviewers, booksellers, academics, and “coalition[s] of lesser gentries” (Anderson 79) — tacitly subscribed to what seemed natural and obvious: that, because the need for intelligibility was paramount, the imperial must trump the tribal. Non-European writing could tell its stories of difference as long as those stories fit a particular — if mystical — condition of European enculturation. While the momentum behind African literary production, then, was moving toward decolonizing literary language and practice in a postcolonial world, the proprieties of European literary reception demanded that a recolonizing of literary language and practice occur in the name of intelligibility. This overview, admittedly, simplifies what was a complex process of literary production and reception, but it outlines nevertheless the basic strictures that governed the negotiation between voices on the periphery of Empire and the organizing machinery at the centre. (That we have any postcolonial literature at all attests to the fact that sufficient accommodation was made, compromising though it was for both sides.) In Canada and the settler colonies, similar relational politics existed between those who produced and those who supported literary production, even if the scale of disparity and the conditions of accommodation were different than those between First and Third Worlds. The New Zealand experience, to take a remote if similar First-World “settler” example, illustrates the recurrence of the imperial pressures of intelligibility. In August 1908, Henry Lanier, a senior editor of the influential New York publishing house Doubleday Page, suggested to by-then accomplished New Zealand novelist Edith Lyttleton that the “tremendous power” of her work was not being “used to best advantage because it had never been turned into producing a novel along more usual and conventional lines.” He advised instead that if you would write a novel or two, more of the sort that people are accustomed to buy in this country, it ought to be possible to secure a public here which would thereafter take anything good that you cared to put before them. But in the books so far, the people, the Reading Maritime 27 surroundings, the conditions and even the language, are all so for- eign to any experiences or ideas which the average American has, that it is extremely difficult for him to establish that basis of human sympathy which a man has got to have for the characters in a novel in order to thoroughly enjoy it.

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