UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

Prize Possession: Literary Awards, the GGs, and the CanLit Nation

by

Owen Percy

A THESIS

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JANUARY 2010

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•+• Canada Abstract

To date, the discussion of Canadian literary prizes as culturally influential forces — and indeed as cultural practice — has remained largely journalistic. "Prize Possession" opens the academic dialogue on the influence of awards on conceptions of Canadian poetry and literary culture by examining Canada's oldest and, until recently, most prestigious literary prizes, the Governor General's Awards. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's theorization of the fields of cultural production, this dissertation argues that literary prizes can be read as sites of conflation between 'restricted' cultural endeavours like poetry and more 'large-scale' and popular cultural events by nature of the competitive model introduced by the prizing of the arts, and that this conflation affects the ways in which Canadian poetry is conceived of in both academic and popular communities. The case of the GGs is of particular interest in the era of globalization because of the cultural-nationalist implications invoked and enforced by their federal mandate and sponsorship.

"Prize Possession" begins by arguing that awards can be read as Derridean 'gifts' which initiate a symbolic (and economic) cycle of prestige designed, eventually, to return to the original giver. It then examines the official mandate of the GGs in relation to the major shifts in the history of critical thought about Canadian poetry since the Awards' inception in 1936 and contextualizes the prize's relationship to ongoing debates and conceptions of canonicity. This dissertation then examines shortlisted and winning works from representative years (books by F.R. Scott, Alfred Bailey, and Barry MacKinnon for

1981 [the first year the GGs designated Poetry an independent category], books by Don

McKay, Judith Fitzgerald, Anne Michaels, Don Domanski, and Patrick Lane for 1991, and

ii books by George Elliott Clarke, Anne Carson, Steve McCaffery, Robert Kroetsch, and Phil

Hall for 2001), as well as selected work by relevant jurists, in order to argue that the

Awards continue to uphold a state-sanctioned construction of 'CanLit' that is increasingly incongruent with contemporary critical purviews. The study concludes by speculating on the direction the GGs might take in order to remain viable and engaged in an increasingly globalizing cultural environment. In general this dissertation aims to emphasize how phenomena like prizes — which are often thought to be extra-literary and market-driven — are of significant import to literary culture and the way that poetry is portrayed, produced, and consumed in twenty-first century Canada.

m Acknowledgements

Thanks first to Harry Vandervlist, whose guidance and support have been integral to

"Prize Possession." His generosity of mind, energy, and time have been a gift. (But not the kind that.. .nevermind.) Thanks also to Team Bos-Vandervlist for opening up to me a nicer workspace than I could have hoped for.

The guiding encouragement, subtle prodding, and general enthusiasm of both Aritha van Herk and Christian Bok have been essential over the past four years; I am indebted to them. (But not in the way that Atwood.. .ugh.)

The intellectual graciousness of Frank Davey and Laura Moss in sharing their unpublished work with me has been humbling, and I fear that the conversations I've had with Jean Baird, George Bowering, George Elliott Clarke, Joanne Larocque-Poirier, Diane

Miljours, and John Steffler have been markedly one-sided exchanges of intellectual capital.

I hope to repay them all somehow, someday.

Thanks to Kevin Flynn for getting me into this mess in the first place. Thanks to

Robert Kroetsch for convincing me that this was the mess I wanted. He was right. Thanks also to Shawn Malley, Pamela McCallum, Lucie Hotte, George Melnyk, Joel Baetz, Susan

Rudy, Pamela Banting, Lynn Penrod, Candida Rifkind, and Julie Rak, for each, in their own way, looking out for me and/or for this project.

An excerpted version of my Introduction, "GGs and Gillers and Griffins, Oh My!," is forthcoming in the Canadian Literature Centre's inaugural publication, Seedlings:

Transplanting Canada/ Semailles: Transplanter le Canada, edited by Marie Carriere and

Jerry White. Thanks to both for their hard work.

IV To my prized Calgary friends Leo Jenkins, Tiffany Neddow, Jackie Jenkins,

Stefania Forlini, Joe Kristoffersen, and Kenna Olsen: Without you I'd be much less happy.

Probably much skinnier too. Thank you for sustaining me in mind, body, and spirit(s).

Finally, and most importantly, I'd like to thank Robyn Read, my editor in life

(editor-in-wife?), who pulls everything together, makes it sound better, and who makes it all make sense. Thank you, thank you, thank you. This dissertation is for her, and for my family who have made anything and everything possible for me.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents vi Epigraphs viii

INTRODUCTION: GGs and Gillers and Griffins, Oh My!: The Rise of the Prize in CanLit 1 The Awards System as a Hole 12 The Implication of the Nation 20 Literary Awards in Canada, or, A Brief History of Awards in CanLit 26 The GGs as Literary History, or, A Brief History of CanLit in Awards 39 Starting to Begin 42

CHAPTER l:To(a)wards a Theory of Prizing 44 You Shouldn't Have! 48 Oh, It Was Nothing 53 'Tis Better 58 Resisting Arrest 62 Scandalous (Granting) Bodies 65 Peering at Juries 73 Northern Reflections 80

CHAPTER 2: Loading the Canon With Trophies: Prizing and Canonicity in Canada 87 Condescending to Contemporaneity and Conceiving of Canons 88 Classes, Classes, Classes 96 Prefiguring Consolidation From Basecamp 105 Can Can-Con Con? Counting (on) Canadian Canons Ill

CASE STUDY—1981: Great Scott, How Could They Not? 126 The Collected Poems of F.R. Scott by F.R. Scott 129 Miramichi Lightning by A.G. Bailey 138 The the by Barry McKinnon 146 Consecrations and Conclusions 156

CHAPTER 3: Restating the Nation: The Canada Council, Nation-State Ideology, and the Institutionalization of CanLit 162 Instituting Institutions 164 Governing the Nation Generally 172 Stating the Nation 177 Schooling (and) the Critics 193

vi CASE STUDY— 1991: Don of an Era 199 Night Field by Don McKay 200 Mortal Remains by Patrick Lane 206 Wolf-Ladder by Don Domanski 211 Miner's Pond by Anne Michaels 217 Rapturous Chronicles by Judith Fitzgerald 223 Consecrations and Conclusions 229

CHAPTER 4: The 'CanLit' Problem: Globalization, Transnationalism, and the Ethical Turn 236 Surrendering or Revolting: Patterning Isolation and Surviving the 'Butterfly on Rock' Literary History of Canada 237 Re: approaching CanLit 245 Criticizing Criticizing 252 "Canadian" Literary (Funding) Power 256

CASE STUDY — 2001: Re-Member History, By George! 274 Execution Poems by George Elliott Clarke 275 Trouble Sleeping by Phil Hall 285 Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson 292 The Hornbooks of Rita K by Robert Kroetsch 300 Seven Pages Missing, Vol. I by Steve McCaffery 306 Consecrations and Conclusions 319

CONCLUSION: Re(a)warding Ourselves: The Futures of the GG Awards 333 Casing the Studies 334 Branding CanLit, Naturalizing Readerships 337 Reinstateing the Nation 343 Lament for a Council 350 Re-jigging Juries 357 An Immodest Proposal 365 Envelope Please 374

Works Cited 377

vn Prize, sb.l lc: A premium offered to the person who exhibits the best specimens of natural productions, works of art, or manufactures at a competition designed to support the study, cultivation, or production of such objects, or at an exhibition or 'show' arranged for the instruction or amusement of visitors. The Oxford English Dictionary, "Prize"

Awards mean absolutely' .nothing to-me..;

Not nominated again, eh?

•jr- J..

George Murray, "Awards'

Prizes are gifts from the old To the young who are old.

Those who have arrived Search in the mirror of youth For their own reflection. Bravo! Bravo!

But oh there is a prize, a crown, for some That stems from wood, and bears the sharpest thorn. F.R. Scott, "Prizes"

viii 1

Introduction:

GGs and Gillers and Griffins, Oh My!: The Rise of the Prize in CanLit

Scholarships, prizes, university posts, await the dedicated writer: there are so many medals offered for literary achievement that a modern Canadian Dryden might well be moved to write a satire on medals, except that if he did he would promptly be awarded the medal for satire and humour.

Northrop Frye, Conclusion, The Literary History of Canada.

Despite the leaps and bounds that Canadian literary criticism has taken since

Northrop Frye's famous Conclusion to The Literary History of Canada, it was he who, as the major bush gardener of the twentieth century, broke earth and laid the seed for a closer examination of the politics and poetics of literary prize culture in Canada. The phenomenon of prizing literature is certainly not a new one, nor was it in 1965 (The Stephen Leacock

Memorial Medal for Humour, after all, had been extant since 1947); it can be traced as far back as ancient Greece, to Athenian playwrights like Sophocles and Euripides, as James

English does in his 2005 book The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the

Circulation of Cultural Value. Never, though, has it been as prolific, pompous, and prestigious as it has been in contemporary times. Pierre Bourdieu famously noted that literary prizes are cultural consecrations (Field 42) which produce, by their very natures, the staged prestige of literary value and worth1. "It is almost as though," writes English

(whose book, incidentally, won New York Magazine's 2005 award for Best Academic

By "consecration" I understand Bourdieu to refer to the (usually permanent) sanctioning of particular items, phenomena, or persons by the dominant mechanisms of cultural evaluation. Upon an authoritative recognition from dominant institutions as being meritorious (as with the winning of a public prize), the consecrated work/person enters into the cultural "doxa" ("relations of order" that "are accepted as self-evident" by a citizenry [Bourdieu, Distinction 471]) as an example and model of excellence and/or value. 2

Book), "winning a prize is the only truly newsworthy thing a cultural worker can do, the one thing that really counts in a lifetime of more or less nonassessable, indescribable, or at least unreportable cultural accomplishments" (21). But prizes, as any of us who have participated in any kind of literary event in recent years — readings, festivals, book signings, lectures — will surely attest, have become quantifiable markers which reinforce, if they do not entirely create, the cultural prestige of featured authors to which they are attached. They become the very indicators that writers are good or important; they do indeed assess the "nonassessable" and thus have become valuable currency in the literary and symbolic marketplaces. In addition to qualifying writers themselves as important cultural figures, they qualify selected works as prize-worthy, as meritorious, and as important work within the scope of that given award and its self-assigned constituency. In some cases the receipt of significant literary awards even validates literary practice itself, not only to the interested public but to and amongst writers as well. In what seems now to be an almost unfathomable period of doubt in her own practice, it was only after winning a

Governor General's Award for fiction in 1968 that Alice Munro "finally possessed sufficient confidence to identify herself as a writer rather than a housewife on the 1971 census" (Gerson and Luneau 93). Prizes are, despite their often pathological, political, and extra-literary tendencies, agents of power, prestige, and status within the multiple overlapping cultural fields that construct literary life in the twenty-first century; American novelist Alice Sebold, for example, recently went from calling awards "bullshit" (88) in an article in The Atlantic, to admitting that "now, more than ever, awards are a necessary crapshoot from which, on balance, all of us benefit" (92). 3

In an interview conducted more than a decade ago Douglas Fetherling went so far as to suggest that Canada, specifically, was "suddenly gagging with literary awards of every conceivable sort" (154, my emphasis), and this celebratory salvo has certainly not slowed since then. The sheer number of supposedly important prizes that culturally interested citizens are told to pay attention to in a given year can incite the feeling of being overwhelmed by distraction on the yellow brick road of literary culture (by GGs and Gillers and Griffins, oh my!) that we try, as cultural citizens, to travel. More often than not literary prizes are publicly derided for their shortcomings, inequities, and egregious failures to celebrate the true value of works of literature. The major complaint seems to be that they inject a competitive and capital-driven spirit into a creative act that Romanticism taught is sacred, economically disinterested, and organic if not divine. In the opening lines of his article "The Favourite Game: Canadian Literature In and Out," J.A. Wainwright laments the increasing 'corruption' of the literary world by more direct market forces that seem immediately extraliterary:

Canadian Literature has become an industry of big-bucks awards, lavish newspaper spreads, instant elevations of writers to master (not to mention celebrity) status, national media interviews, documentaries on writers and their thoughts, and the ongoing concern with international reputation — only now it's not a lament that Canadian literature isn't widely read but a tragedy when certain books aren't shortlisted for prestigious prizes abroad. Best-seller lists indicate not only weekly sales positions but also book time on the hit parade 'top ten'. If you're not there, you're not anywhere, as writer and reader. (241)

Being 'there' as a participant in CanLit culture may not always be as unabashedly commercial as Wainwright suggests, but at the heart of his gripe lies the fact that such a thing as CanLit culture itself exists; taking stock of the contemporary literary world no longer means simply reading the year's offerings in fiction, poetry, drama, non-fiction, etc. — one must also weigh the impact that this emphasis on the extra-textual might be said to have on the way readers approach the textual, if not on the textual itself. This phenomenon

— which Stephen Henighan has called the 'Hollywoodization' ("Giller's Version" 86) of literature — in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through the culture of "big-bucks awards" is also a phenomenon of evaluative pop-canon-making, and it is ostensibly controlled by the various institutions behind major prizes through the institution of the literary prize itself. The practical impact of these real and theoretical institutions on the production and reception of literature in Canada is indeed itself "symptomatic of the larger ideological acceptance that the market is the only (or at least only important) sphere that literature is capable of inhabiting" (Scott and Tucker-Abramson 14). However, as several critics have noted in this early stage of theorizing the literary prize, "journalistic literature is what we have in lieu of any real scholarship" (English 24). More specifically, "free trade has succeeded in creating the illusion of separation between economic and cultural spheres, while simultaneously increasing the dependence of culture on market forces. Absent from

Canadian literary theory is a real reckoning with this separation" (Scott and Tucker-

Abramson 6). This dissertation aims, then, to thus reckon.

Until relatively recently, this blissful illusion of separation has allowed critics to ignore the very real impact that awards have on what, why, and how we — and our students

— read (as) Canadian literature. Prizes generate undeniable attention and demand for certain literatures and thus manipulate the ways in which writing is produced and received in Canada. If it is true, as Kit Dobson suggests, that literary prizes "have become central to the Canadian publishing industry" (Transnational Canadas 161), then we must begin to ask how prizes manufacture, alter, or shape publishing, promotion, and reading in Canada. 5

Literary prizes are, immediately, ambiguous animals; they celebrate forms of cultural work that are, it is often assumed, increasingly marginalized in the ever-digitizing, ever-more virtual world, yet they impose another layer of complication onto the production, distribution, and reception of literature in this same world. Irving Horowitz, in 1988, went so far as to write that "[t]he proliferation of prizes has made the entire system of professional bestowals suspect" but suggested that the prize phenomenon still brought with it "[a] plague of good tidings" (18) in the form of renewed attention to the potential failures and successes of awards in carrying out their respective mandates. With prizes come inevitable (and unabashed) conflict and competition between cultural workers and agencies, and while there are necessarily winners and losers within this realm, the fuss that awards are able to kick up amongst an interested readership suggests their power to engage us. In a literary environment and era in which, as Robert Lecker puts it directly, "less talk decreases value" ("Would You" 16), it is safe to say that the outrage, bafflement, excitement, or comfort that we as literary citizens have all likely felt at the outcome of some or another award suggests that our postmodernism has yet to catch up with our desire for systems and structures to work as flawlessly as they promise to; we expect prizes, which are marked indelibly by the economic, symbolic, sociopolitical, and literary markets in which they circulate, to remain unaffected by all those markets save the latter, and to uphold, as Davey puts it "the romantic notion of economically unbesmirched creativity" {Post-National 13).

What Dobson calls the "politics of purity" {Transnational Canadas 207) that has kept texts and their contexts of production and reception strictly separate, and which has dominated literary study in English-Canada for much of its history, has become increasingly untenable in the age of transnationalism and commodity-fetish capitalism. 6

If it is still true that literary academics remain reticent about, if not resistant to, discussing the economic markets and marketing of the production and consumption of literature in Canada (York, "He Should" 97, Bourdieu, Distinction xiii), then the publication of the first installment of the TransCanada project's proceedings —

Trans. Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature — marks a significant recognition of the inextricability of the various competing and complementary markets and economies in the game of contemporary 'Canadian' culture. Borrowing much of the cultural-studies rhetoric and pragmatism which seems so immediately foreign to text-based literary scholars, Lecker has gone so far as to suggest that "it is because of factors involving profit or loss and actual material risk that Canadian criticism (call it the spirit of the

Canadian critical text) is declining" ("Would You" 17). This study, again, proposes a corrective to this decline by examining the role of the unabashedly materialistic and extra- literary prize culture of the contemporary moment, and its effects, reverberations, specters, and direct influences on both the generative and critical production of literature — poetry in particular — and canonicity in Canada. My approach shares much in common with

Dobson's in his recent book Transnational Canadas: Anglo-Canadian Literature and

Globalization in that it understands that "[b]ooks are cultural commodities that participate in the logic of capital. Their literary contents may resist processes of appropriation in a variety of ways.. .but the market in which texts circulate remains" (205) and must, then, be addressed. If my arguments seem, at times, fatalistic and devoid of avenues of resistance to the often-appropriative machinations of the markets in (and through) which we operate, my approach is always undergirded with a belief in "cultural production and literature as tools that might be capable of constructing new social relations despite their absorption within 7 capital and the machinery of the nation-state" (Dobson, Transnational Canadas 146).

Building, rather, upon Bourdieu's resolution that "[t]here is no way out of the game of culture" (Distinction 12), and English's assertion that "[t]he prize is cultural practice in its quintessential contemporary form" (26, his emphasis), this dissertation seeks not only to interrogate the practical implications of several major literary awards in Canada, but to begin to construct a theory of how in fact prize culture might itself function within (and as projections of) the institutions which are directly and indirectly dictating literary and cultural standards in and around Canadian literature. A couple of recent articles in major

Canadian journals ("May I Have the Envelope Please: Literary Awards and Contemporary

Canadian Fiction" by Terri Susan Zurbigg in Open Letter and "Banking on a Prize:

Multicultural Capitalism and the Canadian Literary Prize Industry" by Jennifer Scott and

Myka Tucker-Abramson in Studies in Canadian Literature) as well as Lorraine York's

2007 book Literary Celebrity in Canada, suggest that the academy may in fact be starting to catch up to the industry and not the other way around as is commonly assumed by believers in the university as a cultural vanguard. All three works of criticism focus on fiction (and the articles, on the Giller Prize) but all three propose intelligent theoretical and critical approaches to the bridging of gaps between literature, cultural value, and the marketplace.

My main argument here is that, by making themselves institutions (which are controlled and initiated by other institutions) and by making annual public declarations of literary value which consecrate certain texts, literary awards aspire to become historical projections of literary value that wield power in the present day, but that also promise to project the spirit and evaluative standard of the moment to future audiences. This is 8 especially true of the Governor General's Awards (the GGs) which originate and continue to operate from within the Canadian nation-state's official discourse about itself (even in an age where transnational and global approaches to culture are increasingly prominent).

