Reading from a Distance In/And Canadian Cities: Negotiating the Stylistics of Locality Sarah Banting Mount Royal University

Reading From a Distance in/and Canadian Cities: Negotiating the Stylistics of Locality Sarah Banting Mount Royal University

reader attentive to narrative address will notice how the narrator Aof the following passage establishes for her audience a position distant from her own location. The narrator is here, in “this city”—a location soon after indicated to be Toronto—but her audience is elsewhere, attending to her story from some considerable distance. This city hovers above the forty-third parallel; that’s illusory of course. Winters on the other hand, there’s nothing vague about them. Winters here are inevitable, sometimes unforgiving. Two years ago, they had to bring the army in to dig the city out from under the snow.… Spring this year couldn’t come too soon—and it didn’t. (Brand 1)

This passage is taken from the opening lines of Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For, a novel about the complicated social and cultural niche occupied by four young Torontonians, all of whom have parents who migrated there from an elsewhere far from the city. The novel thus begins with the narrator locating her city for her audience on a global map cali- brated by lines of latitude. Noting that these are a cartographer’s construction, an illusion of mapmaking that figures lines where there are none

ESC 39.4 (December 2013): 113–144 on the ground, she shifts frames of reference to tell her audience about the embodied experience of living in this city: the “inevitable” force of winter cold, the longing for spring. At this moment in the narrative, fea- Sarah Banting is an tures of style and narrative disposition suggest an address to an audience Assistant Professor in the positioned at a distance—located somewhere southward, perhaps, where Department of English at heavy snow is a story worth telling, and from which perspective degrees of Mount Royal University, latitude northward are the relevant scale for measuring Toronto’s distance. where her teaching and In this paper, I consider narrative passages like this one, in which a research focuses on geographical position relative to the story’s setting is established for the writing, genre, style, and implied audience, and ask what our attention to the narrative style in such the rhetoric of academic passages might allow us to add to recent critical discussions about the writing in literary interpretive dynamics and the politics of reading from a distance. These studies. She is trying discussions include work on regionalism and the reading of Maritime fic- to get used to Calgary tion from metropolitan centres in central Canada, England, and the United winters. States; international readership, in particular the reading of Canadian work by European critics; and cosmopolitan reading. I will shortly offer a review of these discussions; such a review suggests that their emphasis has been on the interpretive powers and geopolitical positioning of certain reading audiences rather than on the audience-positioning effects of narrative style. I would like to contribute some consideration of the effects of style. This paper is motivated, in part, by the sense that style must make some difference, for readers of Brand’s novel—readers located wherever they are: in coastal Canada, or the United States, or Germany, for instance. This motivation, in turn, comes from work in linguistic pragmatics and relevance theory: theoretical approaches to language, including narrative language, that see style as always at once reflecting and constructing particular social situations (see, for instance, Sperber and Wilson, Clark and Carlson, Clark and Marshall, Prince). Narrative style in novels, in this view, constructs a particular audience as addressed by the narrator at a given moment in the narrative (Banting): an audience positioned as knowing certain things (but perhaps not others), as likely to find certain stories interesting and relevant, and as having a certain, more or less defined, relationship to the narrator and the settings and events he describes.1

1 As relevance theorists Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson observe, for instance, all aspects of style indicate a speaker’s assumptions about her addressee and about the relationship between them. “Style is the relationship,” they write. Much of what they argue of spoken language holds for narrative language in novels as well: “From the style of a communication it is possible to infer such things as what the speaker [or narrator] takes to be the hearer’s cognitive capacities and

114 | Banting From this theoretical perspective, passages such as the one that opens Brand’s novel compel an attention to the social dynamics of what Clark and Carlson call “audience design” (218): the designation of a particular audience as the primary addressees of the narrative and the concurrent positioning of other audiences as addressed only indirectly, or not at all. Read in this spirit, Brand’s narrator’s selective address has the social effect of situating some audiences outside of her immediate purview, and it is this effect that leads me to argue that her style must make a difference to readers of the novel, in their particular individual locations and circum- stances. It must make a difference for distant readers (or indeed for local ones), for instance, that the narrator opens her telling with an address to an audience positioned in a particular elsewhere. Here, then, I consider the difference made by the specifics of address in narrative style in the case of recent novels set in major Canadian cities, using as examples Brand’s What We All Long For (2005) and Timothy Tay- lor’s novel Stanley Park (2001). What I want to argue is that these novels address several audiences, positioned at a variety of distances from the cities in which they are set. Among them are relatively distant audiences, who do not know the cities in the kind of intimate, embodied ways the narrators do. But, in the way they manage style, the novels also acknowledge local audiences who do know the cities well, and the distinctions the novels draw between distant audiences and local ones draw attention to the dynamics of reading distance. I suggest that these stylistic distinctions must make readers conscious of their own proximal or distant position, relative to the novels’ settings. Indeed, I suspect this is true in general of novels set recognizably in particular places, although the deliberately referential narrative style in novels like What We All Long For and Stanley Park is likely to make readers especially conscious of reading distance. Toward the end of this paper, I reflect as well on the consequences of a more particular finding: that the style in these two recent novels constructs as desirable a kind of local consciousness that comes only with longstanding, embodied life in their Toronto and Vancouver settings—a “place-based consciousness” that cannot quite be acquired through more distant ways of knowing. Critics who have been writing recently about the question of reading from a distance have focused on work set in a variety of geopolitically mar-

level of attention, how much help or guidance she is prepared to give him in processing her utterance, the degree of complicity between them, their emo- tional closeness or distance” (217).

Reading From a Distance | 115 ginalized places: regional Canadian, postcolonial Irish, and postcolonial African settings. Discussions in particular of regional and cosmopolitan reading have tended to consider the position of Western, metropolitan readers relative to those settings, asserting a link between the interpretive power of such readers—including their demand for work that is “intelligible” from their cultural perspective (Tremblay 25)—and the relatively powerful cultural and political location of these readers in a postcolonial world. They focus on the powerful, even potentially coercive, metropolitan reception of works produced at margins—in geographically remote regions, former colonies, or Third World countries with relatively little cultural and political power (see, for instance, Tony Tremblay’s work on central Canadian readings of Maritime literature). In contrast to such marginalized sites of literary production, Toronto and Vancouver are centres of some political power, hubs of publishing and journalism (to differing degrees), and destinations for migrants and tour- ists. As largely English-speaking Canadian centres, they are sites that might be said to have some cultural, if not political, influence on distant readers.2 These cities’ relative centrality, then, differentiates them somewhat as literary settings from the settings currently under critical discussion. But Canadian cities are not necessarily known to all who read novels set there, and even Canada’s largest cities arguably remain located at the geopolitical “periphery of the centre,” to borrow a phrase from David Whitson.3 They are not, I believe, as frequently represented nor as thoroughly broadcast as a London or New York City. The economics of international book publishing and distribution have generally meant that books set in these cities are less likely to be read in the U.S., at least, than books set in American cities are to be read here (see Corse 145–54, for example, for a discussion

2 European attention to Canada’s model of political multiculturalism, for instance, would suggest a certain power of Canadian cultural influence (see, for example, Howells 16). 3 Whitson’s analysis of the “stature” of cities on international stages is primarily concerned with the image of Canadian cities (and their citizens’ self-perception) as potential sites for major international sporting events, such as the Olympic Games. I find his assessment of Canada’s position within the field of international attention a useful analogy for considering the broader social and economic context surrounding Canadian cities’ representation of themselves as literary settings. “Canada,” Whitson writes, “is not a peripheral country by most standards. However, since the 1960s, Canadian cities have sought to change the somewhat provincial image they have historically had” (1215). He describes their position as somewhere between being perceived as powerful centres and “culturally derivative” provincial backwaters, cities “not geographically ‘central’ to the flows of world trade” (1217).

