• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

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 unforgiv- ing. 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 construc- tion, 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 cer- tain 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 par- ticular 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 acknowl- edge 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 con- structs 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 “intel- ligible” 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, metropoli- tan 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 read- ers.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 pub- lishing 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 interna- tional attention a useful analogy for considering the broader social and eco- nomic context surrounding Canadian cities’ representation of themselves as literary settings.

Load more

  32

Copy Link