Literary awards deserve, thus, to be paid heed as cultural forces that can exert significant pressure on literary and actual markets, and that can also even (re)construct the fields that they propose to speak for in their consecrations. The conversation about literary awards has long been underway in the journalistic circles catering to contemporary literary markets, but it is curiously absent from academic discourse which has traditionally attempted to account for literary and cultural trends from broader temporal and spatial perspectives. This dissertation suggests, then, that academics must start again to recognize themselves as members of the public constituency so often spoken for by cultural prizes instead of maintaining the fiction that we reside in ivory towers utterly disengaged from real life and real-time cultural practice.

In his landmark study of early-Canadian literary culture When Canadian Literature

Moved to New York, Nick Mount argues that specified literatures have three beginnings: the moment of its emergence as writing (through travelogues, legends, fables etc.), the moment that its writers begin to recognize themselves as writers and as writers of a specific time and place, and finally, the moment it receives "critical or institutional recognition as a literature, that is, as a discrete body of writing, with its own history and its own set of works and characteristics. In its actual life any literature is far too internally disparate and too interwoven with other literatures to admit such definition. When we say 'a literature,' what we really mean is an object that exists only in perception, an object whose birth was simultaneous with its recognition and that survives only in restatements of that recognition" 9

(5, his emphasis). "Prize Possession" is concerned primarily with this third beginning, and particularly the ways in which CanLit's institutionalization has cut through and across both popular and academic fields in a variety of game-changing ways that have drawn both positive and negative attention to that very institutionalization. When Griffin Prize-winning poet Christian Bok attacked some past GG Award consecrations in English-Canadian poetry, his commentary highlighted not only the ability of a specific award to — in his mind — fail spectacularly, but also his own latent belief in the importance of the Award as an institution: "When poetic juries, commissioned by Governor Generals, gives [sic] laurels to a poetaster like E.D. Blodgett, rewarding Lorna Crozier (at the expense of Steve

McCaffrey [sic], rewarding Stephanie Bolster (at the expense of Lisa Robertson) — something indeed has gone seriously awry with our standards of judgment" (qtd. in Sentes

9). The fact that Bok, Blodgett, Crozier, McCaffery, Bolster, and Robertson all presently hold (or have recently held) faculty positions at post-secondary institutions notwithstanding, 'our' standards of judgment must be seen to encompass both the academic and popular fields of CanLit, as well as the interconnected web of institutions it has spawned and which sustain it, as discussed below in 'The Implication of the Nation.'

My use of the term 'CanLit' throughout these pages owes a debt to Diana Brydon who announces that the epithet, like 'institution,' "names it as an established formation"

("Metamorphoses" 2). That formation is one that has been, in recent years, characterized as exclusively Anglophone writing that participates, in some way, in the dominant traditions established by critical, academic, and popular institutions in Canada and beyond (see

Rosenthal 296). CanLit, then, signifies not only the literary texts traditionally thought to make-up a literature, but — after Mount — the institutional framework of criticism, 10 contextualization, and commentary that has delineated and sustained the genre as exclusive and indeed worthy of its own distinction from other writing. (I occasionally use the sub- terms 'CanCrit' and CanPo' throughout this thesis with the understanding of them as subgenres of CanLit.) While I will further discuss the critical specificities of the construction of CanLit in Chapters 3 and 4, it is important here to note that the materiality of CanLit — what 'kinds' of books are funded, written, published, prized, written about, taught, and otherwise popularized — contributes indubitably to, and is "embedded in the cultural grammar" of what Kamboureli calls "[t]he governmentality of knowledge production" (Preface xi) through determining what kind of literature is produced and disseminated as CanLit. The various institutional spheres through which a text

(un)naturally travels in becoming CanLit, then, are all inextricable from the institution of

CanLit itself, and thus can all be evidenced — spectrally at the very least — in the textual products comprising CanLit as a genre or a kind of literature and literary framework.

Literary awards, and the Governor General's Awards in particular, can then be said to be one of the many "ways in which [CanLit] organizes and promotes its continuance through formally institutionalized structures" (Brydon, "Metamorphoses" 5). The institution of CanLit as a whole contains within it the machinations and pressures of a series of complementary institutions ranging from the publishing world to the academic world to the world of patronage and subsidy, to the marketing tactics of respective book stores. My contention is that both the market sector and civic non-profit organizations are themselves, just as the academy is, indirectly dependent on what Brydon groups together as

"the government departments, agencies, and arms-length institutions that depend on their funding from the state" ("Metamorphoses" 6) for establishing and fostering the parameters 11 of CanLit, and for normalizing the production and reception of cultural work within a given geographical area. The GGs act, I will suggest, not purely as the celebration and broadening of what CanLit (and 'excellence,' if not 'exemplarity') consists of, but also as a reaffirmation of the State's own authority in setting the rules of the game itself through its funding of the vast majority of the CanLit industry.

I have, thus far, been using the terms "prize" and "award" interchangeably, and will continue to do so because of their conflation in the popular cultural realm by the administrators of prizes and awards themselves. If a semantic difference exists between the two terms in any practical modern sense, it might be that "prize" invokes the implication of materiality — of an actual thing of some metonymic, symbolic, or actual economic value

— received by a certain person, object, or group, whereas "award," in its echoing of

"reward," would seem to imply a recognition of someone or something, with something

(material, like a trophy or a sum of money or ethereal, like a title, a distinction, or a rank) for something, but by someone or some group. If, as the OED suggests, the first example of practical use of the verb "award" is "[t]o award a thing" (591), the "thing" awarded is in fact also the award and/or prize, despite the conflation of the terms and the much later rise of the adjective "prizable," for which the OED gives the first documented usage in 1808

(1395). Indeed, the etymology of "award" is first listed as a verb: "to observe, look at, consider, examine, decide, ordain, fix.. .To examine a matter and adjudicate upon its merits; to decide, determine, after consideration and deliberation...to adjudge...to furnish, give"

(591). As a noun, the word "award" constitutes "that which is awarded or assigned, as payment, penalty etc. by the terms of the judge's sentence or arbitrator's decision" (592), a definition aligning it closely with that of "prize": "A reward, trophy, or symbol of victory 12 or superiority in any contest or competition" (1395). Aside from the possibility of negative or non-celebratory assignations — 'awardings' — inherent in the definition of the former noun, both become objects representative of an evaluative process of selection designed to mark their recipients as somehow worthy of such recognition as the giver's terms dictate.

The nod to payment or recompense in all definitions is interestingly relevant to the concept of an economics of awards as I discuss below, especially given that the etymological roots of the word "prize" run back to and through the Middle-English word "pris," today translated as "price" (1395). The language of prizing, as Chapter 1 will demonstrate, is firmly rooted in the terminology and ethos of economic exchange.

The Awards System as a Hole

Any current critique of awards systems is likely to be, in a sense, a post-structural critique, as it implies significant aporia engrained within systems which purport themselves to be rational, logical, or indeed systematic. Cultural awards and prizes become, then, a relatively easy target as their frameworks which assume by their very nature significant objectivity if not democracy, have been proven to be always already flawed and unrealistic in irreconcilable ways. At every level from benefactor to administration to jury to recipient, literary prizes and their various frameworks are fraught with the problem of subjective human agency, as evidenced by the significant aporia extant between the avowed intentions and the actual practice of world's most recognizable consecrations, the Nobel.

Despite its long, respected, and significant legacy for excellence, the Nobel Prize emerged from the estate of the noted atheist and anarchist, Alfred Nobel. Deeply inspired by

Shelley's Utopian philosophy, Nobel's will stipulated that his fortune be "annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have 13 conferred the greatest benefit on mankind"; with specific regard to literature, he aimed to reward "the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work of an ideal tendency" (qtd. in Jewell 97-98). Because of his personal sociopolitical beliefs, according to Nobel historian Richard Jewell, "by idealistic [Nobel] meant that which adopts a polemical or critical attitude to religion, Royalty, Marriage, Social Order generally" (qtd. in Jewell 103), but writers like Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg were famously denied the prize because it had been administratively commandeered by Carl

David af Wirsen who "led the Swedish Academy to present a conservative front against new writing," thus opening the Nobel up to the valid criticism that it had become "at best a popularity contest and at worst a political event run by second-rate provincials who know too little about literature beyond their own borders and who, in addition, are almost exclusively white and male" (Jewell 103, 97). Although the Canadian case is itself unique, the theory of awards I propose in Chapter 1 locates the ideological or power-wielding impetus of awards not within the awards themselves, but within the institutions that initiate and stand behind them; institutions made up, of course, of ideological human subjects.

In their brief article "Celebrating Authorship: Prizes and Distinctions" in the third volume of History of the Book in Canada, Marie-Pier Luneau and Ruth Panofsky remain uncertain as to the impact that awards might be said to have on the dimensions of the country's literature, yet they cannot deny the power of awards to manipulate the factors

(such as visibility, availability, and reputation) which scholars like Robert Lecker, Frank

Davey, and Lynette Hunter have argued come to form Canadian literary canons: "Growth in the number of prizes and medals awarded since the 1950s has enhanced the visibility and symbolic capital of Canadian authors, while enabling some to improve their financial 14 situation. While the impact of Canadian awards on the literary marketplace remains unpredictable, the political dimension of prizes awarded by government bodies is obvious, insofar as they are often the most visible aspect of state patronage" (122). Just as Jewell critiques the Nobel for preferring conservative, Eurocentric literature, Canadian literary prizes like the GGs are regularly derided for their faithfulness to what is quickly becoming an outmoded model of CanLit. If it is true that "any consideration of literary awards and prizes will reflect the biases of the prevailing literary industry, whose very nature often renders it conservative in taste and cautious in judgment" (Luneau and Panofsky 116-7), then the dominant aesthetic of prizes — the new bastions of the literary industry — would seem to lag behind newer turns towards the transnational which are finding life in the academy itself. And herein lies the newly-fissured aporia with which awards are faced.

Simply put, the economy of literary prizes forces a collision — if not an imagined collapse — of various fields: notably, of the cultural and the popular, or, as Bourdieu more precisely frames it, the "the field of restricted production, in which the producers produce for other producers, and the field of large-scale production, which is symbolically excluded and discredited" (Field 39). The field of large-scale, or mass production here is admittedly itself restricted to a great degree to include readers and consumers of Canadian literature and literary ephemera who are not themselves producers (writers, editors, publishers, critics, scholars, reviewers) of such restricted cultural material. That said, I would argue that literary awards do in fact have the potential to breach the barriers between the mass- production field of CanLit readers and the mass-production field of non-literary citizens through outlets as varied as marketing campaigns and promotions to television spots and radio clips. The literary field, and particularly that of restricted production, is, of course, an 15 inversion of the economic field, as effort does not translate to success, supply attempts to create demand, seniority has less (and less-fixed) bearing, and the field's players are often from socioculturally diverse backgrounds (Bourdieu, Field 39). Within this field "the stakes of competition between agents are largely symbolic, involving prestige, consecration, and artistic celebrity.. .The symbolic power of this sub-field's products is sustained by a vast social apparatus encompassing museums, galleries, libraries, the educational system, literary and art histories, centres for the performing arts and so forth" (Johnson 15), and most certainly, I suggest, awards. If "works of art exist as symbolic objects only if they are known and recognized, that is, socially intuited as works of art and received by spectators capable of knowing and recognizing them as such" (Bourdieu, Field 37), then awards, particularly those awarded by other members known to belong to the field of restricted cultural production, recognize award-worthy work on behalf of those members of the larger-scale field of production who do not (or cannot) possess the requisite cultural capital to make such distinctions. By ostensibly determining and representing literary 'taste' — which Bourdieu calls "a sense of one's place" {Distinction 466) — awards make restricted- field distinctions that are immediately accessible to consumers inhabiting larger fields and larger fields of production. "The implication of Bourdieu's theory," writes Randal Johnson in his preface to Bourdieu's The Field of Cultural Production, "is that any form of analysis which overlooks the social ground of aesthetic taste tends to establish as universal aesthetic and cultural practices which are in fact the products of privilege" (24). By consecrating certain writers with public and financially notable prizes — by pulling them out of the field of restricted production in which they regularly reside and into larger fields of production through public and media-covered consecrations — literary awards have the ability to 16 subvert the economic field while remaining entirely informed by its logic. They rely, then, upon their own ambiguity.

By acting as a bridge between Bourdieu's fields, awards can then provide consumers in the field of mass production with a form of imagined, yet superficially and temporarily tenable cultural capital otherwise acquired only by directly or indirectly apprenticing in the field of restricted production. If the consumption of a cultural product is

"a stage in a process of communication, that is, an act of deciphering, decoding, which presupposes practical or explicit mastery of a cipher or code," then "[a] work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded" (Bourdieu, Distinction 2). Literary awards, in a sense, offer a shortcut to the cultural capital required to evaluate a work of literature as award-worthy.

They offer "the pleasure of distinction, pleasure in the possession of cultural capital"

(Guillory 333, his emphasis) by making a public declaration of evaluative cultural implications. Bourdieu emphasizes that "the specific economy of the cultural field is based on a particular form of belief concerning what constitutes a cultural.. .work and its aesthetic social value" (Field 35), so "[o]ur belief in a prize," suggests English, "is really a kind of belief by proxy, a belief in these others' beliefs" (127) — namely, members of awards juries who, in using their specific restricted-field cultural capital to arrive at an evaluative judgment, then offer that judgment to wider audiences, on behalf of wider audiences.

As mentioned above, a myriad of impossibilities rooted mostly in the problem of the subjectivities of juries render the totalized theorization of these beliefs impractical and wholly impossible. What remains of interest to me here is the system itself; the ends to which it operates, and on whose behalf. Suffice it to say, however, that the successful 17 conflation of the fields via the bestowal or receipt of a literary award lends a certain symbolic capital and cultural gravitas to the various institutions and juries who stand behind the prizes as declarations of literary merit. Prizes, then, begin a certain type of circular exchange by lending credence — symbolic capital — to their recipients as cultural authorities: "the consecrated writer is the one who has the power to consecrate and to win assent when he or she consecrates an author or a work — with a preface, a favourable review, a prize, etc." (Bourdieu, Field 42). Symbolic capital itself, then, is an amalgam of accumulated prestige (both economic and cultural), celebrity, and the recognition of having been consecrated as a possessor (if not a source) of cultural value by the agents (juries) representing the various consecrating institutions. What we begin to suspect when these institutions are uncovered in the light of how literary awards function, is that, following

Bourdieusian logic, "symbolic capital is capital in denial; it is the economic capital that dare not speak its name" (York, Literary Celebrity 29). In Canada perhaps more than elsewhere, the giving of a literary prize has often been more a marker of self-interestedness than of idealistic benevolence towards any national or cultural community.

The awarding of a prize not only assigns an authoritative value to the winning work via the prestige of the award, but it simultaneously extends the ability to grant prestige to the grantee. In keeping with this logic, the literary tastes and sensibilities of the players within the Bourdieusian 'field of restricted production' are then reproduced and re­ generated in a public — and in the case of GGs and Gillers and Griffins (oh my!), explicitly national — performance which begins to breach broader fields of production as it engages with the economic and consumer markets in the form of a lucrative financial and star- making prize. Within prize culture, it is safe to say that everybody wins to a certain capital- 18 based degree: the writers gain prestige and symbolic capital even if they do not win, the institution or benefactor behind the prize wins by promoting and disseminating the type of culture it deems important to promote, the jurists win by increasing their own prestige or further securing their places in the field of restricted-production tastemakers, and the imagined general reading public wins by having a significant degree of cultural evaluation made on its behalf; by being offered a shortcut to both the "Canadian" and the "literature" of CanLit.

This shortcut is often also a literal one, as it has become the policy of major chain book stores to promote newly-stickered award-winning works as such in the high-traffic areas of stores and websites. The common battle-cry of award administrators, benefactors, and recipients — "enhancing marketing efforts in bringing these books to the attention of all Canadians," as the Giller Prize specifically puts it (Scotiabank Giller Prize) — also implies having those readers purchase or otherwise acquire the books at some cost beyond the mere paying of attention. To put it bluntly (if not reductively), upon the receipt of a major award, more books are printed, more are circulated, and, at least for the near-future, the prestige of having won a major prize seems enough to ensure that a book remains visibly within the realm of public consciousness about what CanLit is. The Scotiabank

Giller Prize (the Giller) is the most market(ing)-geared of Canada's major awards; its website's "History of the Prize" page boasts that "[m]ore than 2.5 million Giller-nominated books were sold in the first ten years of the prize. Over $60 million dollars in book sales to date have been generated as a direct result of the prize" {Scotiabank Giller Prize); even for the most reticent cultural citizens who believe, like Carmine Starnino, that "[t]o blindly endorse prizes is to endorse a vision of meritocracy based on publicity" ("Griffinology" 19 par.7), it has become impossible to deny the importance of prizes to the fields and futures of CanLit even as we begin to remedy such blindness. Sales figures from the past three years available from BookNet Canada (the not-for-profit agency that monitors book sales across the country) suggest that a shortlisting for the Giller, for example, can mean an increase in sales of anywhere between 16% and 1200%, while a win has the potential to increase sales by between 464% and 628%. The data surrounding this increase — what they deem the "Giller Effect" — although measured on a weekly basis, also demonstrates the staying power of winning works on bestseller lists for extended periods of between 7 and 12 months after a win {BookNetCanadaxa).

Exchange between the economy of prestige and the contemporary book-selling markets aside, the greater question surrounding literary awards might prove to be their relationship(s) to canonicity, which I examine at length in Chapter 2. Theorist Sarah Corse has gone so far as to consider literary prize winners "'precanonical' texts, educated guesses about what might survive the exigencies of time and caprice to become tomorrow's classics" (100), and that they also "serve as a 'contemporary' canon" (101). And whether or not people will be reading Eunoia or A Good House in a hundred years, Corse correctly notes that "contemporary literary prize winners [can] serve as an avenue for revisions to the national images created in earlier works" (17). Are prizes good or bad for a Canadian literature that often makes so public a display of its aspirations to maturity and diversity?

To begin to answer this question, I will begin, throughout this project, with more questions:

How much and what kind of attention are we paying to book prizes? How are the awards themselves written by the public and private institutions behind them? How do the increased popularity and sales that come with shortlistings and wins trickle back onto our 20 own bookshelves, into our classrooms, and onto our CVs through research, publications, interviews or reviews? How does one begin to theorize a 'jury of peers'? How, in short, is what York has called our current "prize-driven literary economy" ("He should" 102) liable to affect what texts show up on an Introductory CanLit syllabus 20 years from now (if such a thing even exists)? The easy first answer to the question 'Are awards good, bad, or inconsequential for CanLit?' is that prizes simply are, and what they are not is going away any time soon. It is time to begin to theorize the prize's role as a public arbiter of literary value in both the popular and academic spheres, and to consider its practical potential to influence the ways in which we think about constructing Canadian literature in and for the future.

