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A Formal and Thematic Analysis of Madeleine Thien's Simple Recipes

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A Formal and Thematic Analysis of Madeleine Thien's Simple Recipes Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy At Home in Memory Lane: A Formal and Thematic Analysis of Madeleine Thien’s Simple Recipes Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Gert Buelens Paper submitted in partial Co-Supervisor: Dr. Sofie De Smyter fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of “Master in de Taal- en Letterkunde – afstudeerrichting Engels” by Silke Lenaerts Table of Contents 1. PREFACE AND EXPRESSION OF GRATITUDE 3 2. INTRODUCTION 3 3. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 6 3.1. IMMIGRATION AND NARRATIVE MEMORY 6 3.2. SPATIALITY AND ‘HOME’ 8 3.3. MEMORABILIA AND THE VISUAL 10 4. DISCUSSION 10 4.1. SIMPLE RECIPES 10 4.2. FOUR DAYS FROM OREGON 15 4.3. ALCHEMY 20 4.4. DISPATCH 25 4.5. HOUSE 35 4.6. BULLET TRAIN 42 4.7. A MAP OF THE CITY 47 5. CONCLUSION 56 Word count: 27 103 words 2 1. Preface and expression of gratitude With an interest in everything related to cultural exchange and globalisation, I was eagerly looking for a topic that explored this interest as well as one that would challenge me intellectually. Although I initially had never heard of Madeleine Thien, Simple Recipes immediately spoke to me because of its main themes. I find it interesting to see how cultural identity is reflected in literature and in what way characters are influenced by it. En plus, when I found out that Thien had studied at SFU, where my Canadian friends from my Erasmus exchange in Sweden are currently studying, I considered it must be fate. Having been an exchange student a few times myself, I am keen on investigating how cultures where older traditions are preserved, like those of most Asian countries, can cause conflict with other cultures, like those of more urban, modern societies such as Canada. I find that this makes countries that pride themselves on multiculturalism, such as Australia and Canada, notably interesting, especially considering they are also relatively young nations. Their literature has therefore often not received as much attention even up until today, or has received recognition relatively late. I was thus more than happy to give the literature of Madeleine Thien its much-deserved attention and over the course of the year that I have been writing this thesis, I have grown to appreciate the author in an entirely new fashion. Her layering of meaning and the way she exploits the short story form are nothing short of brilliant. Nevertheless, this thesis is as much the result of the support of a few people I would like to mention. First and foremost, my supervisor and co-supervisor, Prof. Dr. Gert Buelens and Dr. Sofie De Smyter respectively, whose continuous, quick and elaborate feedback have taught me to think self-critically and analytically. Thank you for the interesting discussions and active support throughout the writing process. Secondly, thank you to Prof. Dr. Hilde Staels for her helpful lectures on English Canadian literature and sparking my interest. Lastly, I would like to thank my immediate family, friends and classmates for their uninterrupted cheering on. 2. Introduction In this thesis I will be discussing Simple Recipes, a short story collection by Madeleine Thien from a formal and thematic point of view. It was her first short story collection before she published two successful novels, Certainty (2006) and Dogs at the Perimeter (2011). Since then, the 3 Canadian writer has been granted a number of prestigious awards and has been shortlisted an equal amount of times. What her works all have in common, and what is considered the strength of Thien’s writing is her recurrent thematic use of ‘home’. She herself once said she thinks of “home as a verb, something we keep recreating” (Goodreads). This is exactly what she does in each short story that adds up to the as yet largely unexplored collection Simple Recipes. What makes the collection’s approach to the theme of home interesting is its twofold focus. The first type of stories I have singled out are what I will refer to as migrant short stories, namely “Simple Recipes” and “A Map of the City”, respectively the first and final story of the collection. Both stories focus on the complex interrelation between identity and memory that results from the process of (im)migration. The second type zooms in on some sort of child trauma or broken family, namely “Four Days From Oregon”, “Alchemy”, “House” and “Bullet Train”, because they exemplify how the concept of ‘home’ is not always self-evident, especially considering the traumas they represent. What both types of short stories show is that Thien’s interpretation of ‘home’ is a double one. Home can be read in a metaphorical as well as a literal sense: it refers to places, as well as a sense of belonging. In the exploration of these different meanings of home, Shelly Mallet’s article “Understanding Home: A Critical Review of the Literature” will prove useful. In Thien’s collection, ‘home’ is a concept that becomes indistinct and blurred throughout traumatic events such as immigration, domestic abuse, gaps between the generations and heartbreak. The first meaning of ‘home’ is the most literal one, where it is seen as a physical space and place, a literal house or the possibility of movement away or towards this place, creating a dislocation between a house and the main character(s). The second meaning that I have mentioned introduces ‘home’ in a metaphorical sense, namely ‘home’ as a metaphor for the self or family life, where it represents a sense of being. This metaphorical meaning can on its own be interpreted in two ways as well: home can stand for the family unit, or it can represent the public community, which is especially relevant in the stories that deal with immigration. The short stories exploit either one of those two meanings of ‘home’ in their plot, and, as such, contribute a piece of meaning to the puzzle that is Thien’s Simple Recipes. It is this double interpretation of ‘home’ that makes Thien stand out. As a second-generation Canadian migrant writer, she is of course not the first to deal with the topic of immigration and the problems it entails. Canada is the country of the so-called multicultural mosaic, and promotes maintaining one’s own cultural, ethnic identity while still taking part in the national 4 Canadian society rather than adopting one, monolithic Canadian identity. This multiculturalism has come about naturally with the settlement of both French and British migrants in indigenous territory, nowadays supplemented by a new stream of migration from all over the globe. It was not until the 1980s, however, that Canada also adopted a multiculturalist view politically and legally, inspiring much debate. Canada’s long history of immigration, has resulted in a country that consists consists of both an English-speaking part as well as a French-speaking part. Add to this the highly complex position of the First Nations and one gets a very hybrid picture of the nation. This complexity of the country ensured its need for a rather long period to establish itself as a nation. The concept of an English Canadian literature is thus a relatively young one, with the term asserting itself during the Canadian Lit Boom of the 1960s and 70s (Staels). Already in the early days of the Canadian nation, ‘home’ and ‘belonging’, and ultimately also space, played a pivotal role in English Canadian Literature. The first literature described the colonial settlers as they made themselves a home on the rough terrain that was then Canada. Discussions of land ownership between the first settlers and the Aboriginal people made the topic of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ a crucial one. Canada, the nation known to have “been shaped by immigration” (Löschnigg 11), an ongoing process, makes an interesting background to the short story collection. Its major cities like Toronto, Montréal and Vancouver breathe multiculturalism and one of those, Vancouver, is also the main setting of Simple Recipes. This center of cultural multitude is also where the author of this collection grew up and first experienced the difficulties of being both Canadian as well as a second-generation Asian immigrant. The struggle of identity and sense of displacement that comes along with this is a recurrent theme in Thien’s work as she often draws on personal experience (Madeleine Thien Homepage). She herself is “the daughter of Malaysian-Canadian immigrants” (“But, I Dream in Canadian” 1) and, within the Canadian literary tradition, can be placed somewhere in between the writings of Alice Munro, who perfected the form of the Canadian short story and who, much like Thien, uses space as a symbol for the exploration of larger themes in her writing, and Rawi Hage, who like Thien is an immigrant writer and dares to ponder in his writing over whether Canada’s construction of itself and its people as multicultural is a true representation. Hage uses descriptions, or characterizations even, of the city of Montréal to construct his characters and to critically portray a hybridized worldview (Staels), the same way Thien goes about describing Vancouver: 5 Thien aims at making the exotic ordinary; the ordinary tragic. She doesn’t celebrate a Canadian multicultural mosaic, nor rootless cosmopolitanism. (…) [S]he turns displacement into an ordinary family tragedy, developing an aesthetics of the everyday that is based on the limited, confused view point of an ordinary narrator-protagonist; on everyday objects that reflect a far-away reality; and on the narrator’s search for an adequate metaphor to encompass the complexity of her personal life in a global context. In depicting the protagonist’s process of piecing parts together and mapping out her own life, Thien contributes to redefining the changing map of Vancouver and of immigrant fiction (Lorre 8).
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