116 | Banting of economic reasons why Canadians tend to consume American-authored bestsellers and not the reverse). The “long-held truism that foreign publishers have little interest in Canadian settings” (Weiler 19) may now be more vulnerable to contradiction than it was fifty years ago (see MacLen- nan 117): the detailed Montreal settings of several recent thriller novels, for instance, have been celebrated as finding a warm international reception (Weiler).4 But some contemporary Canadian writers continue to circulate the lament that novels set in Canada are rejected by American publishers for being “too Canadian” (Henighan 95), and even celebrations of the Montreal novels’ recent success are marked by residual caution. Derek Weiler’s report on the Montreal novels for the Quill and Quire remarks that borders have not “become a non-issue”: “Toronto agent Helen Heller still believes that ‘with a genre book, it’s probably an easier [sell] if it’s set in the States.’ Joe Blades, an editor at Ballantine in New York, agrees that American backdrops are ‘of wider interest to people across the U.S.’ ” (19). Major Canadian cities’ position at the balance point between the cultural periphery and the cultural centre of the English-speaking world, then, makes the question of reading about these settings from a distance worth considering. Critics discussing centre-region reading dynamics in Canada have pointed out the pressures on texts from the geopolitical margins to be linguistically and culturally “intelligible” to metropolitan readers, as I mentioned; others have emphasized the neo-imperial desire of central Canadians and international readers for intelligible texts that nonetheless offer access to a remote and exotic region (Fuller 46). What might happen to the demand for intelligibility and the desire for exotic difference when the centre-margin reading vector is reversed, as in the case, for instance, of a Maritime-based readership for a Toronto novel?5 Or when the geopoliti-

4 See also Fuller’s study of the bestselling international success of three recent novels set in Atlantic Canada, but note that Fuller identifies the regional, non- urban setting of these novels as contributing to their exotic attraction for “ur- banite” readers (48). 5 Mentioning a reversal of the centre-margin reading vector prompts me to acknowledge analyses in postcolonial studies of the position of colonized readers trained into the language and literary culture of the colonizer through the teaching of canonical texts. Such analyses, applied to the circumstance of a Maritime reader of a novel set in Toronto, would suggest that this reader’s desire, so to speak, for the exotic difference of the distant setting is complicated by the power dynamics of regionalism: on one hand, the Maritimer who reads of Toronto streets and neighbourhoods may be eager to acquire the place-knowledge that equips Torontonians to decipher the significance of particular references to place, particularly because Toronto’s relative economic power gives it glamour and makes it a site of focus and ambivalent longing. On the other hand, the same

Reading From a Distance | 117 cal dynamics of the vector are complicated, or delicately balanced, as in the case of a western Canadian readership for a Toronto novel, perhaps, or a European readership for novels set in major Canadian centres? Distance is an These questions will remain open over the course of this essay, because an analysis of audience positioning in the narrative style of novels can- index of a not support complete conclusions about what certain readerships might demand or desire from these texts. However, this stylistic analysis can tell reader’s us what such readers are confronted with when they encounter these texts, giving us a sense of the responses the texts might evoke. And my review relative access to of critical discussions of reading from a distance in regional, international, and cosmopolitan contexts in the next section of this essay will offer, at different kinds least, a vocabulary for identifying the dynamics of interpretive power in distant reading that can help contextualize my analysis of narrative style in of place- Canadian city fiction. What results is a concept of distant reading focused on how readers might differently make sense of references to a setting knowledge. depending on if they know it intimately, from extensive, embodied social experience there, or if they know of it (if at all) through more distanced means: through extensive reading and research, for example, or hearsay, or imaginative, empathetic extrapolation from experience elsewhere. In my use of the term, then, distance is an index of a reader’s relative access to different kinds of place-knowledge: an index of what a reader might find more or less “intelligible” in a novel’s description of its setting.6

reader may be resentful of and resistant to the seductions of this metropolitan centre precisely because of its relative affluence, which enforces outmigration from the region (see Delisle 66) and even produces the region’s economic un- derdevelopment (Willmott np), and the cultural power it exerts in producing generalizing stereotypes of Maritimeness (Tremblay 35). 6 When Tremblay uses the word “intelligible,” he means descriptions of place that are not simply legible to a given reader but expected and hence recognizable and creditable from the reader’s frame of reference (33). My use of the term borrows from Tremblay’s, but I would place emphasis on what I might call a pragmatic dimension of intelligibility, that is, a dimension that has to do with the social, addressed qualities of narrative language. From my point of view, influenced as I am by linguistic pragmatics and relevance theory, narrative language in novels such as Brand’s and Taylor’s sounds as if it is addressed to an audience; references to the novels’ settings are styled in such a way as to suggest that the narrators expect their audiences to get the particular meanings and connotations intended by those references. Where distant readers might confront the limits of a reference’s intelligibility, from their perspective, then, is where they encounter a reference that seems to have a particular, resonant, referential meaning for an intended local audience, and they realize that they are outside of that audience. The sense of being an outsider that comes with recognizing that a reference is

118 | Banting Distant Readers How do readers receive and make sense of texts set in places distant from their own geographical locations? And how might narrative style influence that reception? Here, I review recent discussions of regional and cosmopolitan reading, paying attention to their sense of how geographical distance affects intelligibility by limiting a reader’s access to a “place-based consciousness.” I then bring these discussions together with analyses of international reading, reviewing their accounts of the variety of ways that distant readers might work, despite these limits, to creatively make sense of unintelligible place-references. These critical discussions collectively tend to accept that there are things about a setting that people distant from it could not know or to which they would have no immediate evaluative or interpretive or moral access. In other words, even in a contemporary era characterized in part, as anthropologist Arjun Appadurai argues, by the massive international distribution of images and information about all kinds of local settings and by the massive migration and mobility of people (4), there are things that non-locals simply are not likely to know about a given setting. And thus, as distant readers, non-locals may find narrative references to such things unintelligible. By a setting I mean a particular geographical and social context, defined either by a literary treatment of it as a “here,” as in Brand’s narrator’s treatment of Toronto as “this city,” or by a lived experience of locality on the part of people who live there. I follow Kwame Anthony Appiah in using the word “setting” to indicate both the geographical and social contexts constructed by novels as locations for their characters and the actual geographical and social contexts occupied by real people—he speaks, for instance, of “we readers in our settings” (223). The things that distant readers would not be likely to know might be characterized as the particularities and complexities of embodied social life on the ground in a setting, especially those particularities that conflict with or are invisible to broadly distributable, generalizing narratives about the place. Brand’s narrator in the opening passage of What We All Long

somehow unintelligible, in this way, then, is a social experience and may well combine with other social dynamics, such as differentials of postcolonial power, race, class, gender, sexual orientation—all of which are so often compounded with differences of geographical positioning. But the geographical distance is the one most explicitly in question, because I am discussing references to place. In the passages under examination, geographical distance serves as the key index for distinctions of insider intelligibility.

Reading From a Distance | 119 For might well have been able to assume that her distant audience would know something about snow in Toronto, but she tells them about the embodied experience of winter’s inevitable, unforgiving force in her city and introduces them to this particular year’s longing for spring. When local particularities surface in the narrative language of a novel or a short story, they may appear in certain stylistic forms (see Prince, Sperber and Wilson, Clark and Marshall on the pragmatics of style): in the form of proper names—the names of particular nearby places or events or local people—which serve as a simple shorthand for a host of complex local meanings and associations, for instance, or in the form of spatial deictics, which register the embodied, located, personal geography of near and far, here and there, up and down. In their discussions of reading from a distance, several critics propose that confident familiarity with such located vocabularies and systems of orientation, among other things, might be understood as a “place-based consciousness” (Tremblay 33) that readers who remain at a distance do not immediately possess and acquire only with difficulty. I would acknowledge, as do these critics, that familiarity with proper names and their local meanings and associations might be learned, even from a distance. As C. L. Innes comments about the specific “incidents, names, and phrases” in James Joyce’s Ulysses, which “signify differently for Irish and non-Irish readers,” the effect of their surfacing in the novel’s narrative language “is not to make those sections [of the novel] mean- ingless to those who do not share the knowledge of Irish place and history; it is, rather, to create an awareness among Irish readers of a shared knowledge and history, over which they have authority and mastery, and which non-Irish readers must be taught” (177). Innes’s argument seems to rest on the idea that longstanding residence and cultural belonging in Ireland readily equip Irish readers with shared knowledge of local, historical particulars. I would acknowledge, as Innes no doubt would too, certain social exclusions—non-literacy or other marginalizations—in which cases being somewhere does not equip a resident with the kind of authoritative local consciousness Innes describes. And one must ask, as well, how thoroughly we might really imagine this consciousness being shared by all citizens of Ireland, for instance (let alone all Dubliners). Indeed, the distinction between Irish and non-Irish—or, to speak more generally, the distinction I am drawing in this paper between local resident and distant reader—is necessarily blurred in the era of migration and mass media Appadurai describes, as Innes would acknowledge. How long might an arriving migrant take to acquire consciousness of shared knowledge of