The Implication of the Nation

Canada provides, as it so often does, a unique and intriguing example of literary culture through its awards and what they accomplish — if only because of the dependence of the arts on governmental support at nearly every level (see Chapter 2). Much attention has been paid to what critics have broadly referred to as the institutionalization of Canadian literature since its introduction into university curricula in the late 1950s. By

'institutionalization,' critics like Brydon (or Davey, or Lecker, or York etc.) are not speaking exclusively about the academic institution wherein literary value and other intangibles like 'national literatures' are ostensibly reproduced and disseminated, although the more thorough critics tend to include critiques of post-secondary institutions in their respective analyses. Nearly all the critics discussed below underpin their respective critiques with a nearly unwavering skepticism that any such institution might operate to positive effect. This leads to what Stephen Slemon has recently come to characterize as 21

"the problem of speaking hopefully about Canadian institutions" (72) . In general, also like

Brydon (here quoting Jeffery Williams) I will understand the term 'institution' "in the looser sense of 'designating an established practice or tradition'" ("Metamorphoses" 5).

Thankfully, Slemon goes slightly further and suggests that "the 'institution' can also designate any individual unit that does the work of cohesive 'institutionalism' within some administrative social massif (72)3. The overlapping institutions interrogated in this project are all inextricably intertwined with each other, and they tend to breach disciplinary and generic boundaries in the same way that literary awards breach, collapse, and conflate

Bourdieu's fields of cultural production. "Canadian literature also exists in different

2 Slemon notes that the term 'institution' is "almost always located in antithesis to some potentially emancipatory or ameliorative force...because we habitually envision institutions as obstacles, we commit ourselves a priori to thinking of ways of navigating around them, not to ways of working through them in the project of inflecting the social register" (73-4); my goal throughout this study is to evade said a priori ways of thinking in favour of a more practical pragmatism which might find room to criticize the Council and yet respect and accept its generative role in the realm of culture as a pure fact, not a threat. A fuller articulation of Slemon's discussion of the term 'institution' might be useful here: "We often play a shell game when we speak of 'institutions' in the human sciences. The definitional apparatus we apply to this general category skitters bewilderingly between meanings, and so the term 'institutions' within university culture can refer to those associations or scholarly societies that provide national or international connection, and an avenue for research dissemination, to scholars in similar disciplines; or it can refer to the structural organization of those target-based research projects that position themselves between and across the established academic disciplines, as in the Institute for Globalization and the Human Condition at McMaster University; or the term can identify those foundations, both public and private, that provide specific training services, like the many 'institutes' for ESL training in this country; or it can refer to the postsecondary academy or academy-complex itself. Nationally, the 'institution' can designate structures that are obviously doing the work of distributive management — like the research granting councils, or the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, or whoever it is that administers the lunos. In the human sciences, 'the institution' can also designate any individual unit that does the work of cohesive 'institutionalism' within some administrative social massif — as when faculty councils reduce really exciting forms of intellectual and pedagogical pursuit into obedient curricular banality, for example, or when the honours English program or the ubiquitous Norton anthology work to channel students' curiosity-driven intellectual inquiry into disciplinarily sanctioned problem-solving at the expense of a more radical pedagogy based on problem-finding" (72). institutional contexts outside the university. The writers and dramatists who produce the literature, the media that publicize it, and the readers and audiences who enjoy it also operate within their own institutional structures" (Brydon, "Metamorphoses" 3). Several of these institutions — indeed ostensibly patterned groupings of functional agents sharing some social or literary context — come to form the larger umbrella institution under which academia, publishing, marketing, and readerships can be said to fall: the institution not of

Canadian literature, nor even of literature in Canada, but instead the institution that has come to be known as CanLit.

Critics like Bok are quick to note that Canada's major prizes "are designed to homogenize taste" and "enforce lyric norms to which all writers might effectively conform'

("The Politics" 114), but it is important to note that even the open challenges to the exclusivity and conservatism of traditional CanLit in academia and creative writing itself are always already being subsumed into the embrace of the nation-state whose goals for

CanLit have traditionally been ideological and unificatory. It is not outrageous to claim, then, that through the omnipresence of certain national institutions — the Canada Council chief among them — even the various branches of radical and alternative literatures which have purported to interrogate the very concepts of 'nation' and even artistic value itself fall within the purview of institutional surveillance of some degree. So, "even as the nation supports oppositional culture, it also co-opts (and thereby normalizes) the work of radical writers to its nationalist goals" because "[t]o prove to the world that the nation has shed its colonial past and achieved mature nation status (a nationalist goal), the government supports experimental 'avant-garde' art (a modernist goal)" (Butling 42, her brackets).

Because the Canada Council in particular takes special precautions to ensure that awards 23 and grants are based on recommendations from peer juries, the loudly-trumpeted ideal that

"the system allows for critiques of the nation" (Butling 43) becomes the institution's defence against charges of ideological bias. The Marxist/institutional critique contends, alternatively, that "the money comes with too many ideological strings attached" (Butling

43). Likely as a result, then, the list of major-prize-winning work being championed by awards like the Giller, the Griffin, and especially the GGs can also be said to be indirectly but irrefutably "sustained by the centripetal, homogenizing narratives of the nation"

(Butling 41) which has ordered the celebration of what Scott and Tucker-Abramson recently called "the homogenized literature recognized in Canada's current literary prize culture" (9). The question then becomes 'Why, in the age of supposed global citizenship, purportedly crumbling nation-states, and imagined multicultural democracy, does prized literature remain so homogeneous, and what does it suggest about the institutions perpetuating such a system?'

With processes of globalization entrenching themselves even further at nearly every level of daily life it is unsurprising that the very concept of the nation-state is itself dwindling in importance and power. The origins of the current global economic crisis in the

North American markets provide a pertinent example of how the undeniable

Westernization (read: Americanization) of capitalist economies has tended towards monopoly and centralization. Jurgen Habermas has gone so far as to suggest that new global realities which have the potential to affect citizens of the world regardless of national affiliations (he points to the border-effacing global warming crisis and the Chernobyl disaster) are "unmanageable from within a national framework; in this sense they overwhelm the capacities of individual states to maintain internal order" (68). Yet nation- 24 states like Canada, with their identity-rooted cultural policies, continue to exist and operate with little practical regard for their supposedly increasing social and political irrelevance. In analyzing Canada specifically, Lynette Hunter deems it "a nation state that is itself increasingly turning into a cultural artefact [sic] in the face of multinational economic organizations" (14). The cultural artifact of Canada remains, though, definitively constructed from within the nation-state itself in accordance with the increasingly outmoded ethos of cultural national unity and national distinctiveness. If we have indeed come to an era in which "states are reorganizing their priorities" (Brydon,

"Metamorphoses" 2) in order to manage the pressures of globalization which threaten to diminish their power as purveyors of political, social, and cultural normalcy, we must also recall that globalization remains a process, not an end-state (Habermas 65, Szeman

"Poetics" 156), and that the nation (and its products, policies, and purveyance) remains a political fact with which much globalization theory seems happy to dispense. The maintenance of CanLit, then, through the Canada Council and programmes like the GGs, seems destined to continue to fall increasingly out of step with the rest of the world if it maintains the reliance upon its own imagination and construction of the national literature with which most Canadian literary criticism has concerned itself with since the arrival of

European settlers.

The institutions of CanLit, as a result of their centripetal funding, are always already complicit in the process of confirming the desire of all nation-states for a recognizable, distinct, and distinctive culture with which it might measure itself against other nation- states. Canada has long been constructed as what Benedict Anderson famously called an

'imagined community' reliant upon the tacit belief that one's fellow residents in a given 25 geographical space share both implicit and explicit social, sociological, and political realities out of which a common tradition, character, and heritage might be definitively forged. Given the increasing digitalization of the planet and the significant pressures of what has come to be called globalization, cultural critics are increasingly articulating the possibilities for transnational or even post-national subject positions in and beyond the political space called Canada; this development has resulted in an ambiguousness of identity and a troubling of general/generalizing constructions like 'national identity' or

'national condition' upon which much of our literary tradition has been built by writers, critics, and readers alike. One of the most virulent and enduring critics of the nation-state's conscious push for national literature and culture through its own agencies like the Canada

Council has been John Metcalf. In his pseudo-utopian tract Freedom from Culture, Metcalf laments the role that the Canada Council has played in the formation of so many CanLit texts: "because the Canadian literary world is wholly subsidized by the State it is impossible to write imaginatively or critically without being conscious of being Canadian, without being self-consciously Canadian, without being conscious of the pervasive social and political desire for 'Canadianness'" (24). His criticism focuses on his own specific opinion of the quality of literature being produced, disseminated, and consumed in and by

Canada, and although his work is ultimately rooted in an exclusive aesthetic, there remains a thread of merit running through his observations. The major questions that have shaped

Canadian criticism within the academy, for example, are those of identity and belonging, most often within and without 'Canada' itself. As Brydon puts it, "Who are we? Where is here? What is to be done? Often, these questions assumed the context of the nation, in ways that privileged examining nationalism over the structures of the nation state" ("Metamorphoses" 1). My hope is that with a more thorough examination of the nation- state and its practices in regard to the Governor General's Awards specifically, we might continue to broaden what Kamboureli has recently seen as "CanLit['s] potential to challenge the presumption of its [own] intelligibility" and to "defy the notion that Canada is an imagined community" (Preface ix). If globalization and transnationalism are indeed shedding light upon the fact that, in a rebuttal of Anderson's thesis, "Canada is an unimaginable community, that is, a community constituted in excess of the knowledge of itself, always transitioning" (Kamboureli, Preface x), then we must come to terms with the fact that despite its intransigence, 'Canada' remains a political fact even if its population cannot be ideologically tied to it with any Romantic coherence. To be clear, my goal throughout this dissertation is not to de-emphasize the role of the nation as portrayed through the GG Awards, but to re-examine it as it lags behind globalizing markets, populations, and cultural turns, thus "not transcending nation but resituating it" (Brydon,

"Metamorphoses" 15).

Literary Awards in Canada, or, A Brief History of Awards in CanLit

The history of literary awards and Canadian literature (and CanLit) is marked from the outset with the brand of the financial marketplace and the direct conflation of the economy of finance with the economy of prestige. Perhaps the earliest significant examples of the prize phenomenon in CanLit occur with the consecration of Martha Ostenso with the

$13,500 USD Dodd-Mead Prize from Pictorial Review in 1925 — which York cites as the catalyst for "the increasingly visible role of literary awards in this country in the first half of the twentieth century" {Literary Celebrity 61) — and Mazo de la Roche's receipt of the

$10,000 USD Atlantic Monthly Prize in 1927. According to award historian Gord Ripley, 27 these American awards "helped contribute to a mood of literary nationalism and optimism that persisted until the stock-market crash of 1929. Publishers and literary associations gradually began to favour the establishment of literary prizes as a device for 'making literature hum' (and, consequently, for selling books and subscriptions)" (par.l). The first awards of note within the country of Canada itself seem to have been established by the province of Quebec in 1922 when they allotted a $5000 CDN stipend from the provincial budget to be distributed on the basis of literary achievement . Ripley suggests that the

Canadian Author's Association would then draw their inspiration from this initiative and would approach novelist and then-Governor General of Canada Lord Tweedsmuir (John

Buchan) to ask for his sponsorship of what would become the Governor General's Awards in 1937. Awarded only for English-language works until the Canada Council took over the administration and sponsorship of the awards in 1959, the GGs came to be known as

"Canada's premier literary prizes" (Ripley par.2). They are still often referred to as such despite the rise of more the lucrative and publicity-fuelled Giller and Griffin prizes, established in 1994 and 2000 respectively by individual donors. The institution at the heart of the GGs — the Canada Council — does indeed remain officially distanced from government, although increased parliamentary interference since the 1970s and 1980s (see

In addition to being entirely distanced from the cultural framework denoted by the term 'CanLit,' French Canada's awards culture in general remains remarkably alien to that of English Canada; it has been addressed with a thorough eloquence by Robert Yergeau in his works A toutprix: Les prix litter aires au Quebec (1994) and Art, argent, arrangement: Le mecenat d'Etat (2004). That said, Francois Landry cites several instances of the competitive model being interwoven with the literary in Quebec's significant literary history, most notably remarking that "[beginning in 1876, Quebec placed its own cultural stamp on the practice of awarding school book prizes. To educate the nation and support the provincial book industry, the government encouraged the publication of series of works by French-Canadian writers" (86). Due, however, to the vast number of literary awards extant in Canada then and now, I restrict my purview to those awards which offered significant practical financial or cultural recognition. 28

Chapter 3) implicates the Canadian government in tastemaking on behalf of the nation it imagines itself to speak for. Lord Tweedsmuir's original vision for the GGs was that they be "designed to create or at least recognize 'Masterpieces'" and at the first annual awards presentation in 1937, he suggested that Canadians "should live in close contact with

[literary] masterpieces" in order to establish for us "a standard of values" that could

"influence our lives, dominate our thoughts, and colour our speech" (qtd. in Larocque-

Poirier, "John Buchan's Legacy" 60). He hoped, thus, to create a canon of works upon which an imagined tradition might justifiably be built.

According to Ruth Martin, "[t]he Governor General's Literary Award is a tax-based government program that creates a canon of selected texts through its institution ... the

Governor General's Award is a political award; it tells the world that these winners are perceived by the Canadian Government as the best of our literary culture" (102). They are, of course, annual awards that consist of a $25,000 CDN stipend, a silver medal, and (at present) a special leather-bound edition of the winning work crafted by master-bookbinder

Pierre Ouvrard. The book's publisher is also awarded a $3000 stipend to be put towards promotions and marketing of the winning work as such. They remain "Canada's most comprehensive literary prizes" (Henighan, "Giller's Version" 83) and make consecrations in both English and French in the categories of Fiction, Non-Fiction, Drama, Poetry,

Children's literature, Children's illustration, and Translation. Although the awards ceremony had, at one time, been annually nomadic in hopes of better representing the geographical diversity of CanLit (see Berg and Harvey par.4), in 1992 the National Library in Ottawa began hosting a gala reading at which winners would read from their works at the National Gallery the day after the ceremony, thus re-rooting the awards ceremony at Government House every year. Recognizing the force and potential of the economic market, the Canada Council accepted BMO as a corporate sponsor of the awards in 1988; the financial group covers the cost of promotional materials as well as sponsoring the gala dinner in the presence of the Governor General. Additionally, "in the 1990s it began making the juries' shortlists public" (Davey, "Tales" 10) in order to increase transparency and, indirectly, generate scandalous discussion amongst its public, while in 1992, "the

Council began presenting the awards in November to coincide with the major book-buying season" (Berg and Harvey par. 4), demonstrating further interaction of the institution with the economic realities of the cultural environment of Canada.

Despite the rise of the Giller and Griffin prizes in 1994, several critics staunchly continue to favour the GGs not just because they are seen as "quintessentially Canadian"

(Taylor par. 15), but also because of the popularly-held belief that "to foster and nurture new and hitherto unrecognized Canadian literature" is the "niche the Governor General's

Award has carved out for itself (Zurbigg 54). In particular, Stephen Henighan has written prolifically about the fact that publishers of books which make the cut for the Giller's shortlist must agree to fork over a $1500 fee in hopes of covering promotional costs, while works shortlisted for the GG have that fee stayed by the BMO support. "The absence of a fee" writes Henighan in his controversial essay "Giller's Version," "has permitted to GGs to create new stars, while the Giller has merely confirmed the status of writers already possessed of a wealthy publisher" (85). Terri Ann Zurbigg agrees that "[t]he Governor

General's Award takes a rags-to-riches approach" (55), but ironically, neither critic acknowledges the odyssean structure of economic narrative involved in the Giller fee: sales numbers suggest that the investment in promotion by publishers is guaranteed to return to 30 them in sales, as the prestige accrued by fact of being shortlisted for the Giller results not only in the chance of having the writer win twice as much money as offered by the GG, but much higher sales based on the elevated public stature of the Giller itself. That said, the fact that no such fee exists for the GGs does indeed suggest a more level playing field for

Canada's independent and smaller publishers, thus rendering them "more equitable"

(Dobson, Transnational Canadas 162) than the Giller. Generally, also, the GGs infuse significantly more capital — $448,000 in 2008, and for a broader range of achievements

(Larocque-Poirier, personal interview 6) — into cultural and hard economies every year.

Several critics including Henighan also see this as making the GGs a more genuinely

"national award" ("Giller's Version" 84, Frank Moher qtd. in Zurbigg 53) because of the subsidized entry and publicity fees which allow regional and independent publishers

(basically anyone other than M&S, Knopf, or Random House) to compete for the lucre available in its various forms through Canadian prize culture.

In 1998 Philip Marchand suggested that "[i]f corporations start thinking in terms of spending money on literature, their natural bent will be to think of sponsoring literary prizes. Prizes with lots of money attract media attention" (64). The establishment of the

Giller Prize (four years before Marchand's prediction) and the Griffin Prize for Poetic

Excellence (in 2001) certainly seems to have validated this belief. Established by Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch in memory of his late wife, literary journalist Doris Giller, the Giller Prize is "awarded annually to the author of the best Canadian novel or short story collection published in English" (Siemens 66). Professing unabashedly idealistic motivations, publicists for the Giller have early and often portrayed the prize as a gift to the cultural health and status of the community it purports to serve, claiming that its intent "is 31 to turn more people on to great books" (Lahey, "Rewards" par. 13). Thus the marketing of the prize and its books through Canada's major 'big box' book stores flourishes; this arrangement — at least in hard economic terms — does not immediately seem to hurt anyone, and it is this seeming benevolence and very visible cultural spadework that actually does increase literacy and literary engagement in ways critics and administrators claim the

GGs never have. Rabinovitch himself has suggested that "if books are sold and read, the purpose of the prize is accomplished" (qtd. in Mcdowell par.5), though as I have suggested, this is far from a comprehensive assessment of the prize's various economies.

The Giller debuted in 1994 and, according to Zurbigg, "the Canadian literary scene has not been the same since" because "Rabinovitch changed the rules of the game and forced Canadian literature to adopt a new strategy" (49). The nod towards conscious competition in Zurbigg's language here, as well as the identification of the individual donor and not the prize itself as the catalyst for this change, imply such a significant and individual interjection of the hard economy into the field of restricted production that the latter as afield is so challenged as to be put on the defensive. In her well-intentioned defense of the GGs, for example, Zurbigg displays some of this defensiveness when she notes that "[t]he media has really given the Governor General's Awards a hard time over its dull, drab image" (54). If the stated intention of the GGs — and of literary awards in general — were to gussy up their own images (or those of the institutions behind them), we might be inclined to agree. However if an award truly is meant to honour a certain work of literature for the very sake and celebration of that literature, the pomp or circumstance surrounding the ephemera of prize culture — the galas, the celebrity donors — should be unimportant. So when Henighan attacks the Giller Prize as "the consummate cultural expression of the Hollywoodized, neo-conservative, market-driven, user-fee mentality promoted by most of the country's newspapers" ("Giller's Version" 86) and notes that, with the frequent recognition of CanLit stalwarts like Mordecai Richler, Alice Munro,

Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and M.G. Vassanji, "[t]his is not a prize that is out to shake our literary preconceptions" ("Giller's Version" 84), we might wonder what it is out to shake.

