Writing the Body in Motion WRITING THE BODY IN MOTION A CRITICAL ANTHOLOGY ON CANADIAN SPORT LITERATURE Edited by ANGIE ABDOU & JAMIE DOPP Copyright © 2018 Angie Abdou and Jamie Dopp Published by AU Press, Athabasca University 1200, 10011 – 109 Street, Edmonton, AB T5J 3S8 Cover design by Natalie Olsen Interior design by Sergiy Kozakov Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens ISBN 978-1-77199-228-2 (pbk.) ISBN 978-1-77199-229-9 (PDF) ISBN 978-1-77199-230-5 (epub) doi: 10.15215/aupress/9781771992282.01 Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Writing the body in motion: a critical anthology on Canadian sport literature / edited by Angie Abdou and Jamie Dopp. Includes bibliographical references. Issued in print and electronic formats. 1. Sports in literature. 2. Canadian literature—History and criticism. I. Abdou, Angie, 1969–, editor II. Dopp, Jamie, 1957–, editor PS8101.S73W75 2018 C810.9’3579 C2018-900427-4 C2018-900428-2 We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities and the assistance provided by the Government of Alberta through the Alberta Media Fund. This publication is licensed under a Creative Commons License, Attribution–Noncommercial–NoDerivative Works 4.0 International: see www.creativecommons.org. The text may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that credit is given to the original author. To obtain permission for uses beyond those outlined in the Creative Commons license, please contact AU Press, Athabasca University, at [email protected]. Contents Introduction 3 Angie Abdou 1 W. P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe: The Fairy Tale, the Hero’s Quest, and the Magic Realism of Baseball 11 Fred Mason 2 The Myth of Hockey and Identity in Paul Quarrington’s King Leary 25 Cara Hedley 3 Hockey, Humour, and Play in Wayne Johnston’s The Divine Ryans 43 Jason Blake 4 The Poetry of Hockey in Richard Harrison’s Hero of the Play 57 Paul Martin 5 Glaciers, Embodiment, and the Sublime: An Ecocritical Approach to Thomas Wharton’s Icefields 71 Cory Willard 6 Hockey, Zen, and the Art of Bill Gaston’s The Good Body 93 Jamie Dopp 7 The Darkening Path: The Hero-Athlete Reconsidered in Angie Abdou’s The Bone Cage 107 Gyllian Phillips 8 “Open the door to the roaring darkness”: The Enigma of Terry Sawchuk in Randall Maggs’s Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems 123 Paul Martin 9 From Tank to Deep Water: Myth and History in Samantha Warwick’s Sage Island 139 Jamie Dopp 10 Identity and the Athlete: Alexander MacLeod’s “Miracle Mile” 153 Laura K. Davis 11 Decolonizing the Hockey Novel: Ambivalence and Apotheosis in Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse 167 Sam McKegney and Trevor J. Phillips Contributors 185 WRITING THE BODY IN MOTION Angie Abdou Introduction Over the past decade, sport literature courses have sprung up at colleges and universities across the continent, in both English and kinesiology departments. As the author of a sport novel, The Bone Cage (2007), I have been invited to speak to students in Newfoundland, Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta, and British Columbia, as well as in Maine, Massachusetts, West Virginia, Colorado, Texas, and Kansas. Because I am enthusiastic about sport literature, professors in the discipline frequently contact me with questions. Mostly, they want me to recommend secondary sources. They want strong academic essays to assign to their students, as examples of the critical analysis of sport literature. Unfortunately, there are still relatively few such essays available. In Canada, an exciting body of critical writing specifically about hockey has emerged, beginning with Richard Gruneau and David Whitson’s Hockey Night in Canada: Sport, Identities and Cultural Politics (1993). Since Gru- neau and Whitson’s groundbreaking study, several collections of essays have appeared, including Whitson and Gruneau’s follow-up work, Artificial Ice: Hockey, Culture, and Commerce (2006); Canada’s Game: Hockey and Identity, edited by Andrew Holman (2009); and Now Is the Winter: Think- ing About Hockey, edited by Jamie Dopp and Richard Harrison (2009). In addition, two full-length studies—Jason Blake’s Canadian Hockey Litera- ture (2010) and Michael J. Buma’s Refereeing Identity: The Cultural Work of Canadian Hockey Novels (2012)—have offered critical surveys of hockey fiction in Canada. But these scholars have, for the most part, adopted an interdisciplinary approach, rather than offering close readings of the hockey novels and poems that tend to be taught in sport literature courses. 