120 | Banting which Irish readers are aware? How much access to a shared place-based consciousness could a tourist or a repeat visitor acquire, through focused attention to a place and local knowledge? Despite the acknowledged complexities of locality and distance, other critics seem to agree with Innes in assuming that, while varieties of local knowledge may be taught to outsiders, an authoritative command of local particulars is most readily available to those who are already there. In Innes’s discussion of Ulysses, a place-based consciousness includes insider knowledge of particular Dublin “places, names and persons,” and “well known … anecdotes, and events” (175). For Tremblay and for Danielle Fuller, who compare distant readers’ reception of Maritime literature to Maritimers’ own reception of the same work, a place-based consciousness involves, most crucially, an awareness of the complexities of Maritime regional experience and identity. Tremblay argues that central Canadian readers do not seem to appreciate certain subtle qualities of the humour in David Adams Richards’s novels, which are set in New Brunswick. Fuller similarly remarks that there may be “a cultural specificity” to the humour in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s novel Fall on Your Knees, which is set in Nova Scotia, “that does not ‘survive’ every journey” (52).7 Moreover, central Canadians’ dismissive response to Richards’s novels, as Tremblay char- acterizes it, is due to the novels’ refusal to repeat a stereotype of Mari- timeness—an externally imposed “sociological abstraction” (32)—that defies the particular “conditions of place” discernable only to those who read with sensitivity to how the region defines itself “from the inside” (33). Fuller seems to agree with Tremblay that a distant reader might miss the most sophisticated local meanings of a text. Fuller argues that Alistair MacLeod’s novel No Great Mystery, which is partly set in Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton, might be recognized by a local reader as finely balancing its overt nostalgia against another, less immediately evident sentiment. She cites as example the interpretive work of David Creelman, a literary critic who grew up in the Maritimes and who recognizes that the novel “struggles to reconcile the divergent nostalgic and despairing strands of Maritime culture,” as Fuller puts it. In Fuller’s view, distant readers did not notice this fine balance. She comments that “to detect the tension [between these 7 Fuller’s notion of a certain place-based humour that distant audiences find difficult to perceive recalls Linda Hutcheon’s discussion of irony. Hutcheon argues that irony “happen[s]” within discursive communities, within groups that share enough general cognitive and cultural territory to produce and perceive ironic statements (92). The discursive communities I consider in this paper, and those with which Fuller is concerned, unlike those theorized by Hutcheon, are specifi- cally based on locality and a place-based consciousness.

Reading From a Distance | 121 two sentiments] requires a situated analysis of the regional realist text that the general reader outside the region is unlikely to undertake” (50). Like Innes, Tremblay, and Fuller, cosmopolitanist philosopher and literary critic Kwame Anthony Appiah argues that readers from distant settings are not likely to recognize certain things that local readers would, especially if the novel is addressed to a local audience and not, as he puts it, to “an Other from Elsewhere” (212). In his discussion of what he calls “cosmopolitan reading,” Appiah’s primary interest is in readers’ moral engagement with distant lives. As an example, he offers a reading of Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions. He points out that the central moral issue of the book—the question of how the postcolonial Western-educated [Zimbabwean] woman and her sisters, daughters, mothers and aunts, peasants or work- ers, wage earners or wives, shall together find ways to create meaningful lives, escaping the burdens of their oppression as women, but also as black people, as peasants, and as work- ers—is not an issue that directly concerns Euro-American readers, whether women or men, because this question is so richly embedded in a context from which such readers are alien. (Appiah 214) If place-based consciousness affords local readers ready knowledge of certain place names, events, people, and anecdotes and equips them to recognize the complexities and particularity of local “conditions of place,” Appiah would seem to add that it also prepares a local reader to concern herself directly with certain moral issues. However, while these discussions of reading from a distance indicate the special immediacy of recognition and sophistication of response available to local readers, they also tend to emphasize the interpretive powers of distant readers, as I mentioned in the introduction to this essay. Appiah, for instance, theorizes a “cosmopolitan reading practice” that allows readers to take up the ethical imperative of reaching to connect with those embedded in contexts distant from their own (202), even while they do not directly share the specific moral concerns of local lives. Appiah insists that such a reading practice does not hinge on discovering abstract principles shared in common with those distant from the reader, a point that will become important in my analysis of What We All Long For and Stanley Park. “Far from relying on a common understanding of a common human nature or a common articulation (through principles) of a moral sphere,” Appiah writes, “we respond to Dangarembga’s narrative with shared judgments about particular cases. We readers in our settings are able to find

122 | Banting many moments where we share with novels from different settings a sense that something has gone right or gone wrong” (223 emphasis added). In Appiah’s view, it is the novel as a genre that allows readers to connect morally with characters embedded in distant settings. Readers’ grasp of Place names are a novel’s narrative logic allows them “to construct the world to which [their] imaginations respond” (223).8 In this account, then, distant read- made accessible ers are empowered to interpret local meanings of their competence with the genre of the novel and their imaginative capacity for moral empathy. in this theory Although Appiah does not say so directly, we might understand his argument to imply that the same competence and capacity allow cos- by the novel’s mopolitan readers to imaginatively construct meanings for such local particularities as place names. However unintelligible they may be when affordance for expressed as proper nouns that the distant reader does not recognize, place names are made accessible in this theory by the novel’s affordance for imaginative imaginative meaning-construction. But as Innes suggests in his discussion of references to Dublin streets and Irish histories in Joyce’s Ulysses (177), meaning- a local place name, even when expressed in one’s own language, may in some respects be quite as unintelligible to a distant reader as, for instance, construction. the Shona words, titles, food names, and greetings that Dangarembga uses without explanatory gloss in Nervous Conditions (Appiah 212). Where is the named place in relation to other locations in the novel’s setting, a reader may wonder? What is its relevant socio-economic, historical, or symbolic significance? Connecting Appiah’s ideas about cosmopolitan reading in postcolonial conditions to Innes’s, we may come to see the novel as the medium that allows outside readers to learn—to “be taught,” in Innes’s words—what locals already know about such places (177): by reading a novel and following its narrative logic, the distant reader may imaginatively construct, and hence acquire, the dense layers of particular, located knowledge and historical awareness that inform a place-based consciousness.9 8 Appiah gives the example of Western readers coming to agree with the narrator that the thing that happens to one of the characters in Dangarembga’s novel— “the thing we call anorexia”—is bad (Appiah 221): a moral agreement about certain plot particulars that may be constructed despite differences between the readers’ cultural perspective and interpretive vocabulary and those of the narrator. 9 Dionne Brand herself offers one anecdote about learning local orientation in a city by attentive reading. I repeat the anecdote, offered in interview, as it is cited by Marc Brosseau and David Tavares in their article about Brand’s writing of Toronto: “ ‘I learned about cities, like Paris or New York or whatever, from reading about them,’ she says. ‘So when I went to New York, I knew where I was’ ” (Brand, in interview with Susan Walker, quoted in Brosseau and Tavares 80).