The simple and reductive answer is, of course, its own hand. A more developed critique, though, would examine the impetus toward remaking literary institutions. Alex Good goes so far as to question the harmlessness of the prize when he notes that "[t]he Gillers have, in a mere fourteen years, become an institution so incestuous and sclerotic they have their own systemic biases. Of course none of this would matter if the best works of Canadian fiction were being recognized. But they are not. And so one may well question whether the prize is serving any valid purpose at all — indeed, whether it is perhaps now doing more harm than good" (65).

Nonetheless, upon its introduction, the Giller had an immediate impact in that it fostered "a thrilling tension not felt before on the Canadian awards scene" (Lahey, "Giller effect" par.5). It was successful in that now, according to Anita Lahey, "[w]hen publishers talk Giller they make comparisons to the Academy Awards," recalling the prize's inaugural year, when "invitations were delivered by a tuxedo-wearing messenger who also brought fresh roses" ("Giller effect" par.4). Noting that to much of the interested world the Giller has become "the be-all-and-end-all of literary prizes in this country" ("Giller effect" par.3),

Lahey too participates in the scandal-driven competition between Canadian prizes by emphasizing that — like the Booker Prize upon which it was based — the Giller-winning book is chosen on the day of the gala dinner which is televised and "attended by 300 33 invitees, a celebration more befitting honoured writers than the modest GG's [sic] event, some say" (Lahey, "Rewards" 14). While the GG juries choose their shortlists and winners weeks in advance of their announcements (in order to allow publishers to order reprints

[Lahey, "Rewards" par. 16]), the on-the-spot tension and suspense fostered by the Giller certainly engages the field of mass-production in ways that the GGs have not. Yet it is important to recognize that the Giller has also been constructed as a corrective to the national-culture-building rubric of the GGs, and that this correction is proposed by a prize that partnered up with Scotiabank as a visible (even changing the award's name) corporate sponsor in 2005.

The Griffin, while not as often portrayed as an oppositional prize to the GGs, has also drawn significant attention to itself and increased its social capital with its own emphasis on pomp and black ties. After deriding the "relative lack of fanfare with which we hand out our literary prizes," Peter Dickinson recently argued that "[t]he recent glitz and festive theatrics of the Griffin Poetry Prize have been a notable and welcome exception.. .with Scott Thompson waving a dildo in front of Atwood and Anne Michaels during the inaugural 2001 ceremonies, and Christian Bok exuberantly bounding up on stage and performing and excerpt from his award-winning Eunoia the very next year" (49). The comparative outrageousness of the galas associated with the Griffin and Giller Prizes has done much to increase the visibility and social capital of the awards when compared to the modest and muted ceremony for the GGs, but they have also, in a wonderful twist of irony, drawn ire from politicians looking to stoke the anti-elitist fires in election years. When

Stephen Harper made his now-famous suggestion that "when ordinary working people come home, turn on the TV and see a.. .bunch of people at a rich gala, all subsidized by the 34 taxpayers, claiming their subsidies aren't high enough when they know the subsidies have actually gone up, I'm not sure that's something that resonates with ordinary people" (qtd. in

Moss, "Strategic" 6), this only highlights the fact that the 'modest' GG ceremonies have never been broadcast on national TV. The galas to which Harper is most likely referring — those available to be witnessed by "ordinary working people" — and those which

Dickinson hopes might use their flair to "bitch-slap all of us out of our Canadian trance"

(54), are funded entirely by the private foundations and corporate sponsors of the Giller

(who have officially partnered with CTV) and the Griffin.

In fact, in terms of political correctness, Lahey notes that "[ajnother charge frequently leveled at the GG is that its lists are politically influenced and often omit what others consider to be obvious contenders for the award" ("Rewards" par. 18).

Representation — be it regional, ethnic, or gender-based (to say nothing of style or kinds of writing yet) — has always been, and remains, a primary concern for the GGs (Larocque-

Poirier, personal interview 5). It remains so by nature of the Canada Council's declaration to "review all eligible titles in each of the seven categories according to literary and artistic merit" (Governor General's Literary Awards). Scott and Tucker-Abramson even deign to

"view the Governor General's Award as a creation and upholder of the Trudeau-era multicultural policy, while seeing the Giller and [Griffin] Prize[s] as part of a new

'cosmopolitan' and free-trade-oriented Canadian cultural policy" (6, my brackets), and a quick look at the list of winners would certainly support this claim.

Most of the criticisms of the GGs sociopolitical/geographical biases, though, are more accurately aimed rather at its juries. Marchand suggests that "[Canada] Council bureaucrats usually make sure that their juries have the right racial or regional balances, 35 knowing that they'll hear about it from organizations such as the Writer's Union of Canada if they don't. Jack Rabinovitch, on the other hand, just has to come up with three amiable people who have the right credentials and no axe to grind" (65). And although this presumes that as long as the jurists remain amiable and neutral they might uniformly agree on the best book of the year, the problem of all juries is illustrated herein. Henighan's griping about the familiarity of Giller jurors and winners ("Giller's Version" 84) does have merit then, but it remains an argument without a ballast because of the sheer realities of the literary scene of the present day. The reality seems to be, of course, that everyone knows everyone in CanLit and that there are just as many axes to grind as there are pats-on-the- back-and-knowing-winks to dole out. It is, likely, "less a Satanic conspiracy than a reflection of how small literary Canada is" (Brian Bethune qtd. in Zurbigg 58), but it does create yet another aporia in which the system must continually fall short of its idealistic aspirations.

Three years before the advent of the Griffin Prize, Marchand argued that a major poetry prize was not likely in the cards for CanLit because "[a] genuinely lucrative prize for poets would make the question of who would be on the jury for that prize a real dilemma.

Choosing three people out of the telephone book at random would be at least as sensible as choosing three members of the Canadian League of Poets at random" (66). So when Scott

Griffin established of the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence in 2001, readers might have wondered if (and how) the prize would handle this issue. My suspicion is that no one could have predicted the results. Calling itself "the world's largest prize for a first edition single collection of poetry written in English" (Griffin Poetry Prize), the Griffin Trust awards two

$50,000 awards annually to the best Canadian and international books of poetry written (or translated) in English that year. While the structure, administration, and bureaucracy of the

Griffin remains similar to that of the Giller (not to mention the fact that Jack Rabinovitch's daughter Elana currently works as the administrator of the Griffin Trust,) the works it has consecrated since its inception have demonstrated a more accurately representative cross section of the Canadian literary scene, especially in terms of form and style. It is appropriate that Anne Carson, whose work tends to tread the line famously drawn by

Roland Barthes in S/Z between readerly and writerly text (156) should have won the inaugural Griffin Prize for a book (Men in the Off Hours) that the GGs would shortlist but not consecrate, despite a seemingly sympathetic jury (see Case Study — 2001).

Consecrating Roo Borson, Margaret Avison, and Don McKay alongside Sylvia Legris,

Christian Bok, and Robin Blaser, the Griffin Prize has proven its aesthetic open- mindedness. It has contributed to the broadening of what might be considered consecratable

Canadian poetry. The fact that no Canadian poets of colour have won the Griffin might awkwardly argue against its inclusivity, but its awarding of the international half of the prize to poets like Kamau Brathwaite, Charles Simic or August Kleinzahler (not to mention its list of jurists like Pura Lopez Colome and Dionne Brand) help to counter that argument.

Regardless, the intention of both the Giller and Griffin prize, and indeed of the GGs (if we believe in the utopic multicultural ideal of Trudeau-era social policy which reflects a just and equal society wherein all literary styles and ethnicities are equally represented and representable) is to honour the best CanLit writing of the year, bar none.

What the Giller and Griffin Prizes achieve, then, is the circumvention of, or rather the illusion of the circumvention of, the sociopolitical concerns faced by the Canada

Council in their yearly assessments and assignations of the best of a certain purportedly 37 representational pool of CanLit (generally around 140-150 books in the English fiction category, for example). Giller juries, who are generally asked to consider between 55 and

60 books, are then perceived to be less concerned with any political mandate than with the quality of the literature itself. (This represents a lighter charge than the truly monumental task demanded of GG jurists — many of whom are working writers, editors, or academics with full-time commitments elsewhere — to read and assess the merit of all submitted books with equal fervency. This sheer volume has led to much muffled and off-the-record suspicion that certain books simply do not receive equal evaluation, or even any evaluation at all.) The oft-unstated presumption of literary objectivity or aesthetic freedom from identity-politics does, of course, betray itself when one peruses the list of Giller recipients and begins to realize that, indeed as Zurbigg noted, the Giller tends to favour a certain

'type' of fiction. Winners like Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, David Adams Richards and the acceptably ethnic Mordecai Richler and Michael Ondaatje represent the well- established CanLit canon, leading Alex Good, for one, to bluntly suggest that "this is an award given by the literary establishment to the literary establishment" (70). Meanwhile, recipients like M.G. Vassanji, Austin Clarke, Rohinton Mistry, and Vincent Lam fulfill the mainstream (mostly white, mostly middle-class) readership's taste for what Graham

Huggan has famously branded the "postcolonial exotic" (28). Without exception, winning books since 1994 have had a traditionally readerly plot, if not narrative, and have followed

— admittedly artfully in many cases — the form of the traditionally canonical realist

Canadian novel. Good continues: "As Canada's most prestigious and certainly most highly publicized literary award, the Giller presents an influential vision of what serious Canadian literature should be. This has led to the creation of our own home and native genre: The 38

"Giller bait" novel. Giller bait novels are very serious books emphasizing history and geography, generally without any sense of humour, and written in a vague, pseudo- poetically lush and highbrow style" (70).

Aside from the obvious goal of turning themselves into institutions of a certain kind, one result (if not goal) of these two new privately-funded-yet-publically-visible prizes is indeed to return a different kind of capital to their donors and namesakes; to exchange financial capital for the symbolic capital of being recognized as culturally philanthropic.

This means being recognized as culturally powerful enough to, as Zurbigg put it above, force Canadian literature to adopt a new strategy. But it also means generally being powerful enough in the world of business and the field of mass production to be able to — on the basis of that power — begin tastemaking and evaluating the products and production of the field of restricted production. My particular analysis here has not, you will have surely noted, allowed for the impossible theorization of the actual benevolence or genuine good intentions of Rabinovitch and Griffin as benefactors (and allow me to state that it is not at all designed to impugn their characters nor undermine the yeoman's work that their financial contributions have indeed made to the cultural markets in Canada through these and other active pursuits). York's Bourdieusian notion that the symbolic capital accrued through the prestige of donating the award will eventually return as economic capital may be true in some indirect sense, but aside from some probable tax relief and the raising of their public profiles, that economic capital will never fully return directly to the bank accounts of Jack Rabinovitch or Scott Griffin. As I argue in Chapter 1, this is precisely the point. My analysis here is designed, instead, to analyze prize culture through a pragmatic lens which pays attention to the unstated and, I suspect, often unconsidered implications of approaching literature and literary culture with the ethos and language of Darwinian capitalism — a phenomenon which has resulted in what Atwood calls the "slightly uneasy eminence" (qtd. in York, Literary Celebrity 116) of winning a major prize in Canada, or what Jacques Derrida terms the "residue.. .[or] remainder that no one knows what to do with" (Given Time: 176) resulting from the bestowal of a gift.

The GGs as Literary History, or, A Brief History ofCanLit in Awards

While the idea that the GG Awards themselves construct some sort of a 'canon' may be true in some technical or idealistic sense, this particular canon would read, because of its teleological framework, as more of a list; something akin to what Hayden White discussed as "annals" or "chronicles" in The Content of the Form (5), though one that is staunchly authoritative because of its federal sanctioning. In thinking about the lists of GG- winning texts as kinds of historical threads, then, we might justly treat them as what White calls "particular products of possible conceptions of historical reality, conceptions that are alternatives to, rather than failed anticipations of, the fully realized historical discourse that the modern history form is supposed to embody" (5-6). The chronicle is, here, then, perhaps a more 'real' or ideologically 'free' version of literary history because it is bare- bones; it forgoes the narrative moralizing that comes along with any coherent 'story' of history that might offer more than a date, a colon, and the title of a particular book. But, with an awareness of what White calls the subjectivity involved in the narrating of history, we must remain acutely aware that the chronicle is produced by a chronicler, and that in this particular case, the chronicler is explicitly interested in the definition and maintenance of national-cultural interests. Of course we are faced with the fact that the Governor-

General's Award, like most major awards, relies on a jury of "peers" to make their yearly 40 consecrations, and while the Canada Council and the Government of Canada have maintained what they vaguely refer to as an "arm's length" distance from the processes of the award, the fact remains that they are administered and then promoted by the Council as representative — as "the best" literature that "Canada" had to offer in a given year.

What exactly "arm's length" might mean is another matter altogether, and one which will be more thoroughly examined in Chapter 3. Recently, Frank Davey has suggested that "[t]he professed 'arms-length' policy inevitably has been at best a smoke screen. Despite the independence of juries, the fact that they are selected and supervised by the Council means that the awards are necessarily the creation of the Council's policies and practices — which of course is not a problem peculiar to the Council" and that the GG

Awards remain "at least unconsciously partisan and polemic regardless of how much rhetoric of independence, length of arms, high standards, and eternal values the organizers and jurors may deploy" (Davey, "Tales" 10, my emphasis). It may in fact be widely understood that awards like the GGs do "more to promote institutions than authors"

(Luneau and Panofsky 121), but the institution(s) here — the Canada Council and CanLit

— might even be said to be served by the institution of the literary prize itself; as a vehicle for the promotion of a certain kind of literature, the prize, as Bourdieu suggests, consecrates particular literary forms and contents as meritorious examples of CanLit. By several accounts available to the general reading public, the GGs "represent the enormous wealth and breadth of our literature: diverse, thought-provoking and uniquely Canadian"

(Larocque-Poirier, "John Buchan's Legacy" 62), whatever that may constitute. If indeed the

GGs are meant to embody "the admiration we all have for writers whose determination and talent are making Canadian literature a true reflection of the complex resonance of our 41 country" (Larocque-Poirier, "John Buchan's Legacy" 61), we must logically assume then that the complex resonance is reflectable. That the GGs are 'Canadian literature.' That it is somehow possible to represent 'Canadian literature.' But perhaps most interesting, that certain selected works of 'Canadian literature' are somehow more or better representations of 'Canadian literature' than a similarly tenuous selection of other works produced under, for the sake of argument, the same or similar socio-political, historical, and cultural conditions.

As a narrative of the nation, the GGs bequeath a chronicle that acts as a point-form bildungsroman (Kertzer 44, Blodgett 10), which "[a]s history, .. .constructs a past by selecting texts (canonization) and commemorating events so that the nation may be imaginatively shaped by the reader in such a way as to acquire meaning" (Blodgett 10).

Because the winners are 'official' examples of excellence in CanLit — condoned, supported, and promoted by the nation itself — the chronicle or annal of definitive CanLit is established. Where we might open this focus of criticism to more fruitful avenues is to adopt a pragmatic assumption of this official canon-making enterprise as a fact, and begin to interrogate this canon as such. The GG mandate to 'honour the finest in Canadian literature' still reeks, as so much institutional cultural initiative has in Canada, of the federal 'post-colonial' impetus to define said national culture, despite the recognition, as

Kamboureli puts it, that "CanLit is marked by a precariousness suggestive, in part, of the nation-state's politics of remembering and forgetting, on the one hand, and the positivism with which Canadian literature has been supported and exported by government agencies, on the other" (viii). The list of GG winners might be said, then, to officially remember 42 those works that the Canada Council and the government they represent have deemed sufficiently excellent examples of 'Canadian literature' as they would have it construed.

Starting to Begin

Interspersed among the following theoretical and historical chapters are selected

Case Studies of annual GG contests in English-Canadian Poetry, beginning with 1981.

My thesis that awards work to conflate the fields of restricted and mass production, and my decision to perform case studies in poetry, seems especially to make sense for exactly the opposite reasons that Frank Davey chooses to read fiction in his Post-National Arguments:

My choice to study fiction alone is, I hope, a pragmatic one. Among other possible genres, Canadian poetry is poorly and mostly regionally circulated, and read mainly by university-educated readers. Plays tend currently not only to be regionally disseminated but also to be performed only in a handful of major cities. Fiction, however, continues to be written for general Canadian audiences, to be widely read, and to be circulated both nationally and regionally. (7)

Poetry is often still understood to be, as Bourdieu put it, a "disinterested activity par excellence" (Field 51), but it is one around which prestige still serves as a dominant form of capital and force of exchange. Recent controversies surrounding poetry awards in Canada have opened the field to wider audiences and have begun to rearrange how that prestige, and how different forms of capital, are construed and circulated within and beyond the field of restricted production as it has been traditionally understood. Thus, the years and genre of these studies were not chosen arbitrarily; despite its strong and lengthy tradition as the foundation of Canadian letters, 1981 is the first year that the Canada Council deemed poetry worthy enough to warrant its own category as an awardable genre. My decision to study the 1991 and 2001 contests was made in the interest of some form of regularity — a

'state-of-the-union' ethos by which we might detect any (notoriously glacial) changes in 43 the literature, the award, or the institution under scrutiny. In advocating a closer and less blindly antagonistic interrogation of CanLit's institutions, I take for granted both that there is no outside to institutionality in CanLit, and that all canons are essentially institutional.

This project remains, in many ways, a defence of the GGs and the Council who have become — not without good reason — easy targets in an era where everything 'national' is immediately suspect. My hope is that the chapters that follow can focus on, examine, and better articulate how these systems of awards themselves are doomed to 'failure' and imperfection, and, yet deserve recognition for their degrees of qualified success in conflating the ever-tenuous fields of Bourdieu's cultural floorplan. Literary awards, like all cultural forces, are pointedly interested in the breaching of different markets and the exertion of influence onto the production and evaluation of cultural goods that they can incite; this project argues that it is time for us to become interested in the parameters and implications of those interests. 44

Chapter 1:

To(a)wards a Theory

Literary awards and prizes do more than recognize the achievements of a writer. They also confer power on those positioned to judge the value of a literary work and bring 'into relief the continuing evaluative process by which the literary text is constructed as an object of negotiation.' Marie-Pier Luneau and Ruth Panofsky (quoting Graham Huggan), History of the Book in Canada, Vol. III.

I'm just doing my rock'n'roll duty, creating a buzz, buzz, buzz. Some say I'm in it for the money, man, I'm in it for love, love, love.