3 doi: 10.15215/aupress/9781771992282.01 Perhaps the critical and commercial popularity of certain hockey novels—classics like Roy MacGregor’s The Last Season (1983), Paul Quar- rington’s King Leary (1987), and Bill Gaston’s The Good Body (2000)—has helped to overcome some of the historical prejudice in the academy against the study of sports and, by extension, against literature about sports. At the same time, works of literature about sports other than hockey have largely been ignored. The present collection aims to redress this imbal- ance, by including considerations of some of the best recent literature in Canada about other sports. In preparing the collection, we intended to maintain an even balance between hockey and “not-hockey” literature, but continually found our hockey list outweighing all other sports combined. The same thing happens each time I teach a sport lit course: if I don’t stay vigilant, I easily end up teaching a hockey lit course. This phenomenon is easy to explain: there is an abundance of very good Canadian literature about hockey—which is, after all, an iconic sport in this country, intricately entwined with efforts to summon a pan-Canadian sense of identity. To make room for non-hockey sport literature, we have thus left out some classic Canadian hockey literature: Roch Carrier’s The Hockey Sweater (1979), Jamie Fitzpatrick’s You Could Believe in Nothing (2011), Steven Galloway’s Finnie Walsh (2000), Mark Anthony Jarman’s Salvage King, Ya! (1997), and Cara Hedley’s Twenty Miles (2007). The growing interest in hockey for Canadian writers and scholars also led to a growth in hockey conferences, the first of which was hosted by Colin Howell at St. Mary’s University, in Halifax, in October 2001. According to the proceedings, the conference “Putting It on Ice: Hockey in Historical and Contemporary Perspective” was “meant to be the first in a series of conferences on hockey and its historical and social significance” (Howell 2002, vol.1). This conference helped to jump-start an increase in scholarly analysis of hockey and set the pattern for future conferences, which have brought together scholars, journalists, members of community hockey organizations, athletes, and writers and poets from across North America and Europe. In 2002, Howell organized a follow-up conference on women’s hockey, and two years later, Andrew Holman, a professor of Canadian studies at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts, organ- ized a conference called “Canada’s Game: Hockey and Identity.” Since then, hockey conferences have been held every two or three years. The hockey essays in Writing the Body in Motion offer explanations for this wealth of 4 Introduction doi: 10.15215/aupress/9781771992282.01 hockey literature and the growing scholarly interest in it, while also exam- ining the association between hockey and Canadian identity. We hope the interest in hockey literature will gradually extend to other types of sport literature. Sport lit courses allow students the opportunity to critique sport culture and to analyze the role of athletics in today’s society. Most of us, at some point in our lives, participate in sport, and many of us also interact with sport as consumers by attending or watching sporting events or following sports in the media. Sport literature courses give us a chance to think critically about that consumption. We intend this collection to complement those courses, both for professors as lecture material and for students as models of literary criticism and as research sources. The essays offer a variety of ways to read, teach, and write about sport litera- ture. Organized chronologically by source text, from Shoeless Joe (1982) to Indian Horse (2012), the essays in this collection focus specifically on contemporary Canadian sport literature. The lessons of these literary works—and the essays about them—extend beyond the sporting arena. According to the course website of Don Morrow, who taught one of Canada’s first sport lit courses at the University of West- ern Ontario, sport literature is never just about sport; rather, it explores the human condition using sport as the dominant metaphor. Similarly, Priscila Uppal, perhaps the most well-known Canadian scholar and writer to focus her attention on this topic, explains that the best sport literature functions as “metaphor, paradigm, a way to experience some of the harsher realities of the world, a place to escape to, an arena from which endless lessons can be learned, passed on, learned again” (2009, xiv). Many of the essays in this collection, therefore, examine the various ways in which sport functions metaphorically. Our authors also consider various recurring themes of sport literature, including how sport relates to the body, violence, gender, society, sexuality, heroism, the father/son relationship, memory, the environment, redemption, mortality, religion, quest, and place. Two theorists feature prominently in the following essays: Joseph Camp- bell and Michael Oriard. Because writers often represent sport stories as a quest for victory, with the athlete as mythic hero, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero of a Thousand Faces (first published in 1949) works well as a con- textual and theoretical framework. Campbell proposes the “monomyth” of the hero’s journey, which involves a departure from home, overcoming obstacles, triumph, and a return to community with new knowledge (see Introduction 5 doi: 10.15215/aupress/9781771992282.01 Campbell 2008).