Reading From a Distance | 123 I would like to remark on what I see as a breaking point in this line of thinking—a line that, I admit, I have extended by pushing Appiah’s and Innes’s points so far. Distant readers may imaginatively construct for a place name a significance quite different than that understood by the local reader: it may be a significance faithful to the novel’s narrative, perhaps, but more reflective of their own places and lived experiences than those of local people. I am not very concerned about this possible mismatch for its own sake. Imaginatively constructing a distant setting out of a pastiche of one’s own lived places might yet allow for a moral connection, with characters in that setting, that is both amply empathetic and sufficiently respectful of the otherness involved to meet Appiah’s standards for cosmopolitan reading. But here I do see style as having a decisive effect. Narrative style must influence readers’ imaginative work of constructing significance, because style in a given novel behaves in a specific way toward distant readers, if I can put it this way. In some novels, narrative style sets out to teach certain distant audiences about the embodied experience of local residents—as does the opening passage of What We All Long For, quoted at the beginning of this essay. In others, style does not accommodate or offer guidance to the distant reader. We will shortly see examples from the same novel of a style that leaves a reader without a local place-based consciousness very little to work with in interpreting the significance of certain place names. It seems to me important to acknowledge that the imaginative work of “follow[ing] a narrative and conjur[ing] a world” (Appiah 224) is constrained by the effects of narrative style. Before turning to examine in detail the effects of style in What We All Long For and Stanley Park, I want to pursue further the critical discussion about distant readers’ interpretive power, turning to discussions of international reading—in particular, the reading of Canadian work by European literary critics.10 Doing so should allow me to further develop an analytic of abstraction versus specificity in style and interpretation which, I have

10 I draw on the example of European perspectives on Canadian literature because this instance of international reading has been the focus of thoughtful discussion in Canadian literary studies. Reading(s) from a Distance, a collection I discuss here, carries on a tradition of attending to the distinctiveness of European perspectives on Canadian literature exemplified, for instance, by Waldemar Zacharasiewicz’s 1986 edited collection, Encounters and Explorations: Cana- dian Writers and European Critics and Lynette Hunter’s 1996 book, Outsider Notes: Feminist Approaches to Nation State Ideology, Writers/Readers, and Publishing, which takes care to observe and comment on the writer’s, and some of her readers’, interpretive positions outside of the state under examination (for example, Hunter 1, 13). And Reading(s) from a Distance, for all its valuable

124 | Banting begun to suggest, will be helpful in the analysis to come. Coral Ann How- ells’s essay in a 2008 collection, Reading(s) from a Distance: European Per- spectives on Canadian Women’s Writing (edited by Charlotte Sturgess and Martin Kuester), exemplifies a theory of reading that asserts distant readers’ interpretive power to deal with locally relevant references which are “unintelligible” to them, in the sense developed above. I want to acknowledge that Canadian literature scholars based in Europe are brought very close to Canadian settings, so to speak, through their immersive reading and research and their participation in international dialogue with writers and scholars based in Canada and in many cases, indeed, brought physi- cally close by way of attentive travel and periods of residence. The position of the European scholar is neither uniform nor necessarily distant from Canada, in any strict sense; it offers a useful reminder of the complexity of what I am calling reading distance. Drawing on Howells’s work here, I am using the term “European,” as she does, to denote scholars whose lives and work are based in Europe and whose perspectives on Canadian literature are influenced, as she argues, by that particular remove from the point of origin and the settings of the works they interpret. For Howells, as I will show, Europeans’ distance from Canada lessens the influence on them of certain local concerns more deeply felt in Canada; in her observation, as well, European scholars of Canadian literature tend to be drawn to certain theoretical perspectives. Reading distance in this case, then, is a matter of scholarly inclination toward certain questions rather than others. Howells’s essay, “Complex Transactions: Reading from a Distance,” observes a history of contrast (and complement) between the work being done by Canadian literature scholars working in Europe since the 1980s and that by scholars working in Canada. She focuses especially on a difference in levels of engagement with what she understands as being national concerns or, more precisely, concerns with specific local or national settings and social questions. According to Howells, “for Canadian [scholars] in the 1980s, literature” seemed to offer primarily “a representation of the country and its people” (14) and current scholarship continues to be framed by national concerns, even as it takes up “debates around postco- lonialism, postmodernism, and globalization” (18). By contrast, she argues, European critics have focused especially on formal questions of textu-

work, has not settled the question of European critical approaches. I noted in 2011 a call for submissions to a collection, to be edited by Romania-based scholar Dragos Zetu, titled Contemporary Canadian Literature in English: European Perspectives.

Reading From a Distance | 125 ality, metafictionality (18), genre, and narrativity (19). For European critics, she notes, the “Canadian landscape [has not been] important in itself as a location, but … local facts [have been] turned into narrative puzzles, The distant covered over, and made secret,” turned into enigmas ripe for interpretive textual play (19). “Distance … shifts our perspectives,” Howells remarks: reader may in European readings, place is “released from its geographical location to become primarily a textual space” (11). I see the interpretive conversion convert of local facts into narrative puzzles Howells describes as a move toward abstraction: a move to unhinge the specificity and indexical deliberateness references to of references to place and to let them float as relatively empty signifiers. I am not entirely comfortable with one of the implications of How- unrecognizable ells’s argument, which, I think, is that Canadians are bound to read their literature as referential and mimetic because its points of reference are so places into proximate and immanent for them, whereas Europeans can liberate—or “release”—the signifier from its bondage to the signified. And it seems “narrative to me crucial that Canadians are not uniformly bound to recognize the reference points of a given novel. But I do find useful Howells’s idea that puzzles.” the distant reader may convert references to unrecognizable places into “narrative puzzles”: moments where the puzzling enigmas of unaccessed local knowledge are marked but where the reader is free to arrange and compose her own version of their significance. This interpretive practice poses an alternative to Innes’s notion of “be[ing] taught” to recognize local significances and one’s own outsider position as non-master of that understanding. I would like to suggest one additional notion of how the international scholar (as distant reader) can work creatively with local references that might, because of their embedding in a narrative address to local audiences, seem particularly unintelligible from a distance. One contributor to Reading(s) from a Distance, Isabel Carrera Suárez, who is based at the Universidad de Oviedo in Spain, offers examples of this additional way of working with places references in her reading of What We All Long For.11 Suárez’s attention to the novel’s portrait of a “specific, local Toronto”

11 I discuss Suárez’s work at length here because of its publication within the frame of the Reading(s) from a Distance collection, but other international scholars’ work offers similar examples. For instance, Franca Bernabei, who is based at Ca’Foscari University, in Venice, almost exclusively handles references to places in Toronto by citing verbatim from the text of the novel in her article on What We All Long For. A typical example from her analysis of the novel involves weaving cited references to place into her own sentence as, for instance, she remarks that “Tuyen’s father, a civil engineer, and her mother, a doctor, end up opening a ‘hole in the wall restaurant off Spadina,’ although neither of them cooks

126 | Banting (190) suggests her scholarly command of the city as field of reference. In discussing the novel, Suárez mentions by name the neighbourhoods and streets also named in the novel, occasionally authoritatively glossing those place names for her readership when necessary to flesh out her analysis: she refers, for instance, to “the run-down neighbourhood of Alexandra Park” and “the wealthy neighbourhood of Richmond [Hill]” (Suárez 193). But she also demonstrates another possible mode of handling Brand’s references to specific Toronto streets and sites in her chapter, that is, by way of the scholarly routine of verbatim citation. At points in her article, Suárez re-cites Brand’s place references, thus incorporating them into her own critical language even while leaving Brand authoritative control over how those references indicate and construct their referents. For example, summarizing the class trajectory through various Toronto neighbourhoods of one immigrant family in the novel, Suárez writes, Tuyen’s parents live in a one-room apartment on Bloor Street on arrival, then move to downtrodden Alexandra Park, and finally to Richmond [Hill], a wealthy suburb where “immi-

very well” (Bernabei 117). Interestingly, at one point in her article, Bernabei’s technique of weaving in citations is framed by language that suggests her own authority to confirm the accuracy of Brand’s descriptions of Toronto landmarks; here, the scholar’s style suggests her access to local knowledge: “Richmond Hill is indeed one of those ‘lookalike desolate suburbs’ settled by ‘giant houses’ where newly rich immigrants like [Tuyen’s parents] have moved,” Bernabei writes (118 emphasis added). Elsewhere, when mentioning landmarks referred to in the novel, Bernabei translates them into more abstract terms, removing their local specificity as she deals with them in her own scholarly discourse, a move that recalls Howells’s sense that distant readers can work with textual enigmas by abstracting them. (See, for instance, Bernabei’s reference to things going on in the novel “meanwhile, in another part of town” [Bernabei 123].) I also observe this last technique, of handling place references via abstraction, used without interruption in an article on What We All Long For by Pilar Cuder-Domínguez, who is based at the University of Huelva in Spain. Cuder-Domínguez writes, for example, of Tuyen’s family “living the transparent lives of immigrant success, with their restaurant business and their lovely house in the wealthy suburbs of Toronto” (157). While drawing attention to these examples of citation and abstraction in the work of European scholars, I want to acknowledge that these techniques of reference are typical of work by scholars based in Canada as well. I use these examples of international scholarship simply to highlight how the routines of scholarly citation afford possibilities other than those Howells describes for managing unintelligible place references from a distance. Finally, I want to acknowledge, with regret, that I have thus far had difficulty locating and accessing work by a greater variety of European scholars than the ones I cite here, despite focused searching and attempts at access via two Canadian university libraries.