Kim Mitchell, "Rock'n'Roll Duty"

It is my contention throughout this project that literary awards initiate a cycle of capital exchange and translation which breaches several different cultural and economic fields; my suspicion remains, however, that the impact that they might be said to have is more akin to that of a stone skipping across water — touching upon several sites of contact between readers and texts which then bear the ever-outward ripples of effect long after the stone itself has disappeared — than that of merely appealing to a broader market of potential consumers. In the globalizing world in which taste, art, and creativity are becoming democratized through blogs, digital file sharing, and communal websites like

YouTube, the role of literary prizes as arbiters of taste on behalf of a perceived or constructed constituency would seem logically to be imperiled. And yet the number of prizes available to cultural workers continues to increase at what seems like an exponential rate. Although I will address the impossible problem of theorizing a jury later in this chapter, I am treating awards and the entities behind them as institutions in the broader sense in which they aspire, by their natures, not only to a conscious dream of objectivity, 45 coherence, continuity, and sustained 'excellence,' but to a seat of cultural power permitting them to make evaluative and canon-forming decisions on behalf of an imagined constituency or community. I will, thus, consider the model and implications of the cyclical economy of awards as they operate in general — their bestowals, their acceptances, and their continual circulation through cultural fields as gifts — before considering the uniqueness of the Canadian awards economy.

Awards, it would seem, do not do what they claim to do, and yet we continue to expect them to. In an unpublished essay on the GG Awards, Frank Davey revisits a particularly passionate discussion that took place on a short-lived CanPoetics listserv in

2004 throughout the course of which several notable Canadian poets and scholars ranted, raged, and reformed the awards industry in Canada through their comments. What Davey found remarkable about the commentary — much of it by poets largely considered to be radical, avant-garde, or at least not part of the mainstream — was not its contemporary vivacity, but its eerie echoing of complaints about the GG Awards voiced famously by John

Sutherland about the 1946 poetry prize's bestowal onto Robert Finch (Davey, "Tales" 6).

Sutherland's vitriolic review of Finch's book Poems, published in the pages of Northern

Review, attacks the GGs' selection by complaining that the jury (whose membership was, at that time, not public knowledge) had erred on the side of politics and timidity in selecting

Finch's verse; calling Finch a "would-be pedestrian moralist" who is "less concerned with poetry than with a game of similes," Sutherland wonders "How... did Poems receive the national award for poetry in a year which saw the publication of some unusually good books?" before offering a list of what he calls "possible reasons" (107-108):

1. Respectability. Finch is a professor of French at the University of Toronto. 46

2. Precedent. The award has a habit of going to the sturdy Western farmer type or the etherialized academician. It has recently been granted to the following writers: 1942—Anne Marriott 1943—A.J.M. Smith 1944—Dorothy Livesay 1945—Earle Birney 1946—Robert Finch 3. Naive wonder. Mr. Finch kept his first book up his sleeve for twenty years. 4. Fairness. Ryerson Press had won many times and Oxford never had. 5. Respect for age. Mr. Finch was old enough: the other candidates were not. 6. Sanctimoniousness. Mr. Finch was morally correct and sounded religious. 7. Hypocrisy. The politics of the younger writers was 'out of place' in poetry. 8. Snobbery. Finch was billed as a talented musician and painter. 9. Credulity. The judges accepted Finch's verdict on his own work: His lines run wherever his pen goes, Mine grope the miles from heart to head; His will tire before he does; Mine will move when I am dead. ("Poet on Poet") 10. Ignorance. The judges knew of, but had not read, Louis Dudek, P.K. Page or Patrick Anderson.

11. Ignorance. The judges had not read Finch. (108-109)

Aside from having caused the majority of the magazine's star-studded editorial board

(including Anderson, Smith, Page, A.M. Klein, F.R. Scott, and Ralph Gustafson) to resign in protest of its publication, Sutherland's review articulates the desire for the award to function in the way that he feels that it should; its failure in this regard elicits a desire for order and justice that the Awards' system is designed explicitly to highlight. Systems are what I am interested in here; not only the system of evaluation that so perturbed Sutherland, but the economic systems that awards initiate upon their bestowal.

In a more recent, if tongue-in-cheek, demonstration of this desire for consistency and genuineness in the economy of literary awards comes in the form of a brief list fashioned by literary journalist Adam Mcdowell in the Vancouver Sun in late 2008.

Mcdowell's article, entitled "Giller Prize Lessons," lauds the awards for their popular 47 success and offers the following systematic advice for other awards administrators wishing to cash in on the popularity of the Gillers:

1. Offer a significant financial purse, although this is "among the least important" (par.7). 2. Err on the side of simplicity by only choosing one winner upon which all the attention can focus. 3. Focus the award on the recent past — make it annual instead of for lifetime achievement. 4. Hold the events in Toronto. 5. Court public controversy whenever possible, for "[n]o quarrel is more likely to grab attention in grievance-riven Canada than accusations of regional or linguistic bias, especially if jurors are perceived as pro-central Canada" (par. 14). 6. Hold a publicized gala and hope for a media-friendly guest liable to do something reportable, like the dildo-waving Scott Thompson. Mcdowell points specifically to the 2008 Giller gala when Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson brought brown- bagged lunches to protest the bird-killing practices of the Four Seasons Hotel which hosted the event. 7. Be transparent by "[t]elling the public how decisions are made and who makes them." (par. 17)

While most of this advice is unsurprising, my interest is again in the very desire for taxonomy and formula. If there is in fact any kind of 'recipe for success' for awards administrators, how might success begin to be assessed? In order to address this question in any terms beyond the general we must build an understanding of how awards function within the various economies in which they are introduced, promoted, given, and received.

In many ways literary prizes are always already a failure. They cannot be

'successful' by any conventional understanding of success because they will inevitably disappoint, anger, inspire, or dissuade some individual or community who exist as part of the larger group which prizes purport to serve. The real success of a prize, rather, comes not from fulfilling its avowed mandate but in its generation and circulation of cultural and symbolic capital in what English calls "misrecognized form" (245, his emphasis); that is, 48 following Bourdieu, "capital in denial... the economic capital that dare not speak its name"

(York, Literary Celebrity 29). The cultural capital assigned by awards can again become economic capital with the according increase in prestige and public visibility that come with such consecrations, and which translate into greater book sales, more speaking engagements, larger honouraria, and indeed more awards, prizes, and grants accompanied by financial stipends, for the trajectory of cultural awards is one of circularity and exchange. The very idea of literary prizes seems both familiar yet alienating to those of us schooled in capitalism who yet survive in cultural industries because, despite the uneasiness we might feel about "what seems an equation of the artist with the boxer or discus-thrower"

(English 2), history has suggested the folly of acting "as though human beings could ever refrain from judging the things they make" (Guillory, Cultural Capital xiv). Literary awards simply provide a practical and visible manifestation of the culture of competition inherent in any literary culture which is affected by extra-literary artistic mediators —

"publishers, critics, agents, marchands, academies, and so forth" — who affect the literary by acting "as producers of the meaning and value of the work" (Johnson 11).

You Shouldn 't Have!

It is no longer blasphemy in Canada to acknowledge that "[l]iterary history is often written by the marketplace" and that "[cjanons centre on what can be bought and sold"

(Lecker, Making 172). It then stands to reason that approaching the award or prize as a

Derridean gift, as I do below, will say much more about the giver than it does about the recipient. Derrida, after Marcel Mauss (3), suggests that we "cannot treat the gift... without treating this relation to economy, even to the money economy" (Given Time: 17) and that such an economy "implies the idea of exchange, of circulation, of return, the figure of the circle is obviously at the centre ... circular exchange, circulation of goods, products, monetary signs or merchandise, amortization of expenditures, revenues, substitution of use values and exchange values" (Given Time: 16). The idea of exchange here relies more on the symbolic capital implied by the bestowal of an award than on the materiality of the gift itself, and, although the monetary implications of the particular awards discussed below can be highly significant to Canadian writers, the symbolic capital — the capital of prestige — must be considered to be of equal, if not even greater significance.

Prizes themselves — often money and some form of token medal, document or trophy — seem on their faces to be just that: gifts with no strings attached, on behalf of a benevolently granting institution or donor. And of course, to a certain superficial degree, they are. But as thinkers like Mauss, Derrida, and Lewis Hyde have thoroughly demonstrated, the economy of the gift is "a system of law and economics in which considerable wealth is constantly being expanded and transferred" (Mauss 37). Most theories of gift exchange portray it as "an economy characterized by surplus, excess, and continuous dispersal... In material terms, a gift economy is one that produces surplus or excess goods rather than (or in addition to) tidily packaged, marketable commodities"

(Butling and Rudy 62). That is, an agent (a person, an institution) appears to desire to circumvent the rules of capitalism which encourage the continual accrual of greater capital by offering a one-sided exchange of capital. Butling and Rudy continue: "a gift economy thrives on the dispersal rather than the accumulation of material goods. 'Expenditures' are made without expectation of return, investment is made in the processes as much as the product, and giving rather than accumulating goods signifies wealth" (62). But by setting the expenditure and the investment in process — two words which imply a lingering 50 relationship to the movement and possession of capital — a process is begun whereby evaluation and determination are required, in order to decide who may be worthy of such a gift. The process of making that evaluation, and the act of literalizing it through the bestowal of a gift thus beneficially celebrates one person (or work) over a raft of possible others. The shadow of a debt to be paid for the making of that distinction, then, follows the gift, even — or especially — if it is symbolic.

In her recent treatise, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, Margaret

Atwood posits that "debt exists because we imagine it" and that "none of our many systems of debt and credit could exist without an innate human module that.. .strives for balance"

(10, 162). So if credit is indeed extended by someone or some institution in the form of a prize-as-gift, it carries with it the shadow of debt — or at least the common understanding that a debt is at least expected even if it not repaid — inherent in all gifts. Noting that debt

'law' is even older than the Code of Hammurabi (approx. 1752 B.C.E.) {Payback 56),

Atwood traces the Judeo-Christian concept of debt back to the story of creation itself wherein "God gave Man life and was therefore owed a debt of absolute gratitude and obedience. Man, however, did not repay this debt as he should have done, but reneged on it through an act of disobedience" {Payback 67), thus forging a basis for society in which some form of remuneration — loyalty, love, obedience, lip service, a reciprocal favour — is always expected for any act of seeming benevolence or even love. Debt, via the prize-as- gift, requires both a grantor and a grantee to enter into a relationship of stated or unstated complicity.

While I will argue below that 'complicity' need not mean complicity with the ideology out of which the award itself emerges, it produces, according to Atwood, a kind of 51 partnership predicated on balance: "in any consideration of debt, the concept of the balance is pivotal: debtor and creditor are two sides of a single entity, one cannot exist without the other, and exchanges between them — in a healthy economy or society or ecosystem — tend toward equilibrium" (Payback 163). Atwood even approaches the idea of the gift as it relates to debt, and she struggles to uncover any kind of transaction that might exceed the categories of'taking'or'trading':

At first I thought of gifts: surely a gift is neither taken nor traded. But no: gifts fit under "trading," because although no set price is attached to a gift and it is bad form as well as bad luck to sell one, a rule of exchange is still at work: for a gift you owe, at the very least, a payment of gratitude; and in addition to that, you owe a gift of your own, if not to the person who gave you the first gift, at least to someone else. (Payback 50)

The 'rule of exchange' here is where the gift economy of prizes relies upon a process of translation of cultural capital. A gift does not require, as a prize does not require, equivalent or even related reciprocation; one does not express one's gratitude for having been given a gold watch by in turn gifting a gold watch to the initial giver. The capital that is expended, instead, must be translated into another form of capital, often of the symbolic kind, in order to be returned appropriately, and not only exclusively by the receiver of the initial gift, but often by all of those who witness the bestowal itself. Atwood warns her readers to "beware of free lunches, because there aren't any" (Payback 109), and while one may not be expected to provide a 'free lunch' to one's previously generous host in the future, nor to return any award or distinction that has been granted you, one might duly expect to feel the pull of indebtedness to the person or institution who had imposed upon you the contradictory 'burden' of recognizing your worth and worthiness for consecration or the generosity of a sandwich. 52

This is not to suggest, by any stretch of imagination, that awards and those who administer and initiate them are consciously investing in a process of self-remuneration or that all gifts are necessarily Trojan horses. It is to suggest, though, that prizes are more properly understood as exchanges and translations of currency. The literary prize, in accordance with the fact that it has been 'gifted' and not earned, incurs a kind of debt for the writer to repay in turn, and "it is this exteriority that sets the circle going, it is this exteriority that puts the economy in motion. It is this exteriority that engages in the circle and makes it turn" (Derrida, Given Time: 130, his emphasis). An award bestowed represents symbolic capital in the form of distinction over and above one's compatriots, which acts then as cultural capital or currency rooted in the power of that prestige. The institutions behind awards share in this prestige by claiming the right — often through sheer economic ability — both to indirectly determine taste through cultural distinction, and to claim a degree of patronage of cultural agents from the field of restricted production to which they may not otherwise have access. It is a gift which serves its giver by starting the "the odyssean structure of the economic narrative"; so "why would we still call that a gift?" (Derrida, Given Time: 17, 27). This question was, of course, implied by Mauss in

1924 when he called the giving of a gift "a polite fiction" that is actually "social deceit" (3).

By this rationale, as English puts it, "[t]he prize really is an agent in the cultural economy, producing and circulating value according to its own interests — that is, according to what is good for the prize and for prizes in general. But to serve its interests effectively, the prize must also serve the interests of its artist/judge, recognizing the judge as possessed of special power, special capacity to make distinctions where others cannot" (147). 53

Oh, It Was Nothing...

Approaching the idea of prestige as it relates to literary awards is, in some ways, a redundant pursuit because prestige is inextricable from any notion or system of cultural prizes itself. In many ways literary awards are simply prestige incarnate. They are quantitative markers of literary quality, assigned by a certain group to a certain group for or on behalf of another larger group (often the book-buying public). In 1978, William J.

Goode defined prestige itself as "a system of social control," specifying that "prestige is the esteem, respect, or approval that is granted by an individual or a collectivity for performances or qualities they consider above the average" (7). Goode also points, quite naturally I think, to prizes and awards as the material markers of prestige in specific cultural fields which are explicitly designed to reach, and to perform prestige, beyond that particular field by being visibly "public announcements, typically made by an organization, and meant to convey information to as many people as possible in as many different social networks as possible. They assert the importance of the activity, they proclaim the esteem due to the recipients, they remind people, (however subtly) that the organization is a judge of achievement, possesses prestige to confer on others, and also deserves some prestige for its support of that activity" (152, his emphasis). We must keep in mind, then, that "prestige is obviously a means to the goals of individuals, groups, and corporate agencies" (Goode 6, his emphasis).

If, as I will discuss below, the Giller Prize has established itself as an anti-GG

Award, the weapons with which it has attacked the older prize are those of prestige and public awareness. While the GG juries choose their shortlists and winners weeks in advance of their announcements, the on-the-spot tension and suspense fostered by the 54

Giller certainly engages wider fields of production and consumption in ways that the GGs have not. The Giller has even taken to trying to borrow prestige by having, as Canada

Reads has so successfully done, Canadian 'celebrities' like Gord Downie, Seamus

O'Regan, and Rex Harrington participate in the television broadcast and public promotion of the awards. But there is also the matter of historical prestige, an area in which the GGs boast a significant advantage, having been around since 1936. But during their history, prizes were awarded to certain works that simply have not done well against the exigencies of time; therefore, it became easy for supporters of the Giller to note that the tired GGs cannot be counted on to recognize work that is artistically durable. While several of the

Giller's consecrations have been rather loudly criticized in the literary media, it has not really had to watch its winners flounder in the ebbs and flows of anything we might loosely call canonicity or staying power as of yet. It has, however, countered the historical prestige of the GGs with its own financial prestige. In 1996, Kelly Hechler, who was, at the time,

Head of PR for McClelland and Stewart, went so far as to denigrate the GG because it

"seems like it has a shortlist of 150 names under 'a million' categories. This can't possibly pack the same oomph as the Giller, with its single $25,000 fiction award" (Lahey,

"Rewards" par. 15). The award is now $50,000. Oomph here is tied directly to financial remuneration, but in addition to the significant financial bump a prize can give to a cultural worker, the size of the prize also seems to increase the prestige around it. This is evidenced best by the veritable pissing-contest that the Giller Prize has initiated and won with the GG.

First valued at $25,000, the Giller easily trumped the GG ($10,000 in 1994); so when the

GG upped its ante to $15,000 in 2002, the Giller responded by increasing its purse to

$40,000. The GG has since gone to $25,000, and the Giller, this year, to $50,000. William 55

Goode notes, somewhat obviously:

If considerable money is granted as part of the award, its prestige is greater. However, esteem does not come from the money itself. Rather, social norms require that if a large sum of money is to be granted, the procedures, auspices, and judges must be so chosen and organized that high-prestige candidates will compete or will be considered.. .Finally, the list of prestigious men and women who have won the prize in the past proves socially that the prize carries great esteem and, in turn, justifies the size of the money award. (175)

Given that the prestige of these writers is likely at least partly attributable to the receipt of the award in the first place, the circularity of such a system becomes more evident. The beginnings of prestige, like the beginnings of the odyssean economy of the cultural prize, lie in the conscious decision of the individual or institution who already holds significant enough power in one or more social fields, to pass along their capital — to lend it, and still to invest it if it is to return to them — to those they deem, for whatever subjective reasons, worthy of such recognition.

Generally, however, the vast majority of writers consecrated by major literary awards are already known to literary citizens, and have often already achieved some degree of staying power, in part, of course, thanks to their receipt of other or previous awards.

Alex Good gestures towards this unspoken thesis in an attack on the work of M.G.

Vassanji, when he adds his voice to a significant chorus of critics who see the work of the two-time Giller winner as middling and mediocre. "The Giller Prize made him" (69) Good, suggests, and the mere fact of having won "confers Important Author status upon him"

(69). The receipt of a prestigious award makes Vassanji, seemingly by default, prestigious, regardless of the quality of his work. His name, when then attached to endorsements, book blurbs, literary festivals or readings, becomes its own marker of prestigiousness and distinction with regard to literary value or quality. It also, then, makes him consecratable 56 for further awards and prestige; a phenomenon that Marie-Pier Luneau and Ruth Panofsky noted of Michael Ondaatje's receipt of the SmithBooks First Novel award in 1976 for

Coming Through Slaughter. This, they suggest, "anticipated his eventual receipt of the international Booker Prize in 1992 for The English Patient" (120, my emphasis). Being prestigious and award-worthy, it seems, establishes one as such for Good and for good.

Prestige serves to underscore its own power in affecting literary culture through awards; in determining, for better or worse, its terms of quality in a given arena of a 'national' literary prize.

Prestige is, then, always active in shaping the way that both a literary text and its consecration are produced and received. In the same way that a text which clearly participates in a formal genre like a novel or a poem preconditions its readers to approach it with pre-formed expectations and precedents, a text "announcing itself by an author known to a particular community incorporates not only that community's knowledge of her, but its readings of her previous texts. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, for example, is marked by a reader's knowledge of her public life and her other books, as well as by the codes of the novel and the dystopia" (Davey, Post-National 20). That audience's readings of previous texts, and its knowledge of a writer's public life pre-establish a requisite degree of prestige for the writer as a cultural figure, even if those readings and that awareness are not celebratory or laudatory. It is enough that the writer is seen as worthy of prestige by someone or some group wielding some significant degree of (often imagined) power. The writer — and someone like Atwood especially — is indisputably prestigious because she is recognized as being so by citizens well entrenched in her own particular field as well as those who remain entrenched in other, unrelated fields. The fact that her extant prestige is 57 enough to mark her as prestigious to a given public marks her, indelibly, as being worthy of further prestige.