Reading From a Distance | 127 grants go to get away from other immigrants, but of course they end up living with all the other immigrants running away from themselves” (54–55). (Suárez 194) Her writing style here demonstrates a knowing awareness of the names of the places being referred to. In this passage, she might be generat- ing her descriptions of Alexandra Park and other Toronto sites from her own archive of place-knowledge or she might be paraphrasing Brand’s description of these places. (If she were not personally familiar with these neighbourhoods before beginning her research on Brand’s work, the novel itself might have “taught” Suárez how to understand the local references of which she is now in command.) Note that she cites Brand’s novel at some length when she wants to offer a lengthier glossing and construction of the Richmond Hill suburb. Suárez’s work here suggests a reading and response practice that may cite and recirculate a novel’s place references, incorporating them intertexually into the scholar’s own text, even if the scholar herself does not have access to their connotative content from embodied local experience. Such critical writing moves one step beyond what How- ells suggested was the work of the distant critic: rather than abstracting itself entirely from specificity and referentiality in playing textually with narrative puzzles, it dexterously cites and thus recirculates specificity and local reference. This also suggests a kind of distant place-knowledge that might attentively replicate and recirculate the patterns of local discourse without being impeded by relative distance from their significance. Critical discussion of reading from a distance in Canadian, international, and cosmopolitan contexts, then, proposes that distant readers might practise a spectrum of interpretive moves when confronted with place names and other local references that they would need a place-based consciousness to decipher. At one end of the spectrum is Appiah’s imaginative and empathetic cosmopolitan reader, whose competence with the genre of the novel enables him to connect his own particular experience with the particularities of local moral concerns and construct significance for local references, even while recognizing his distance and difference from the setting. At the other end is the dismissive reader Tremblay identifies, who refuses to grant value to locally significant texts that are unintelligible from the perspective of his generalizing and coarse-grained stereotypes of their setting. Less dismissive but distinct from the cosmopolitan reader is Howells’s unconstrained critic, whose removal from the setting allows her to play freely with enigmatic local place references, abstracting them as sheerly textual elements. And, somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, is the example Suárez offers, in some of her citation work, an

128 | Banting example of a scholarly reader whose careful attention to the text empowers her to re-cite distant place-names, even, perhaps, without full access to the significance they might hold for a place-based consciousness. What I propose is that these various moves toward either specificity or abstraction in interpreting novels’ references to place must all be affected by the novels’ own varieties of stylistic specificity or abstraction. I turn now to a discussion of these varieties of style as they are handled in What We All Long For and Stanley Park. Considered in the light of the theories of reading from a distance reviewed above, they suggest that reading across distance is a negotiated relation, one not wholly determined by the text but not freely programmed by the powerful interpreter either. In their very variousness, these styles remind us that readers are not confronted blankly by texts that accede to their interpretive powers. Rather, these works behave toward their distant readers with degrees of accommodation or indifference. And attending to how style behaves in novels set in major Canadian cities offers an additional finding, as I suggested in my introduction. If the example of these two novels can be generalized, in Canadian literary fiction of the early twenty-first century we may find an open negotiation of which audience is to be anticipated and accommodated and from what distance that audience is reading. We may find, as well, that despite their occasional attention to distant audiences, these novels emphasize the interpretive riches of a consciousness built out of a sustained, embodied experience of locality in their settings.

Local Reference What We All Long For, which is set in twenty-first century Toronto, has interested critics writing in Canada, in Europe, and elsewhere.12 Of interest has been how, in certain public and private spaces in downtown Toronto, the young characters are represented as imaginatively and somewhat hopefully creating a community that incorporates a global multitude of international cultural influences and a widely diverse membership but is

12 In addition to those critics whose work I discuss in the text and footnotes of this article, I am thinking, for instance, of essays on What We All Long For by Sandra Regina Goulart Almeida, who is based in Brazil, and Winfried Siemer- ling, whose attention, offered in an article written from Ontario, to the ways Brand’s work articulates a “ ‘felt’ ” local geography of Black Toronto (109) shares something with my discussion of the Paramount passages in What We All Long For. Writing from bases in Canada and the United States, Phanuel Antwi, Jen- nifer Blair, Diana Brydon, Chris Ewart, Johanna X. Garvey, Sneja Gunew, Paul Huebner, Sherry R. Johnson, Molly Littlewood McKibbon, Heather Smyth, and Eleanor Ty have all published on What We All Long For.

Reading From a Distance | 129 nonetheless deliberately and fully located in Toronto (Johansen 49; compare Dobson, Smyth, Suarez, Buma, Brosseau and Tavares, Bernabei). The analysis of What We All Long For that is offered here, of course, is not based on how the novel represents such communities, their insiders and their outsiders, but rather on the narrative style of the novel’s place references and, by extension, on where the novel locates the audiences to which it seems to be speaking. Are those who are addressed by this narrative located at a distance, in the position of readers eager to learn about the city, or are they located in the city, possessing the place-based consciousness of one who already knows the setting? In What We All Long For, the narrator shifts between several different stylistic modes (Banting 366–69); each of these modes might be read as an address to a different audience, occupying a particular position relative to the city of Toronto. The narration in this novel is wonderfully rich, so a selective analysis does not do complete justice to its variety of address. But for the sake of demonstrating the range of distances at which the novel positions its audiences, I will focus on two of the more prominent stylistic modes. What emerges is a sense of how the novel constructs a spatially immediate community, with whom the narrator is closely allied, as the narrator’s primary concern. Indeed, the narrator’s storytelling is primarily pitched for an audience resembling the community other scholars have identified as represented in the novel: one that is firmly located in downtown Toronto although it incorporates diverse international cultural influences. However, the novel also warmly addresses itself to a substantially more distant audience: the audience addressed in its opening passage, with which we began. In this second, removed audience, the narrator expects to find a ready interest in her Toronto characters. It is an interest founded to some degree in a cosmopolitan cultural sympathy and in a fascination with the life of immigrants and their children in the Western metropolis. The first of the two prominent stylistic modes I want to consider in detail is illustrated in the following example. It is a passage early in What We All Long For that fills in the backstory of Carla, one of four young Torontonians who are the novel’s central characters: “Smoking was an affectation she had started early, in high school, in the café across from Harbord Collegiate, in the park on Grace Street, where she and her friends would sit on the embankment, puffing and joking” (Brand 37). Two specific place-references here—“the café across from Harbord Collegiate,” “the park on Grace Street”—with their compounding of definite references and proper nouns, are styled in such a way as to suggest that, for one potential audience of this narrative, Harbord Collegiate and Grace

130 | Banting Street are familiar territory: an institution and a street that are not only known by name but relevant and helpfully orienting. If the café itself is not known to this audience, it is easily fleshed out in the imagination by the rich sense of social texture that Harbord Collegiate’s given location in This audience the city supplies. The park on Grace Street (which happens to be quite a big park, or so Google Maps tells me) may very likely be more familiar to recognizes or this knowing audience than the unnamed café. Indeed, in not identifying the park by a formal proper name, the reference extends to the knowing would be able audience the same relationship with the park that the characters have: a sense of the park that is oriented to the street. to construct In the narrative mode typified by this passage, the narrator invests her language in the particular, realist textures and names of the city’s sites. with ease the Her audience here shares with her and her characters a deeply intimate knowledge of a certain set of public spaces, especially streetscapes, in the precise social, downtown core of that city. This audience recognizes or would be able to construct with ease the precise social, ethnic, and class geography she ethnic, and class is referencing when she mentions landmarks by name. In the following passage, for instance, a reference to “the Paramount” is styled in such a geography she is way—casually and concisely, with a definite article and a proper noun— as to mark the narrator’s assumption that her audience knows of this referencing. nightclub already. Indeed, in narrative passages like this one, the narrator addresses someone who shares with her and her characters not only the spatial map referenced in this sequence of street names and the social geography it implies but even the orienting perspective that establishes a relative distance of near and far: “When the Paramount closed, Jackie’s mother and father were lost. Everyone in Alexandra Park was lost. Even some up on Bathurst Street and Vaughan Road and Eglinton Avenue. As far out as Dawes Road and Pape Avenue. All the glamour left their lives” (Brand 178). Jackie’s mother and father are Black Nova Scotian migrants to downtown Toronto who had found for themselves a place in the city centred on their participation in the nightlife at the Paramount. As a reader who has not spent much time in Toronto, and as a middle-class white person of a generation younger than Jackie’s parents, I don’t recognize the precise sequence of spaces being referred to here or the social textures connoted by these gradations of distance. What I infer from the narrative style and from the context of this passage in the novel is that the narrator is speaking from and to a local knowledge circulating in a downtown Toronto Black community. I would emphasize that in the passage above the narrator might be read as situating her audience immediately with her, spatially. Her audi-

Reading From a Distance | 131 ence shares her deictic frame of reference, which puts Alexandra Park in the foreground and these other streets farther uptown and “far out.” This is an example of the parts of What We All Long For that are narrated as if to a knowing community insider, as I have said, and it is worth noting that this audience is also located locally. These parts of the novel are filled with unglossed references to the particular streets and parks and corners of downtown Toronto, as other commentators have noted (see, for instance, Suárez 195). Elsewhere in the novel, the narrator does explain to distant readers like me the significance of landmarks like the Paramount. In other chapters, that is, the narrator introduces parts of the setting to community outsiders.13 A distant reader, in this case, is primarily someone who is outside a particular circuit of racialized, class-specific, local community knowledge, but the narrative ties this knowledge and experience so tightly to specific places that geographical removal is a second and parallel index of such distance. (I would acknowledge that distant reading, as I am dealing with it here, is never separable from other social distinctions, like this one of racialized and class-specific knowledge, but I would emphasize the worth of attending to how these distinctions play out through references to geographical place in Brand’s novel. See also footnote 14.) The parallel gradations of experience and distance are evident in the passage describing those who were lost when the Paramount closed: “even some up on Bathurst Street and Vaughan Road and Eglinton Avenue” were affected, the narrator remarks. “As far out as Dawes Road and Pape Avenue” (emphasis added). The narrator seems to find it somewhat remarkable that people at these tiers of distance were moved by the loss of the Paramount, and her phrasing suggests that the number of people affected decreases with each

13 Indeed, when the narrator mentions the nightclub so casually in the passage cited, she has already introduced it into her narrative at an earlier point. Her style of reference to “the Paramount” in this instance suggests that she assumes that her audience knows the nightclub at least on the strength of what pragmatics-influenced psycholinguists Herbert H. Clark and Catharine R. Marshall call “prior linguistic copresence” (42)—that is, the audience and narrator had been present together when the place was spoken about before—rather than that she expects them to know it on the strength of the likelihood that they know the same geographies she does. However, in this stylistic mode, Brand’s narrator frequently mentions proper nouns with the same casualness as her reference to the Paramount, here, even when she has never yet spoken of them in the narrative. Clark and Marshall would identify her style in these frequent cases as suggesting her assumption of shared local knowledge on the strength of “community membership” (36–38).

132 | Banting tier of removal: it is a testament to the Paramount’s importance that even people at the farther reaches of midtown Toronto were lost.14 The move to introduce landmarks like the Paramount to a second, distant audience is marked by a shift of narrative style, and the style shift, accordingly, marks this outsider audience’s position at a remove from local knowledge. As an illustration of this stylistic marking, when the narrator introduces Jackie’s father and mother and their migration from Halifax to Toronto for the first time, the narrator explains, “They came to Toronto just when the Paramount—the best dance club in the country—was about to close” (94). The narrative two-step here first indicates that the proper noun “the Paramount” is all the information a certain audience needs to identify this location and, second, pauses to gloss it for a second audience.

14 Brand’s narrator does point out that knowledge of the Paramount is more importantly tied to membership in a certain community than strictly to distance from the nightclub. “They knew about the Paramount from Cape Breton to Vancouver, they being a select group,” she explains to her second, outside audience. She describes this select group: “Black people and a few, very few, hip whites—whites who were connected. Just as they knew about Rockheads in Montreal. And every blind pig in Winnipeg, Hamilton, and every city with more than 200 black people” (95). Here, inside knowledge is explicitly connected to racialized community membership and to a degree of hipness. The narrator’s assertion that knowledge of the Paramount was distributed across Canada seems to undermine the significance of distance as a factor in distinguishing interpretive communities. Presumably this widespread community’s sharing of knowledge is made possible, as Appadurai argues, by its members’ relocation and other movements across the country and by remote communication via the telephone, mail, and the Internet. The novel does not make this clear; however, when describing Jackie’s family’s migration to Toronto, the narrator speaks of Halifax in a voice that seems to incorporate and represent, through a free indi- rect narrative style, their reminiscent familiarity with certain Halifax landmarks (93). This familiarity suggests that knowledge of important sites is transmitted to new locales by migrants’ reminiscing speech about where they come from. Second-hand knowledge of Halifax is passed on to Jackie, who was too young when her family left to remember the place (93), for instance. I would offer that, importantly, the narrator in the passage cited in this note is speaking of select people knowing about the Paramount. Even where knowledge of specific places, like the Paramount or Rockheads, may be orally transmitted to listeners at a distance, a distinction may be felt between the first-hand, embodied, local experience of a scene like the Paramount that is so vitally important to Jackie’s parents (see 95–96) and the second-hand knowledge of a place through word of mouth. Considering What We All Long For’s focus on migrants’ children, who deliberately root themselves in Toronto rather than remaining attached to their parents’ homelands (Brand 20; compare Johansen 55), this distinction seems important. Perhaps, then, even trans-local interpretive communities (such as the select group who knows the Paramount) are internally differentiated by distance. In this case, distance would bear differently on each community member’s sense of relationship to known landmarks.

Reading From a Distance | 133 If one prominent stylistic mode in this novel is signaled by the delib- erate, realist, indexical specificity of proper nouns like “the Paramount”— which, for the knowing insider audience to whom the named places are It is marked intimately familiar and proximate, are richly informative and efficient shorthand for a whole body of knowledge and experience—the other by its removal prominent stylistic mode is marked by relative abstraction. That is, it is marked by its removal from the specificity and tightly indexical referen- from the tiality of proper nouns and its preference for the relatively more open- ended, unspecific, and even portable referentiality of generic nouns and specificity and abstractly descriptive noun phrases. A compact example of this second stylistic mode is the phrase the narrator uses to gloss “the Paramount” for tightly indexical the outsider audience: “the best dance club in the country.” This description is informative for and easily accommodated by someone who does referentiality of not know Toronto, the Paramount, or Canada. It seems to me, as well, that this kind of removal into more abstract, referentially open terms func- proper nouns tions within the novel to open up space for fiction-telling. When Canada becomes “the country” or Toronto becomes “the city”—as it frequently and its prefer- does, in this second mode of narration—the narrator can invite a wider, more distant audience into her embrace, and she can also shift gears into ence for the the creative versioning and production of space that fiction readily allows. For example, when concluding her reflection on the closing of the relatively more Paramount, the narrator asks her wide audience: open-ended, How does life disappear like that? It does it all the time in a city. One moment a corner is a certain corner, gorgeous with your desires, then it disappears under the constant construction unspecific, and of this and that. A bank flounders into a pizza shop, then into an abandoned building with boarding and graffiti, then after even portable weeks of passing it by, not noticing the infinitesimal changes, it springs to life as an exclusive condo. (Brand 183) referentiality of Here, Toronto becomes generalized into one version of “a city,” a place of generic nouns a certain urban kind, that one might know in this general way: a place of typical, non-specific institutions (banks, pizza shops) that behave in know- and abstractly able ways, to which a generic “you” might relate. Throughout the novel, Brand’s narrator occasionally pulls back from her immersion in the richly descriptive noun located specificities of her characters’ lives to reflect in these more abstract terms on Toronto as “the city.” Another important example of this second phrases. mode of narration is the opening passage of the novel, which anticipates an audience that attends to the story from such a distance that it is helpful for them to have the city located on a global map, as we have seen.