If literary awards, which are, at their base, subjective or collaborative value judgments of literary quality or appropriateness, do indeed produce prestige then they must be said to spur the excessive economy of prestige by becoming quantitative. That is to say that although literary awards are bestowed for creative acts that are essentially unassessable and unquantifiable against any objective measure, the prize itself becomes quantifiable both through its materiality (the prize on the proverbial mantle) and its ethereality (the residual title or public distinction/declaration it continues to make). Prizes make the qualitative quantitative and thus foster the capital-driven push to increase the number of one's consecrations by initiating a translation of the subjective to the objective. If indeed prizes make a writer more worthy of further prizes and distinctions in the future, the exponential explosion of cultural capital borne by each further consecration becomes loosely measured in the number of distinctions one receives. There remains, of course, the matter of the quality of the distinctions themselves; namely, the prestige which they warrant based on their historicity, their reputation, and the compounded financial and cultural capital offered by the institution behind a given prize. A GG Award is not of equal value to a Pat Lowther

Award, a ReLit Award, or a New York Magazine Academic Book of the Year Award.

While the cultural capital associated with each must inevitably vary in given aesthetic, political, social, and geographical communities, the award, as a material/ethereal marker of distinction necessarily increases the quantity of prestigiousness due to the consecrated writers, which they then pass on to writers whom they consecrate in turn with reviews, prizes, and public endorsements, thus increasing the prestige of the grantees so that they 58 may become, in their own right, grantors. If the economy of prizes is odyssean, the economy of prestige upon which it simultaneously relies and feeds through the trickle- down gifting of prestige, is supernovan.

'Tis Better...

It is perhaps unsurprising that in the field of the gift economy, the giver of the gift wields the initial power of prestige and initiates the circularity and translation of various translating and exchanging forms of capital. If the prize itself is the marker of the system in which it circulates, the people and institutions behind prizes are the ground-zero agents of the prize phenomenon to which expenditure shall eventually return. The model of the First-

Nations potlatch is often invoked when discussing the gift economy because of its simultaneous communal and individual goals. Butling and Rudy suggest that "the purpose of excessive giving in potlatch is to achieve status and prestige for the individual and economic leveling for the group" (63). However, upon the translation of material into symbol — the symbol thus broadening the scope of the gift by acknowledging that it has been given by someone — the act of parting with one's own material capital seems immediately less 'purely' benevolent. Even if, as the potlatch dictates, the giver impoverishes him/herself, "cultural capital (acquired by gifting) replaces economic capital as the determiner of social status" (Butling and Rudy 62). I suggested in my Introduction that the benefactors behind prizes, be they institutions or private citizens who create institutions, are often only afforded the opportunity to be benefactors once they have achieved success in some significant capital-driven field. Usually this field is that of the hard economy of large-scale production, and usually the degree of the benefactors' success is great enough to allow them, literally, to buy access to fields of restricted production by 59 offering its agents equal (limited) access to the lucre of larger fields through the prize itself.

As Hyde suggests of the gift bestowed upon artists, "it is the patron who has entered the market and converted its wealth to gifts" (359). What remains to be explored, though, is the degree to which that conversion of hard capital into a gift enables and engages the circulation of capital in misrecognized, or ever-transferrable forms.

Prizes aspire, in degrees, to what Thorstein Veblen famously called "invidious distinction" (45); with each of their consecrations they publicly declare their conspicuous authority and ability to recognize literary quality, and they thus extend that distinction to publics they hope will defer to their authority. Through what Mauss calls the "aristocratic extravagance" (68) of giving public gifts, individuals can literally purchase cultural capital

— social status as Butling and Rudy have it — that often can transcend the borders between fields of production. Veblen offers a more thorough explanation:

Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure. As wealth accumulates on his hands, his own unaided effort will not avail to sufficiently put his opulence in evidence by his method. The aid of friends and competitors is therefore brought in by resorting to the giving of valuable presents and expensive feasts and entertainments. Presents and feasts had probably another origin than that of naive ostentation, but they acquired their utility for this purpose very early, and they have retained that character to the present; so that their utility in this respect has now long been the substantial ground on which these usages rest. (47)

Seemingly undiscriminating displays of cultural philanthropy (giving a gift to the community) form, then, a kind of conspicuous production of culture that can be publicly attributed to benefactors, thus increasing their own cultural and social capital. By this logic,

Carmine Starnino can make the leap to which such acts seem to aspire (if unconsciously) by lauding Scott Griffin as "a private citizen [who] decide[d] to singlehandedly reintroduce poetry to the public imagination" ("Griffinology" par.l). The case of a benevolent 60 institution like the Canada Council is obviously different in that it operates under the aegis of the nation-state which has always taken its support of the arts as a point of public pride.

The impetus behind the visibility of giving remains much the same: to draw attention to art, to infuse impoverished fields with capital, and to increase readerships, but to do so all quite visibly.

Prizes are not, thus, 'pure' gifts which several thinkers have argued can never be given without leaving a kind of "residue" of the gift exchange that in fact annuls them as gifts (Derrida, Given Time: 176). This Derridean residue lingers in part because, as in all gift economies, there is no stated expectation of remuneration on behalf of the grantor even though the recipient of any gift "binds himself (Mauss 62) by accepting an uninvited prize/gift that is socially understood to be "contractual" (Mauss 8) and requiring some form of payback (even if it is, as in the case of the GGs, only in symbolically lending a text to the nation-state who desires to claim it as its own product). Prizes-as-gifts cease being gifts through the omnipresence of this residue, which Mary Douglas argues pulls gift recipients into "permanent commitments that articulate the dominant institutions" (ix). A gift is no longer a gift if it is used, consciously, as capital, or towards accruing further capital, by either the giver or the receiver (see Hyde 3-31). It must be fully wasted by the recipient in order to remain a gift. A prize is also a distinction that deviates from a gift symbolically and that, in Hyde's words, "loses its gift properties" (9) because — even as it circulates — it also ceases to move: the consecrated writer might verily spend the money they are awarded, and they might well and effusively disseminate their own cultural capital by consecrating other writers, but the permanent public record of consecration (put to use by institutional benefactors, institutions, and artists themselves as they accrue capital over a 61 period of time) that remains after the gift itself has come and gone is itself still an ever- given gift. Awards are circulated by grantors or granting institutions with ideological biases, and thus circulate between (financial, symbolic, cultural) economies as between fields in order to conduct their exchanges to maximum profit in select, targeted fields.

Prizes invoke the gift economy only to corrupt it through their translations of capital from one form to a misrecognized other, just as they access the economy of prestige by nature of their practical economic footprints. In the case of Canada's major prizes we might assume that these targeted fields in which the institutions and/or grantors hope to make a profit are primarily symbolic. We must also recall, though, that the application of any "politics of purity" (Dobson, Transnational Canadas 207) to markets as of to literature, is an artificial one that denies the interrelatedness of forms of capital as well as the fields in/through which they circulate.

Aside from the upward (cultural, social, financial) mobility that the prize affords the winner upon consecration, it also fixes the celebrated text by mere fact of its official, authorized, and permanent appropriation by, in the case of the GGs, the nation-state. Just as literary celebrity can be read as a kind of living death because it wrests a degree of subjectivity from writers by making them public property (see York, Literary Celebrity

118, and, more broadly, Derrida's The Gift of Death), books which may not be exemplary or representative of a writer's career publicly become so in the hands of awarding institutions. In the case of the GGs, too, they become exemplary and representative of the national literature regardless of their poetics or politics which might even explicitly antagonize, resist, or refute the nation-state from within, as was the case with Roy Miki's

2002 GG consecration for Surrender (see Dobson, Transnational Canadas, 169-178). Thus, when a gift begins to circulate, "its motion is beyond the control of the personal ego, and so each bearer must be a part of the group and each donation is an act of social faith"

(Hyde 20); one (or one's text, at least) is necessarily implicated in and, to a degree, appropriated by a system initiated by the granting benefactor or institution. In this sense, prizes are in fact entirely opposite to 'gifts' as Ralph Waldo Emerson construes them in his

1844 essay "Gifts": "the rule for a gift.. .is, that we might convey to some person that which properly belonged to his character, and was easily associated with him in thought"

(117). The prize-as-gift, rather, imposes what it desires upon the texts it consecrates and yet purports to recognize winning texts by the very fact that they already contain the seeds of their (CanLit) recognizability. Douglas argues that "[a] gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction" (vii), and herein we find perhaps the most accurate model of the prize-as-gift; the GGs impose solidarity on the texts that they claim in the name of the

Canada Council and the Government of Canada behind it, and then circulate that solidarity to national and international citizenries as a natural coherence.

Resisting Arrest

If prizes remain, as the OED suggests, objects that are "striven for or worth striving for... [a]n advantage, privilege; something prized or highly valued" (OED "Prize" 3a, 3b

1395), and if the public success of prizes depends on the common understanding that they are, to some degree, legitimate in their evaluation of literary quality, then the various forms of capital in which they trade become all the more important; what is desired, of course, is the distinction of being prize-worthy. Critics of prize culture like Michael Barnholden tend to believe that awards are in fact almost entirely political and merely vehicles for the exchange of such capital; that they are "creations of the sales and marketing department of 63 publishing houses (mostly large) and like all capital tend toward monopoly. When the monopoly is broken [I]e. an award is won by a small publisher[,] it's really a structural breakdown that must be repaired.. .The only option is not to participate" (qtd. in Davey,

"Tales" 2). A couple of questions then arise: How does one remain within, or even outside of, a culturally engaged contemporary literary community without participating in prize culture in some way? To what degree is non-participation — resisting the evaluations and appropriations of the prize — a viable political option?

To consider these questions we might turn to the obvious instances of non- participation; the refusal of awards on the basis of incongruent political belief. If, as Luneau and Panofsky assert, "[t]he political implications of literary prizes are highlighted when a winner declines, as occurred when several francophone authors expressed their objections to the federal government by rejecting Governor General's Awards in the early 1970s"

(117), then the political implications of public refusal seem immediately evident. To a writer's desired audience — let us generally say, in this case, an audience supportive of

Quebecois nationalism and sovereignty — such a refusal must surely increase the writer's cultural capital, while significantly decreasing it in other demographics. Refusal on this level is politically effective, but it simultaneously pulls a writer into the crosshairs of the critique most often leveled at the GGs specifically, that they are primarily a political tool underpinned by a specific and exclusionary ideology, and that because of their 'national' aspirations, they are "probably more concerned with propaganda than aesthetics" (Bok,

"The Politics" 114).

The political refusal of an award — or the political acceptance of one — does not entirely negate the award, nor does it disrupt its actual function with regard to facilitating 64 the transfer of capital. When Leonard Cohen refused the 1968 GG for English Canadian

Poetry, he sent a telegram from Europe to the Canada Council that read: "May I respectfully request that my name be withdrawn from the list of recipients of the Governor

General's Award for 1968.1 do sincerely thank all those concerned for their generous intention. Much in me strives for this honor but the poems themselves forbid it absolutely"

(qtd. in Nadel 173). Cohen made no mention of the fact that, as his biographer Ira Nadel suggests, as a popular figure from wealthy Westmount whose fortunes depended on playing the cosmopolitan blue-collar troubadour, the decision was likely more political than aesthetic: "he felt that receiving an award from the federal government at a time when the separatists were crying for recognition was, for someone from Quebec, not quite timely. He had friends in the separatist movement, and he couldn't divorce himself from it so easily"

(174). Cohen's refusal, likely the most public of its kind to date in English-Canada, may indeed have invoked a convenient politics for him at the time, but, like all public refusals, it actually confirmed the value, power, and worth of the award as an agent in the cultural economy and as an arbiter of taste. Even when a gift is refused it continues to fulfill its role in the symbolic economy. Derrida writes that "if he recognizes it as gift, if the gift appears to him as such, if the present is present to him as present, this simple recognition suffices to annul the gift. Why? Because it gives back, in the place, let us say, of the thing itself, a symbolic equivalent" (13, his emphases). By 'annulling' the gift he means, of course, the gift as pure expenditure that incurs no debt. Simply put, if an award is worth refusing on political or aesthetic grounds, it must represent and hold some significant value, even if that value is modified, altered, or increased by its refusal. The capital refused in the form of the award regenerates itself in another form; the prestige that Cohen surely earned amongst the 65 audience not only sympathetic to Quebecois federalism in particular, but amongst cultural citizens sympathetic to struggles for political independence around the globe might better be considered the gift in this case. That CanLit's consummate con-man seems to have been one of the few writers to have steered the prize towards his own goals not by denying the prize's validity but by exploiting it seems somehow appropriate. And it does not seem to have proven an obstacle in maintaining and building a growing audience in Canada.

Refusals and non-participation in the prize economy always remain an option, but they also threaten to highlight the political potential of the awards. Refusals also do little to disrupt the general flow and translation of capital within the system. As we will see in the example of the Canada Council, it is not writers who set the rules of the game that they 'win,' but rather the prize itself and the institution(s) behind it.

Scandalous (Granting) Bodies

Indeed, one might go so far as to say that refusing an award for any reason actually emphasizes the award's proper and inevitable function of drawing attention to itself and reaffirming its own framework of cyclically. Citizens who may not even read or participate in the fluxing fields of Canadian literary culture often find themselves aware of the matter of literary awards when such thing as a refusal or what seems to be an egregious conflict of interest erupts. David Sol way, wallowing perhaps too deeply in his own despair at the state of poetry in contemporary Canada, echoes Wainwright in dismissing the popular media interest in literary controversies as unrelated to the art itself: "The media are there to report the news: prizes are news, poetry isn't" (192). Prizes unapologetically suggest an innate design to generate attention for themselves as "public dramas" (Douglas xiv), and what it is they purport to do. Like prestige, and especially in the case of the newer specifically 66 reactionary prizes, they have the potential to transfer, gift, and increase valuable amounts of media attention and commentary amongst their subjects and agents.

Perhaps the most significant element of prize culture which forces the front matter of the field of restricted production into the realm of national and international media is indeed the fodder of Hollywoodization of literature: the scandal. Scandal, which constitutes any deviation from the perceived norms accorded by the award system in question, is in fact a necessary part of that system if the award is to be successful: "scandal is its lifeblood; far from constituting a critique, indignant commentary about the prize is an index of its normal and proper functioning" (English 208). English goes so far as to suggest that scandal and controversy translate directly into "social capital" which is "often an even more important factor than symbolic capital (and far more important than money)" (194) because it generates both through the sustained interest accrued though media dissemination of said conflict. Numerous mentions of the importance of scandal — and the manufacture of scandal — to major prizes like the Nobel and the Booker have been noted by critics like

Richard Jewell, Graham Huggan, Luke Strongman, and others. York's study on celebrity suggests that the symbolic capital accrued by a certain writer en route to literary celebrity is very dependent on scandal, media attention, exoticism, or controversy. Mcdowell's article offering advice to the GGs, the Griffin, and the Rogers Writers Trust Award on how to mimic the Giller Prize in order to 'succeed' finds its most immediately outrageous nugget of advice (aside, perhaps from 'Hold all events in Toronto') with its encouragement to court controversy, for "[n]o quarrel is more likely to grab attention in grievance-riven

Canada than accusations of regional or linguistic bias, especially if jurors are perceived as pro-central Canada" (par. 14). While the issue of CanLit prize juries is discussed below, 67

English's articulation of just how scandal manages to marry Bourdieusian fields of restricted and mass production is worth quoting here in full, as it clearly shows exactly how this marriage is itself still orchestrated by the tastemakers of the field of restricted production:

This new rhetoric of amused complicity in the manufacture of scandal is an instance of what Bourdieu calls [in Language and Symbolic Power] a 'strategy of condescension,' a strategy that enables one to enjoy both the rewards of the game and the rewards due to those who are seen as standing above the game. It does not permit outright denunciation or implacable opposition, except as a kind of put-on, a form of trash-talk, ritual insults within the bounds of a game; it does not allow one to say explicitly and in all seriousness that, as a 'literary critic' or 'intellectual,' one is above such stakes as are at issue in the prize economy. It does still enable one to gesture toward that imaginary separate space on which the ideology and institution of modern art have been predicated, the space outside all economies, where artistic genius is a gift rather than a form of capital and where the greatness of great art is beyond all measure or manipulation except by the sure determinations of Time. (215)

Furthermore, in Distinction, Bourdieu notes that "[p]opular taste applies the schemes of the ethos, which pertain in the ordinary circumstances of life, to legitimate works of art, and so performs a systematic reduction of the things of art to the things of life" (5). So when so- called mass-culture recognizes a controversy or scandal which is somehow equated to those of film stars or politicians, the works of art at the heart of prize culture become the things of scandal, and become, in a sense, normalized within the field of large scale production and celebrity-fuelled media. It is important to note here, as I will discuss in Chapter 2, that

Bourdieu's fields are necessarily somewhat altered when we discuss them in the Canadian context, and in the literary context at that. I say that prizes begin to breach the Bourdieusian fields because the media reporting on them and the readers consuming that particular media still remain somewhat specialized. My point is that while a scandal in the granting of the

Giller Prize is not likely to reach the number and variety of citizens that one involving 68

Hollywood celebrities might, it still manages to broaden its base of interested audience members who lay outside of the active field of restricted production (writers, prize administrators, scholars, critics) by engaging with the attractive schadenfreudlich potential of a public scandal.

A pertinent example of this phenomenon in the context of CanLit is paraphrased by

York in her examination of Michael Ondaatje's literary celebrity: when The Collected

Works of Billy the Kid won a GG in 1970, John Diefenbaker publicly voiced his displeasure at the celebration of what he considered to be a filthy book. "Ondaatje often jokes that

Diefenbaker did him, a young and still relatively unknown poet, a big favour: 'He hated it and thought it was outrageous and disgraceful that it had won the award. So he gave a press conference and suddenly my name was plastered on the front pages. It was the nicest thing he could have done for me'" {Literary Celebrity 128-9). The GGs have, of course, had their fair share of similar scandal and controversy, most notably those instances that most scholars of CanLit will list off as a matter of course: the Gouzenko affair, Cohen's refusal, the numerous Quebecois and Quebecoises who have refused the honour as a political statement, the joint selection of George Bowering and Gwendolyn MacEwen for English

Canadian poetry in 1969 in lieu of the thought-to-be-heavily-favoured Milton Acorn (the very visible ex-husband of MacEwen), and the most recent scandal in 2008 in which Jacob

Scheier was awarded the prize for More to Keep Us Warm by a three-person jury containing Pier Giorgio Di Cicco and Di Brandt, both of whom are thanked for their advice and guidance in the book's acknowledgments. (Additionally, DiCicco 'blurbed' the book for ECW [back cover], while Brandt seems to have actually contributed to it; she is saluted for her "ongoing advice, support and feedback in the process of writing [the] book" [n.p.], and is credited with having helped to translate the first poem "The Voices" [3] from Rilke's

German. Additionally, there is a poem in the book's third section entitled "Di" [71].) There is also the long list of books that have proven their staying power or made their way into the canon otherwise but that were overlooked by the GGs themselves. The larger scandal in

Canadian literary prize culture though, may in fact be more institutional than individual, as the rise of new awards which have challenged the unchecked supremacy of the GGs have succeeded in initiating controversy by their mere existences.