134 | Banting What We All Long For thus situates its audiences in two geographical positions: one very local, one in a quite distant place. The dynamics of address and listening or reading distance that I find in What We All Long For’s shifting narrative style echo but also extend what critics have seen depicted in the novel’s portrait of young Torontonians: through her address, the narrator convenes a located community that is deeply invested in the geography of downtown Toronto, that shares and delights in sharing a rich local knowledge, and that is pointedly not White, Anglo-European, or middle-class. But she also convenes a distant audience that is eager to know about the city and this experience of locality, an audience who, because of their distance, can only know about this city through a layer of abstraction and imaginative accommodation. Brand’s narrator speaks about her story’s setting in such a way as to convene an imagined audience with a particular social position and locally “territorialized” identity (as in Johansen 50), meanwhile turning occasionally to speak in more general terms to a distant audience. One resultant effect is that an otherwise marginal Toronto community’s location, located knowledge, and position as audience for its own story is presented as central, as a focalizing perspective that can take its own legitimacy and legibility for granted as the central motivation for telling a particular story. And the outside audience is expected and invited to acknowledge this centrality, to appreciate being offered a threshold understanding from which to step toward that territorialized Toronto perspective. Comparing the style of Brand’s narrative in What We All Long For to that in another widely read contemporary Canadian novel suggests just how various are the relationships to the setting that narrative style may dexterously prepare for a novel’s distant readers. In Timothy Taylor’s Stanley Park, the narrator refers to the Vancouver setting in such a style as to cultivate an audience rather differently positioned than the audiences addressed in What We All Long For.15 The Stanley Park narrator seems to address an audience that is not local—although there are broad side- long winks at knowing Vancouverites layered in certain passages—but for whom Vancouver is on the radar, a place barely but increasingly known of.

15 Stanley Park, like What We All Long For, has been read and written about both inside and outside of Canada. Like Brand’s novel, for instance, it was the subject of discussion at a 2011 conference, titled “The Glocal City in Canadian Litera- ture,” at the Universidad de Salamanca, Spain. Unfortunately, while I understand that there has been substantial scholarly consideration of the novel in Europe and elsewhere, I have had difficulty finding published scholarship on Stanley Park beyond work done in Canada by Travis Mason and Emily Johansen.

Reading From a Distance | 135 Taylor’s narrator, like Brand’s, employs a style incorporating both specificity and abstraction, but he combines these quite closely rather than shifting between them. The resultant effect is to create a near-distance reading position on the very verge of extensive place-consciousness. In the characters and practices it depicts, Stanley Park certainly invites analysis of the potential relations between local knowledge, distant audiences, and international cultural influence. The central character, a tal- ented, entrepreneurial young chef named Jeremy, prefers to cook with local and regional ingredients. He grew up in Vancouver and launches his first restaurant on the fringes of that city’s oldest neighbourhood, but he first travels to France for chef training and apprenticeship, and his mother comes from a nomadic European family. He aims to serve a kind of chic and carefully crafted but unpretentious, locally-sourced soul food—“high- end urban rubber-boot food,” he calls it (Taylor 48)—that would entice to his restaurant a clientele of both local and internationally mobile food lovers: residents of the restaurant’s immediate neighbourhood, Vancou- ver “foodies” from across the city (52–53), film-industry stars up from Los Angeles (56), and European food critics (63). But he has difficulty securing a steady enough clientele to support the expense of high-quality local produce. Financial pressures and the influence of one high-powered investor threaten to make him cook instead a market-test-driven menu of tradition-resistant, imported, hyper-fusion food with no connection to any place in particular. He does not succeed in catching the attention of the international media until he apparently resigns himself to preparing food for that investor’s new project: a “restaurant of no place” that serves “Post-National Groove Food” (364). What the style of place-reference in Stanley Park does, interestingly, is position its implied audience in such a way as to suggest that however difficult Jeremy finds it to secure a customer base for his first restaurant, the city of Vancouver is in itself delectable enough fare to appeal to the taste of distant audiences, and all the more so because there is a knowing local audience that appreciates the city as insiders. Taylor’s narrative style presents Vancouver to an implied audience that is not close to the city but shares a great deal of urbane, Western, moneyed, cultural knowledge with the tastemakers at the novel’s centre. This is an audience that is presumed to recognize certain European and American brand names and places: Aga and Gucci, London’s fashionable Jermyn Street and Knightsbridge, and the Wolfgang Puck and Planet Hollywood brands are among the proper nouns mentioned by the narrator without explanation. But these are not the only defining reference points, and Vancouver is not rendered in generic terms

136 | Banting that would frame it as strictly recognizable from the vantage point of London or Los Angeles, for instance. Taylor’s narration instead preserves the city’s specificity and presents it to a distant audience that has begun to know of the place but cannot know it fully. Several features of the narrative style exemplify how the novel handles specific Vancouver place references. Proper nouns are usually glossed for the reading audience, implying that this audience does not know these locations already. Such glosses typically pair specific place names with common nouns that position them within more abstract categories, as, for instance, in the narrator’s introduction of one local landmark: “At the bottom of the cliffs and to the left stood Siwash Rock, which pillared fifty feet out of the water near the shore. A rock that was once a bather, legend had it, a bather honoured by the gods with this permanent place at the lip of the forest that had been his home” (20). Significantly, Siwash Rock is named before it is described in more abstract terms, a move that fleet- ingly reminds readers without a complete local place-consciousness that they are outsiders to a knowing local community, and then offers them enough guidance to begin constructing the landmark’s significance. But the explanatory glosses on place names in this novel are sometimes sparing, coy, or otherwise elusive. Meanwhile, the narrator frequently comments on how well-known (or not) a particular landmark is, even as he decides what might need explaining, for his audience: the central characters in this novel, through whose perspectives the narrative is often focalized, are interested in insider circles of prestigious or useful knowledge, in who knows what. In the opening lines of the novel, for example, the narrator expands briefly and enigmatically on the significance of the pivotal first site of action. “They arranged to meet at Lost Lagoon,” he begins. “It was an in- between place, the city on one side, Stanley Park on the other” (3). (Four sentences later he mentions “the lagoon” again and describes the hill and the trees around it, ensuring that distant readers will adequately construct the place.) The narrative’s first description of Jeremy’s restaurant location includes an equally brief descriptive gloss. The restaurant, called The Monkey’s Paw, is “A narrow fifty-seater on Cambie Street in Vancouver’s Crosstown neighbourhood, edgy but with cheap rents” (51 emphasis added). And early in the novel the narrator remarks that Jeremy meets up with his friend and sous-chef Jules at Save On Meats, in a rough block of East Hastings Street. Jeremy knew about the legendary Vancouver butcher—part

Reading From a Distance | 137 slaughterhouse, the band saws and heavy cleavers were in use right behind the glass counters—but he hadn’t known about the little diner at the rear. It had a narrow yellow Arborite counter … They sold drinkable diner coffee and enormous hamburgers for $3.50. (47 emphasis added) Here, Save On Meats, a Vancouver landmark, is first introduced with a proper noun and then extensively described. The passage makes a point of differentiating degrees of local knowledge. Jeremy knew about the “legendary” butcher, while the audience is presumed to be reading about it for the first time, but even Jeremy did not know about the diner. Occasionally, place names are offered without explanatory gloss in Stanley Park, but this happens here less frequently than in Brand’s novel. Jeremy impresses a young woman named Benny by describing, as the narrator puts it, “A time when he took a girlfriend on a surprise trip to Ucluelet … They stayed for the weekend in a cabin on Long Beach” (80). “Long Beach” is a generically legible enough proper noun, in English, that it gives the unknowing reader a sense of what might have been so thrill- ing to Benny, but Ucluelet is not, unless one speaks Nuu-chah-nulth or is enough acquainted with the Canadian Pacific Northwest to recognize the name of this small coastal town, a town less prominent on tourist maps than nearby Tofino. The novel makes clear that the location holds significance for Benny not by explaining it but by having Benny repeat the words to her local friend: “Imagine you had a boyfriend who phoned you up and said, ‘Let’s go to Ucluelet for the weekend’ ” (80), thus maintaining its mystique for a distant reader. Unlike in What We All Long For or in Benny’s speech here, place names are not generally so casually, conversationally dropped in the narrative line in Stanley Park: there is none of the piling up of presumedly self-explanatory points of reference that was suggestive of closely shared local knowledge in Brand’s Paramount passage. Instead, places are named deliberately, with the implication that these references may be somewhat mysterious but that they nonetheless direct the audience’s attention to sites of special resonance, the enigmatic importance of which they may be able to gather—be taught—by reading on. And indeed, since these references come surrounded with thickly descriptive details, the narrative supplies plenty of material for this gathering. For example, when “a rough block of East Hastings Street” is named as an anchoring location for Save on Meats, it is offered as a loose point of reference to which the reader might map her new knowledge of the butcher. While the narrator does not assume it would be relevant to name the specific block—the offered