In Canada, again, perhaps more than in other countries whose literatures have not defined themselves primarily on the basis of nationalism and a governmentally supervised award-granting body like the Canada Council, the rise of new or alternative prizes like the

Giller and Griffin, the Re-Lit or Milton Acorn People's Poet Award, will immediately achieve some degree of success by offering an implied conflict with not only the GG

Awards themselves, but also with the institution behind them. English notes that "[e]very new prize is always already scandalous. The question is simply whether it will attract enough attention for this latent scandalousness to become manifest in the public sphere"

(192). In the case of the Giller and the Griffin — which both offer significantly more prize money and "more hoopla" (Paul King qtd. in Lahey, "Rewards" par. 15) than the GGs — this has certainly proven to be the case. "The ambition of the newer prize," suggests

English, "is to situate itself in a relationship of marked, and possibly antagonistic, complementarity to the dominant one, establishing its own apparent necessity by reference to some failing or lack in its more esteemed predecessor" (63). The Giller Prize has often been called an 'anti-GG' award (Bowering 2-3, Lahey "Rewards" 14, Henighan, "Giller's

Version" 83), but when Margaret Atwood mused on the purpose of literary awards at the 70 inaugural Griffin Prize gala (for which she stands as Trustee) in 2001, her dissatisfaction with the then-extant awards systems in place in Canada (read: the GGs) was palpable: "All of these prizes — they bring books into the hands of readers ... And the reason we wanted to do a poetry prize was that there wasn't a major award in this country that was fulfilling that function in the way that we thought it could be fulfilled" (Griffin Poetry Prize). Several awards like the ReLit Award, which aims to act as "an alternative to the big-money prizes" by "Regarding ... Reinventing [and] ... Reigniting literature" by focusing on independent

Canadian publishers (ReLit Awards) and the Milton Acorn Memorial People's Poetry

Award, which was "established in 1987 as an alternative prize to the GGA" (Ripley par.5, my emphasis) seem to fulfill the role of scandal-makers and thus lay the foundations for a

'successful' prize culture within and around CanLit — a literary culture within which awards can continue to draw attention to themselves and the literature they assess. This imposes a significant sense of competition onto the literary sphere by introducing tangible and material proof (be it money, medals, plaques, trophies) of imagined literary value.

The scandal generated by this type of metacompetition is effective in terms of attracting the requisite mass-production media outlets spoken of with such derision by

Wainwright, and in spurring change and modification in the awards and their administration themselves. Terri Ann Zurbigg suggests that the GG prize money's increase from $10,000 to $15,000 in 2002 was "likely attributable to the Giller's influence" (52) — the prize was bumped to $25,000 in 2008 to compete with the Giller's jump up to $50,000 in the same year, although Joanne Larocque-Poirer, Head of Endowments and Prizes at the

Canada Council is careful to clarify that this change was made entirely autonomously

(personal interview 13) — and that "[t]he Governor General's Award is much more 71 concerned with Canadian culture and artistic expression, whereas the Giller Prize is preoccupied with commercial appeal and sales figures" so they "favour different types of fiction" (Zurbigg 50). The Giller, for many reasons, has played the pomp-and-scandal game effectively, and as a result receives inordinately more media coverage and subsequent distribution of cultural capital. Its relationship to the GGs — against which it consciously attempts to shine — has been mutually beneficial, as several cultural agents who have gone on record, like Somerville House Publisher Patrick Crean, suggest that with the rise of the

Giller and Griffin, the Canada Council is making a clear effort "to bring the GG out of the dowdy suit it's been wearing for decades" (qtd. in Lahey, "Rewards" par.23). Indeed, the organizers of the award have made practical changes which have begun to reflect on the awards and their reception in recent years including the introduction of a significant promotional budget (Lahey, "Rewards" par.20).

In addition to the scandalous competition fostered between prizes themselves, the scandals that their respective consecrations are able to spark are of equal interest and importance. Although they are often only discussed in what is the academic equivalent to water-cooler chat, scandals are inevitably, emphatically, passionately, discussed. As a case in point, I turn to a poem by Stephen Cain entitled "The King-Byng Affair" from a longer suite called "A History of Canada," which appeared in his 2005 collection American

Standard-Canada Dry. The suite entire is a re-writing of the master-narratives of Canadian history; this particular poem parodies the contentious moment in 1925 when then-GG, the

Lord Byng of Vimy, refused to dissolve parliament at the request of Prime Minister

Mackenzie King, by pulling it into the literary realm of the GG Awards:

Nobody has confidence in the system anymore. M.T. Kelly is better 72

than Ondaatje? MacLennan trumps Watson? Somebody has to speak for the people and overthrow the tyranny of the Governor General. At Grossman's the rabble is rising: who's fit to bestow the laurels, aren't people poets too? Nairn Kattan asks Michener to rescind the disastrous 1969 results but this is unprecedented—haven't his decisions enshrined such luminaries as Gwethalyn Graham and Igor Gouzenko into the national consciousness since Bertram Brooker first took the crown? The poets drink at the tavern for four days; on the fifth day Milton emerges victorious. (102)

Cain's poem is tongue-in-cheek, no doubt. His tone is sarcastic: the fact that these are writers who rarely show up on CanLit syllabi or as the subject of journal articles, conference talks, or other literary 'work' underlines the insignificance and impotence of the

GG Award; it has not been enough to salvage the work of these writers from the cruelties of the popular canon. But, the fact that they remain recognizable names to many of us, and indeed that they are here referenced and salvaged in a poem published in 2005, suggests that they do in fact maintain a place in the broader histories of Canadian literature. These writers serve, here, along with M.T. Kelly and Hugh MacLennan, to highlight the failure of the system to recognize the 'better' or more durable books. They are, in a sense, the

(foot)notes on a scandal.

Scandal — with regard to an award's consecration — constitutes any deviation from or breakdown of the awards 'system,' and is in fact a necessary part of that system if the award is to actually be successful as an award. Scandals can generate both social and symbolic capital through the sustained interest accrued though media dissemination of said egregious systemic breakdown, most often attributed the selection of 'bad' books at the expense of better ones, and by conflicts on or around juries. In this way, through these routes, scandal makes itself — and the prize around which it happens to revolve —: the cultural event or discussion of historical note, ensuring that, if nothing else, the 'wrong' or 73 scandalous winners like Gouzenko, Graham, Kelly, or Scheier, are granted a (usually very minor) place in literary history even if only through negation. So while it may not be entirely safe to suggest that these scandal-based extra-textual fascinations significantly alter the ways in which we conceive of CanLit and its agents, their impact cannot be denied. If

Wainwright remains concerned that literary prizes and similar promotional activity being fostered within CanLit are really just "hype and value judgments promoting an 'instant' literature that meets industry standards and sustains the glib media appropriation of cultural expression" (241-2), then the scandals which spiral out of these processes — the hype spawned by hype — would seem to edge even further away from the kind of 'legitimate' or

'enduring' literature upon which his statement implicitly relies. As I will suggest in Chapter

2, the relationship between awards and canonicity may not be as strange as he implies.

Peering at Juries

Of the numerous aporia in the awards system which might, happily, incubate a news-worthy scandal, conflict of interest between nominees and jury members has been the most productive. The problem of the jury is one which must constantly plague any study of awards and literary culture because of issues of subjectivity, literary tribalism, and symbolic exchanges and repayments. In the collection of essays put together by the Giller

Prize to mark its tenth anniversary, Ondaatje indirectly points to many of the other political snafus that are often thought to influence jurists, even in competitions which attempt to distance themselves from the politics of representation or other metonyms for social justice:

"one thing we have to admit about juries is that they can often choose the wrong books. If we all had more patience, what should happen is that we wait ten years and then put forward a shortlist. No local obsessions, no owing of favours, no considerations for past 74 slightings, no judgments based on bad behaviour or someone's saintly aspect" (90). In some ways Canada would seem to be an especially fertile ground for the sprouting of scandalous prizes, as its relative professional incestuousness is immediately evident; despite its increasingly border-bending aesthetics, the world of CanLit remains a relatively small one thanks in large part to the centralization of subsidy and creative enablement administered by the Canada Council. To return to the case of 2008 GG winner Jacob

Scheier, we might begin to find that jury-scandal is old hat for the GGs. Critic Zachariah

Wells — who has elsewhere written on what he terms "the inevitable provincialism and nepotism of juries drawn exclusively from the ranks of CanPo" ("Griffin" par.l) — wrote a scathing column in Maisonneuve about the 2004 competition in which Roo Borson's Short

Journey Upriver Towards Oishida was selected by a jury chaired by Robert Bringhurst.

Wells argues that Bringhurst, who is credited for his support and friendship in the book's acknowledgments, "was therefore in the position of passing judgment on a collection that he had some share in creating" ("Scratch" par.2). Wells' rant continues by vehemently insisting that "the Canada Council should take steps to ensure that at least the most egregious conflicts of interest are obviated" and should "conduct routine audits of juries to ensure that no significant conflicts exist — if not prior to submission of the short list

(which would be a logistical nightmare), then at least once the short list has been submitted by the jury but before it is made public" ("Scratch" par.8). While wonderfully democratic in spirit, this practice remains, as above, virtually impossible in Canada's limited literary circles, but its idealism should not be ignored.

Peggy Kelly states the obvious-yet-often-obfuscated in suggesting that "definitions of quality in literature depend on the evaluator's gender, class, race, age, and position in the 75 literary field" (Kelly 75), and W. De Nooy's 1988 study of select European juries poses, then answers, the question which will not allow any consideration of literary awards to be simply or definitively theorized: "Do the literary activities of judges relate to the prestige of the prizes they award? Provided that my classification of literary prizes according to prestige corresponds with a consensus on this matter within the literary field, the question can be answered in the affirmative" (543). Much irony, and significant commentary about the nature of the specific prizes themselves — the GGs, Giller, and Griffin — spirals out of the fact that these prizes regularly share jurists and yet continue to consecrate tangibly different kinds of writing. This is not to suggest that jurists are unable to be or remain objective in their tasks, but to note that the personal and the professional are often not as distinct in the world of CanLit as they may be in other fields of production.

What exactly constitutes a peer might also become an area of uncertainty. In 1985

George Woodcock openly wondered "just how 'peerly'" Canada Council juries might actually be when he observed that every member of the council's granting juries from

1982-1984 "was palpably a member of the literary establishment" (Strange Bedfellows

180), and that their average age was 59, thus placing the projects of the future exclusively in the hands of those whose personal interests lay in consolidating models of their own pre- established cultural production. John Metcalf, taking the situation personally, goes so far as to grumble that "[t]here is something both pathetic and disgusting about our spineless willingness to submit ourselves and our work to juries of our peers. Who are these peers exactly? Would I acknowledge them as such? I would have no difficulty in putting together a dozen juries of noted Canadian writers which I personally wouldn't trust to select a ripe pineapple" (Freedom 45, his emphasis). Aside from Metcalf s surely exacting standards 76 pertaining to who might be worthy of consideration as his peer, the problem lies in the plurality of juries. By their nature — by requiring deliberation at all —juries of more than one judge in fact highlight the failure of literary prizes to do what they purport to do with any degree of perfection or purity. If one must be convinced of a work's superiority over others by a peer, has the suggestion of pure aesthetic superiority not already been laid aside? In many ways, prizes with single judges offer a purer example of evaluating the best piece of writing in a competition, but they simultaneously highlight the subjectivity of taste involved in the same instant. Perhaps the best example of the success of such a system in predicting of what might actually survive is W.H. Auden's tenure as the judge and editor of

Yale's Younger Poets Series and annual manuscript contest. English offers a thorough reading of this example in The Economy of Prestige (144), but suffice it to say here that only in breaking the rules of the competition itself (namely the pre-judging and administrative trickery in reducing the number of eligible manuscripts submitted) was

Auden able to consecrate such then-unknown poets as Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, James

Wright, John Hollander, and W.S. Merwin, who became who they were to become, of course, thanks in no small part to this recognition.

Canadian critics often suspect that the make-up of a jury, like the decision it is asked to make, is affected significantly by non-literary motivations. Larocque-Poirier is unequivocal in emphasizing that "representativeness" is "always" a primary concern when an awards jury is being built (personal interview 16), but the perceived value of this geographical, gendered, and otherwise socio-political representativeness remains unstated.

It suggests, on some level, that objectivity is the goal of a process that is, at its heart, subjective. Stephen Henighan nobly admits that "serving as a juror for the Governor 77

General's Awards is like a grueling road trip. You try to read a book every day and usually fail. When you succeed, while each town does not look identical, there are, in most cases, distinct similarities: coming-of-age rites, failing relationships, cultural alienation" (A

Report 235). The system fails yet again when it is noted that there are no methods in place to ensure that jurists have done the requisite reading or if they have allowed their extant considerations to eliminate certain candidates from their reading piles from the start. The fact that the onus of responsibility remains outside of the control of the institution in fact liberates prizes from their predetermined institutional shackles, but it also corrupts the possibility that all jurors are equally prepared, informed, or engaged in the decisions that they make.

Several other cultural institutions which operate in the same way that prizes tend to, yet which appear at least to resist much of the economy of prestige by calling themselves book clubs, wield even more power than most contemporary awards anyway. Examples include Richard and Judy's book club in the U.K., and Oprah's book club in North

America. The CBC's annual Canada Reads competition provides perhaps the ultimate example of the conflation of Bourdieu's fields and consecration under the guise of transparency, and acts just as viably as a prize as it does a literacy and cultural initiative. Its popular success also suggests that its particular form of jury-deliberations — which, of course, are never identified as such but instead as 'debates'— are presented as the material of the competition itself, perhaps more even than the books being discussed. The chance to watch a jury deliberate en route to making a consecration calls back to Mcdowell's suggestion that jury deliberations be transparent, and it also engages with the rhetoric of scandal — or at least the potential for scandal — inherent in awards, as the celebrity panelists engage in their occasionally heated discussions about (and around) the books.

While the contest functions strongly within its own framework, it faces a similar bind to other prizes in terms of the legitimacy of the jury members as authorities and arbiters of literary quality. While there always seems to be a writer on the panel, other non-specialist jurors immediately qualify the contest as a more general and accessible endeavour which breaches the fields of both restricted and mass production (and consumption). The jurors, however, in order to be seen as being worthy of being such, must hold significant cultural capital in other public domains which the contest then purports to unproblematically transfer into the literary realm. The question with Canada Reads, then, is rarely that of a book's literary quality or even qualities, but of whether or not the panelists enjoyed reading it, and if they feel that it should be read by their constituency as panelists on Canada Reads.

The idea that all of Canada should read a particular book because it is the 'best,' or even the most representatively 'CanLit' book in a given competition is one that is itself increasingly under suspicion in the academy in particular. Institutions like the CBC and

Canada Reads, like the Canada Council and the GGs, which are funded directly by the federal government often use their 'arm's length' policies of cultural independence as markers of their politically unbesmirched processes. Pauline Butling notes that "the federal government formulates general policy but leaves implementation and interpretation to the cultural institutions and to independent peer juries. Because awards and grants are based on recommendations from peer juries, the system allows for critiques of the nation" (Butling

43) but those critiques are themselves usually funded by the nation, thus nullifying them through a kind of forced complicity. If, as Zurbigg notes, awards favour different 'types' of writing and prizes like the Giller can be justifiably critiqued for their sustained interest in 79

"Giller bait" novels, Bok's claims about the pathological tendencies of awards, and Scott and Tucker-Abramson's claims that prize culture leads to a homogenization of tastes seem immediately valid despite the plurality and ever-changing make-up of juries. In the case of the Canada Council, even if "[a]mong the members of the Council there has always been some uneasiness over the outcome of peer judgment in particular cases. After all, it was sometimes argued, it was the Council members, not the artists on the juries, who had to answer for the decisions" (Milligan 65), there has been very little deviation from the norms of CanLit as it has been construed by the Canada Council as an institution.

The criticism that awards tend to service a distinct and exclusive sub-section of a particular field, despite laying claim to it in its entirety, is one that is regularly raised at most awards. Henighan's and Good's criticisms that the Giller Prize is merely the self- congratulatory exercise of an elite community of writers, or the fact that, as poet Gary

Barwin suggests, "most of these awards are self-replicating systems — past nominees & winners are usually the judges" (qtd. in Davey, "Tales" 1) suggest that the jury system is yet another circular structure in the greater economy of the literary prize. Davey similarly opines that "the Council has... appeared to practice a policy of preferring previous award winners as jurors" ("Tales" 10) — a policy that the Council vehemently denies (Larocque-

Poirier, personal interview 15), but that George Bowering, for one, insists has long been practiced (personal interview 4). In light of the fact that — and actually specifically because — literary juries are most often comprised of three or more individual and independent subjects, awards would seem to have a legitimate claim to a degree of reflective community consensus if not objectivity in the decisions they render. It would stand to reason, then that, as Good suggests, "one chooses a shortlist when one chooses a jury" (64), or the sense that Davey picked up from the CanPoetics listserv "that conventional jurors can honor only conventional poets" ("Tales" 6) would render the awards, to a certain degree, predictable. But this has rarely been the case. This was perhaps nowhere more evident in the 2007 contest in English-Canadian Poetry which saw the most radical and avant-garde jury yet assembled as adjudicators — Bok, Christopher Dewdney, and dub poet Lillian Allen — select a shortlist and winner (Domanski's All Our Wonder

Unavenged) that prompted Steven Laird to determine that "the lyric is [still] king" in the field, and that "Canadian poetry is in the same place" (21) that it has been for the past generation. As my Case Studies will show, juries are rarely reducible to their constituent parts.