138 | Banting descriptive information that it is a “rough” area is more valuable to this distant audience than anything more precise—he does leave unglossed the place name East Hastings Street. East Hastings may well be one of Vancou- ver’s most widely known street names, since certain inner-city stretches of the street are frequently indicated by the local and national media as a public gathering place for people struggling with poverty, homelessness, illness, and drug use problems. But the neighbourhood of the Downtown Eastside, which is centred on the “rough” blocks of Hastings Street, may be the more widely distributed name. “East Hastings Street,” the specified spatial anchor of the passage about Save On Meats, itself remains potentially enigmatic to the imagined audience of this passage. If the stylistics of place reference in Stanley Park may finally be said to construe a reading position for an audience for whom local knowledge is almost accessible, whose wealth of prestigious, urbane, Western, cultural knowledge equips them to all but understand the significance of Prospect Point, East Hastings Street, or even Ucluelet at first mention, but who have simply not spent enough time in Vancouver to have acquired substantial referential content for such enigmatic local signifiers, then it might be appropriate to pun further on the novel’s vocabulary of culinary taste and suggest that Taylor whets the appetites for local knowledge of readers at a certain near distance. The relationship of almost knowing thus constructed is a consumer’s interest in contact, acquisition, and sensual experience. The intrigued near-distance reader is eager to know what social and aesthetic textures and histories are signified by those enigmatic place references. This reading position does not align neatly with Howells’s model of distant critics’ interpretive play—it is too invested in local contents that European readers find uncompelling, in her account—or with Appiah’s model of the cosmopolitan reader’s imaginative moral concern, although in some respects it approaches more closely to the latter. But rather than finding congruencies between one’s particular life over here and the rich particulars of Vancouver over there that would motivate one to share in the novel’s moral judgments, Stanley Park positions its audience as finding an appetite to share in the novel and its setting’s uniquely desirable qualities.

Reading Across Distance

What We All Long For and Stanley Park demonstrate two of the possible attitudes that novels set in major Canadian cities adopt toward distant audiences at the start of the twenty-first century. If these cities are still positioned, in general, just at the periphery of the centre of international

Reading From a Distance | 139 audiences’ awareness, some Canadian novels set in these cities are nonetheless positioning their settings as decidedly at the centre of their implied audiences’ field of attention. In What We All Long For, as we have seen, the narrator’s primary address is not to a distant readership but to a specific local community, one identified with or closely tied to a certain generation of Toronto-based children of immigrants. This assurance on the part of the narrator that her audience is equipped with the rich place-based consciousness necessary to recognize the relevance of each of her place references suggests something about contemporary Toronto’s certainty of being a cultural centre of grav- ity. It is self-sufficiently both a producer and consumer of its own stories. That the same narrator also intermittently extends a warm welcome to those distant readers who care about “this city” and, more especially, about the complicated intercultural allegiances and countercultural ethics of her Toronto characters, suggests in addition that, in the imagination of this novel, the city’s gravitational pull has established weight on an international scale, perhaps precisely because a globe-wide variety of cultural influences makes their home there. But those attending to the novel’s Toronto from a distance are brought into contact with it primarily through an abstract versioning of it as “this city” or, even, “the city.” The embodied experience of living a particular sort of place-based consciousness there can be described in general terms but not fully extended to the novel’s distant readers, this narrative suggests. The style shift into abstract terms thus may render desirable to distant audiences the embodied experience of being a local in Toronto. In Stanley Park, too, a complete place-based consciousness figures as beyond the grasp of distant readers, although in this novel it is only just out of reach: an enigmatic extra layer of cultural and aesthetic significance that the otherwise generously explanatory narrator is content to keep tantaliz- ingly inaccessible. But the distant reader is at the same time positioned much closer to the city, as if the trendy, saleable urban features of the Vancouver Jeremy primarily inhabits must be quite familiar already to the novel’s international audiences. Thus the narrator’s offered explanations can mix specific place names with generalizing description, as if with the expectation that the distant reader is already in the process of acquiring a consciousness of the city, one capable of accruing more and more detail. What actual readers in Germany, Spain, the United States, or other parts of Canada may do with the place references in these novels must remain for now, as I have said, an open question. We do have the example, drawn from Suárez’s work, of dexterous citation of the Toronto place

140 | Banting names as they appear in What We All Long For, which suggests that one approach distant readers may adopt is to learn to echo local ways of speaking about a setting, that is, to practice a kind of mimetic echo-locality that may not offer them the interpretive riches of a place-based consciousness The same but affords a kind of functional, conversant knowledge of the setting. Let me suggest, in addition, that these two novels’ privileging of a insistent local place consciousness may well work to baffle or complicate, although likely not to prevent, both cosmopolitan readers’ attempts to find points assertion of the of connection with the settings (as Appiah describes these attempts) and European literary critics’ inclination to freely abstract the place names referential as textual puzzles (as Howells puts it). Particularly in cases of narrative style like that in the Paramount passage of What We All Long For, where relevance of sequences of proper nouns insist on the relevance of their own referential specificity, such novels may make it difficult for readers without place names local familiarity to construct their settings with an impression of accuracy. Equally, the same insistent assertion of the referential relevance of place may frustrate names may frustrate the efforts of distant critics to play fruitfully with them as sheer text. the efforts of What We All Long For and Stanley Park situate their distant readers as decidedly out of contact with local specificities, preparing for them distant critics to accommodating but rather remote positions: the position of readers who can connect with Toronto only through an understanding of “the [gen- play fruitfully eralized] city”; the position of readers who are always being taught how to understand local signifiers. This narrative management on the novels’ with them as part seems to me an efficient, if subtle, resistance to the pressure to be intelligible to distant readers, particularly those powerful readers who sheer text. decide what may be published, that Canadian texts likely continue to feel. It highlights a distinct (if unsurprising) growth in the confidence of major Canadian cities and of the writing set there, since even the mid-twentieth century moment that Howells identifies is the time when Canadian writers and critics were especially attentive to local concerns. Illustrating what Weiler called “the “long-held truism that foreign publishers have little interest in Canadian settings” (19), Canadian novel- ist Hugh MacLennan once told a rueful anecdote about the American publisher who, in the 1930s, suggested he set his novels elsewhere than in Canada in order for them to be marketable. “A boy meets girl in Paris, one thing leads to another and they—well, it’s interesting,” offered the publisher. “But a boy meets a girl in Winnipeg and they swing into the same routine and who cares? … for the American public you’ve got to see it’s a fact that Winnipeg kills interest in the whole thing” (117). MacLennan’s

Reading From a Distance | 141 anecdote indicates that a city’s ability to command distant readers’ attention falls somewhere along a gradient, determined perhaps by a city’s size, regional positioning, and its national context: anything that happens in the metropolitan centres of the historically powerful nations of the Western world is worthy of concern, but whatever happens in regional centres, particularly in a nation at the periphery of international attention, is not. If newer publishing realities question that truism by recognizing the success of novels set in bilingual, sexy Montreal, even while keeping the truism in circulation with doubts about the salability in general of Canadian settings, Brand’s and Taylor’s novels assume for their versions of Toronto and Vancouver a position high on the gradient of attention-worthiness, thus effectively participating in the production of their cities as magnetic, metropolitan, and worthy of international attention, in all their specificity.

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