Northern Reflections

In his article on the Nobel Prize and canonicity, Richard Jewell suggests that the world's most prestigious literary declaration engages in what he calls "the usual business of.. .ignoring non-Euro-American cultures" (106) which, he quotes 1977 Academy member

Artur Lundkvist, "have not achieved that level of development.. .that can make them truly significant" (qtd. in Jewell 106, his ellipses). In a crushing critical turn, Jewell then calls upon John Kwan-Terry's articulation that modern Chinese literature, for example, is virtually unrecognizable as literature to an uninitiated Western audience because it "goes against almost all the tenets of modernism.. .its power resides.. .in analogical sublimations, in a kind of colonizing symbolization extended by the creative imagination" (qtd. in Jewell

107, my ellipses). That is to say, Chinese literature, very much like African literature and oral narrative history, does not receive due consideration from the Nobel despite its significantly longer tradition simply because it does not conform to the standards of 81 expectation enforced, unnaturally, on literature as a whole by the Academy. It is the prize, then, that must recognize itself or its established perceptive framework in a winner in order for the work to be deemed prize-worthy to begin with. I overstate my case here, surely, for a jury cannot be expected to appreciate and evaluate a work for which they have no precedent. The aporia, the irony, to which I refer here is not in the failure of the Academy to be completely and competently versed in all extant literary traditions, but in the expectation that, as an international award, it engages with all such traditions with equal vigour and depth. The Prize's inability or unwillingness to assess Chinese literature on its own terms is where a kind of pathology might in fact develop. It relies on an imaginary universal standard (which is, of course, quite specific and exclusive) against which to assess candidates in much the same way that jurists assessing CanLit must rely on a conception of what it is in order to have a frame of reference against which to measure quality.

Barbara Godard has suggested that "the literary field(s) in Canada are not autonomous in the way Bourdieu formulated the concept. At every stage in cultural production, government financial support compensates for the lack of economic capital invested in publishing — grants to artists, block grants to publishers, fees to translators, funds to promote books and support readings of work by writers and translators. Publishers do not necessarily seek to please a bourgeois elite in the selection of titles and so produce cultural capital or to extend their audiences through titles chosen to augment economic capital" (279). The Canadian case remains unique — its fields informed, if only by the spectre, of an ever-present governmentality. So even in an era when nations, according to

Habermas, are being eschewed for global 'networks' which "signal a danger for the nation- 82 state as its institutional form" (67), the nation-state remains — and I cannot stress this enough — integral to the socio-cultural framework upon which any notion, past or present, of professional Canadian culture relies. I say 'professional' here not to invoke a distinction of quality or aesthetic, but to signal creative industries by which citizens make their livings or a significant part thereof (as one can perhaps hardly imagine referring to themselves as a professional novelist or a professional painter). Globalization and the turn to planetary citizenship encouraged by transnational corporations and capital flow, in place of regional or national citizenship, undoubtedly threatens the cultural autonomy and identities of established or self-defining communities. But in a space like Canada, they also threaten the very ability to live and perform as an artist who might express either trepidation about or collusion with the dissolution of nation-states. Globalization, in the end, strives for centralization and totality — not those of McLuhan's global village in which one remains part of community while choosing the access one has to other communities, but of the melting pot where cultural difference is actively eradicated in favour of the homogenization of fields of consumers for centralized economic and cultural markets. The trick, then, is to consider both the nation-state and globalization anew (see Conclusion) in order that the former may maintain desired economic stability and cultural autonomy while participating actively in the possibilities offered by the latter to enrich and engage a citizenry that is at once globally conscious and responsible, but unforgetful of the fact of their physical geographical and social presentness.

This is certainly not to say that the theoretical nation-state in Canada has provided an exemplary model from which to begin this re-thinking. The track record of historical cultural injustices perpetrated on behalf of the nation continues to grow with each 83 residential school lawsuit and every immigrant welcomed into the country based on an educational or social desirability that proves to be non-transferrable. The GG Awards are not, by any stretch of imagination, a significant part of these injustices. They do, however, reflect a larger conscious institutional project to both define and assert a dominant and exclusive model of 'Canadianness.' In Chapter 3 I will argue that the GG Awards and the

Canada Council from which they spring can be fruitfully examined as what Louis Althusser famously called 'Ideological State Apparatuses' or ISAs (17). Stephen Slemon describes

IS As as "organizations and complexes that visibly do the work of maintaining dominant cultural assumptions.. .And beyond these organizations for the manufacture of hegemony lurks a vast range of social practices, technical apparatuses, and dominant discursive assumptions that we tend to refer to as institutions" (72). If prizes do indeed engage a circular economy of cultural and actual capital that ultimately serves the interests of the institution behind them, then the GGs annually underline the work done by the Canada

Council in fostering and delineating CanLit by reinventing and reconfirming them with a consecration of exemplary excellence under the guise of a disinterested nation-state. The case of the Canada Council's prizing practices is unique in that it claims to subvert the notion of debt and gift by expecting nothing in return from the grantees themselves other than their association with the Council and the national project that the Council itself initiates. Even when awards are refused, then, the Council is able to claim inclusivity, cultural maturity, and institutional fortitude for withstanding critiques of the projects that it has, in fact, itself funded in the interest of diversity and plurality. Derrida points towards this idea when he discusses the metonymic agency inherent in the gift: 84

In our logic and our language we say it thus: someone wants or desires, someone intends-to-give something to someone. Already the complexity of the formula appears formidable. It supposes a subject and a verb, a constituted subject, which can also be collective — for example a group, a community, a nation, a clan, a tribe — in any case, a subject identical to itself and conscious of its identity, indeed seeking through the gesture of the gift to constitute its own unity and, precisely, to get its own identity recognized so that identity comes back to it, so that it can reappropriate its identity; as its property. (Given Time: 711)

Giving the gift of the GG Award, then, while it signals the consecration and celebration of a particular work as excellent, simultaneously claims a degree of ownership over that work in the public sphere. It becomes definitive of what the GGs are inasmuch as the GGs celebrate what it is as a text. The ISA of the Canada Council is able, then, to reassert its cultural dominance as arbiter of taste and CanLit by making the work it has facilitated an offer it cannot refuse. The institutional hegemony inherent in this cycle (due to the role of the cycle's initiators, as discussed above) suggests that the Award acts as both the publicized possibility of distance from the Council, and an unstated confirmation of the

Council's cultural dominance in and of CanLit and its canons.

John Metcalf and Pauline Butling respectively note that, with the Canada Council paying honouraria, awarding grants, and increasing the cultural capital of jurors and winners alike, that capital "isn't neutral" (Metcalf, Freedom 41, his emphasis) and that it

"comes with too many ideological strings attached" (Butling 43), but this is surely not a basis for suggesting that creative individuals become the Council's minions in exchange for a stand-out line on a CV and an admittedly middling honourarium. Are winning books chosen because they are always already "calling for [their] archivization because [they] already contain[] the seeds of [their] own archive" (Prenowitz 110)? That is, do they bear the markings of what has been generalized as CanLit within them and thus confirm their 85 legitimate candidacy as an example of their genre? Criticism deriding the homogenized literary aesthetic foreclosed by prize culture would answer in the affirmative; work recognizable as CanLit continues to be recognized by the GG Awards. Diana Brydon, for one, recognizes the power of the institution to influence, through its machinations like the administration of literary awards, the subjectivity of individuals: "While individuals often assume a certain autonomy of action, paying little overt attention to the unwritten rules and regulations that legislate acceptable thinking or behaviour within these institutionalized contexts, these contexts influence action within the field" ("Metamorphoses" 3). So if prizes seem to have the ability to, in whatever capacity, enforce their own larger aesthetic authority on the canons they create, then what might be said about the kind of literature consecrated by the Canada Council through the office of the Governor General? Are the

GGs partial to a particular literary aesthetic? Do they generate one as a result? Do they tend towards compromise candidates which articulate a recognizably prize-worthy precedent?

Do they settle for inoffensiveness or safe candidates?

As public declarations of literary quality made on behalf of both acknowledged and unacknowledged cultural communities, literary awards necessarily opine not only on standards of taste in a given cultural environment, but also on standards of normalcy. Alex

Good suggests, directly, that "[a]s Canada's most prestigious and certainly most highly publicized literary award, the Giller presents an influential vision of what serious Canadian literature should be" (70) by continuing to consecrate a certain kind of literature as literarily

Canadian and as literarily excellent. In the case of the GGs, the imposition of taste can even be said to be state-sanctioned. More important than the aesthetic penchant of particular awards, though, is the fact that their consecrations in fact project value judgments onto 86 imagined and real constituencies. Their judgments, thus, have the potential to alter the ways in which the field of CanLit is conceived in popular and academic spheres. In this sense, major literary awards allow the textual arts to address a potentially wider audience (even though the amount of reading and actual textual engagement spurred by awards remains unexamined) while simultaneously allowing that wider audience a shortcut to the cultural capital that it has created. Award-winning books thus offer their readers — and more importantly their nations or constituencies — a "canon of reputability" (Veblen 46), and allow them to piggy-back the judges and "become.. .connoisseur[s] in creditable viands of various degrees of merit" (Veblen 47); if the ideological framework of particular awards do indeed suggest pathological biases towards kinds or genres of literature, then as awards continue to favour increasingly-normalized literatures, accusations that awards homogenize taste will become increasingly difficult to deflect. But do awards really have the power to infiltrate canons? 87

Chapter 2:

Loading the Canon with Trophies: Prizing and Canonicity in Canada

For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love, Or chide my palsie, or my gout, My five grey haires, or ruin'd fortune flout, With wealth your state, your minde with Arts improve, Take you a course, get you a place, Observe his honour, or his grace, Or the King's reall, or his stamped face Contemplate, what you will, approve, So you will let me love. John Donne, "The Canonization"

Perhaps the most important discussion yet to be had in literary circles on the subject of awards is their relationship to canonicity. This is an especially pertinent discussion to begin in Canada, where canons, canonicity, and national literature have been at the fore of critical concern for so long. Like Laura Moss in her 2006 article "Playing the Monster

Blind?: The Practical Limitations of updating the Canadian Canon," I am well aware that I am entering the fray quite late in the game (8) — especially in light of the vibrant discussions and positions articulated by Robert Lecker, Frank Davey, Tracy Ware, Laura

Groening, J. A. Wainwright, Kristjana Gunnars, and several others over the past two decades. The dynamic between the potential ephemerality of what is celebrated by contemporary awards, and the canonical works that have established the very standards against which winning books are held up, is a nebulous and ever-shifting one; any consideration of such a relationship must take into account the nature of the award in question (ie/ the community for whom it purports to speak or represent), the motivations and framework of the institution behind the award itself, current social and political trends, the make-up of the jury, and the established parameters of any number of intersecting, 88 competing, or complementary canons. And this is to say nothing of the consecrated literature itself! If Sarah Corse is correct in suggesting that prizes find their main function in affirming or establishing "the current elite version of literary aesthetics" and "the continued validation of notions of 'pure' literary and aesthetic hierarchies of value" (100), any consideration of canonicity must lead us to agree that canons and literary prizes have much in common. While any direct or formulaic connection between winning a certain prize and subsequently entering a larger canon (aside from the one created by the prize itself) remains to be demonstrated, there is much evidence to support the belief that, as

Moss herself suggests, "[ijdeally, a canon should reflect the current literary, social, and theoretical climates of the field" — it should be "a map of territory" ("Playing" 8) in much the same way that a literary awards are. Any entrance into the arena of canon-studies necessitates, according to Gunnars, that the critic will become "wound up in sorting out large 'forces' that are sociological, political, and cultural" (232). Both awards and canons wield unspoken power within their literary fields — power to construct, to instruct, and to de(con)struct on behalf of larger audiences and publics who might rarely have any say in their construction. Louise Berkinow puts it bluntly both figuratively (in terms of canons) and literally (in terms of awards): "What is commonly called literary history is actually a record of choices" (qtd. in Peggy Kelly 73).

Condescending to Contemporaneity and Conceiving of Canons

Before articulating the terms and parameters of my particular arguments below, more context on the nature of this often unaddressed relationship might be useful. It is certain that the winning of even what we might consider a major prize does not ensure a work's inclusion in any larger canon. It is equally certain, however, that due to the media 89 attention and increased visibility, availability, and sales proffered by the receipt of a notable award, award-winning books "often serve as a 'contemporary' canon" (Corse 101).

Inasmuch as "contemporary literary prize winners serve as an avenue for revisions to the national images created in earlier works and reaffirm the hierarchy of high culture and popular culture by positing a realm of 'pure' literary merit" (Corse 17), it is precisely because of their selection over other works in the same generic, cultural, and/or temporal field, that "[l]iterary prize winners are 'precanonical' texts, educated guesses about what might survive the exigencies of time and caprice to become tomorrow's classics" (Corse

100). The success of these educated guesses will rely upon varying understandings of particular canons. This becomes particularly evident in the case of directly oppositional or

'corrective' awards like the Relit prize or the Acorn/Plantos People's Poetry Prize; the canon of prized (and prizeable) work is simultaneously undermined and solidified by the construction of an anti-canon full of traditionally non-prizeable (previously unrecognized) works that remain, however, subjectively chosen for inclusion in the anti-canon over a multitude of other texts. Even prizes that attempt to skewer the very notion of prizing itself by offering recognition for absurd or awful contributions to a given field (the Golden

Raspberry Awards, the Friggin' Prize, or the Bad Sex-Writing awards for example), demonstrate acts of cultural distinction that adhere to the very concept they critique.

Following what Bourdieu would call these 'strategies of condescension,' James English sees this catch-22 as "the central paradox of our contemporary awards scene" and notes that

"cultural prizes can be, at one and the same time, both more dubious — more of a joke — than they used to be, and more symbolically effectual, more powerfully and intimately intertwined with processes of canonization" (216). 90

Exactly what qualifies as canonization (inclusion on institutional syllabi? inclusion on 'Best of lists? scholarly attention? popular cultural footprint?) becomes the question here; as Cain's poem itself wondered, are Bertram Brooker, Gwethalyn Graham, Igor

Gouzenko, Hugh MacLennan, and M.T. Kelly canonical writers simply because of the scandal that their consecrations initiated? (One suspects that if Cain is able — no pun intended — to invoke them in this new millennium, they must belong to some version of a field-based canon, though one more focused on the history of literary culture than on texts themselves.) Does more attention within and without restricted fields of production — regardless of how that attention is garnered — ensure some degree of staying power? The answer must be affirmative even if the extent or make-up of that staying power remains uncertain. In his lengthy discussion of the non-awarding of the National Book Award or the

National Book Critics Circle Award to Toni Morrison for her novel Beloved in 1988,

English notes that Morrison's academic and literary supporters treated significant prizes as

"keystones to the canon of American literature" despite being well aware of the exigencies of canons and canonicity. According to English, "they recognize[d] that it is precisely by such embarrassingly social-commercial-cultural mechanisms as these that the canon is formed, cultural capital is allocated, 'greatness' determined...a more false ... and a more true measure of cultural value than its traditional critics would ever allow" (244). In one of his remarkable deconstructions of canonicity John Guillory stresses that even if the

'quality' or aesthetic 'value' of a text remains an important factor in its eventual canonicity, its sociopolitical contexts — both historical and contemporary — remain equally constitutive of its potential to stick around: of any canon he notes "we must see its history as the history of both the production and the reception of texts. We must understand that the 91 history of literature is not only a question of what we read but of who reads and who writes, and in what social circumstances" ("Canon" 238, his emphases). Those circumstances, aided, abetted, hindered, or fostered by prizes, ensure a politics of canonicity that, as Frank

Davey has it, is "not merely 'plural'; it has winners, partial winners, local winners, and losers; it is exciting only for voyeurs and non-losers" (Canadian Literary Power 67-68). If the majority of the readership comprise the voyeurs of this equation, I would propose that awards embody a more direct example of these politics, as the winners, partial winners, local winners, and losers are all literally so.

While Metcalf may prefer to talk about traditions instead of canons when it comes to CanLit, the discussion about what survives to circulate amongst readers has long been a lively one in Canadian letters. While I will return to a discussion of specifically Canadian contexts below, I would first like to further examine the relationship between awards and canons in more general terms. Both canons and awards naturalize and normalize a view of certain works as exceptional or exemplary, thereby concealing how exactly they got to be there in the first place. The result is what we might call the 'objectification' of certain works that both prizing and canonicity can achieve. In the same way that I have suggested it is in the interest of the nation-state to form and reform its notion of a national literature through the bestowal of grants and the consecration of certain exemplary works, Rakefet

Sela-Sheffy argues that

it must be the interest of a specific group of people to form, or to reform, a canon (that is, to capitalize on the consecration of a certain repertoire and the creation of a distinctive field of activity). However, it takes more than just the motivation of the canonizers who seem to profit from it. The question is what canonizers do, and how they do it. As various studies have shown, the work of canonization includes the construction of a particular theory and a history of the field. (152-3, her emphases) 92

If we think, in this case, of canonizers as the administrators and agents behind a significant prize, what they do and how they do it often relies completely upon addressing and assessing an already-imagined field, or a field that they themselves delineate in the setting of the parameters of their prize. In this way we might come to understand the political and cultural power politics behind the decision to bestow the Governor General's Awards only for English-language works until the Canada Council took over their administration in

1959.

I will continue to assume that prizes both create their own specific canons of quality, and simultaneously increase the visibility, accessibility, and possibility of the works they celebrate entering into any number of larger canons. If the GG canon does in fact favour work that reaffirms national myths, or if that of the Giller does indeed favour the Giller-bait novel, then a rhetoric of scandal might equally apply to the notion of canonicity as it does to the notion of prizes. Theorist Jan Gorak notes that, like the reactionary or corrective scandalous prize, the impetus to 'open' canons coming from the critics he calls 'anti-canonists' relies upon an disingenuous "need to see an earlier generation of critics as imprisoned in the world of utter repression and restriction from which we ourselves have heroically broken free" (8). In carefully outlining that contemporary anti-canonists who are eager to assert their "radical credentials" by opening or undermining the canon have "a long ancestry" (66), Gorak notes that "[e]ach of these critics presents himself as witness to an intellectual awakening. Awakenings usually lead to canons" (245). Just as the GG prize was not fulfilling the role that Atwood et al. had envisioned a major poetry prize should fill as they launched the Griffin, or just as the ReLit prize is about "ideas, not money," new canons — 'opened' canons — offer, in fact, both 93 affirmation and confirmation of the model of the canon/prize being contested. These seemingly radical interventions actually "evoke[] an alternative content of the canon, but accept[] the elitist ground rules of 'valuable cultural goods deserving to be cherished'"

(Sela-Sheffy 142, her emphasis).

Just as with prizes and the canons they create, larger canons are only ever successful to their greatest market-breaching degree when they are scandalously challenged. Reaction to canons and prizes by the erection of substitute canons "fails to deal with the canon as a general mechanism, indispensable for the organization and evolution of societies" (Sela-

Sheffy 141) — in short, it remains good business for both the canon and its dissenters. Not only is "the status of the canon.. .almost irreversibly secured" (Sela-Sheffy 141), but the status of the evaluative, exclusive model is too. Like prizes, "[o]nce established, [canons] are then almost always contested, altered, opened up for further inspection" (William Cain

130). Establishment, as well as subsequent inspection, both depend upon "the existence of an autonomous field with authorized consecrating agencies" (Sela-Sheffy 141).

While I will resist wading into the infamous Lecker-Davey brouhaha surrounding

Canadian canons to any great extent, I should state here that I understand the real role of canons to be evident in neither critic's ultimate argument. Rather, I think, the notion of canonicity is at its most provocative and useful in the dialogue it creates between theoretical literary positions. While it is not my desire or intention to define or delineate my own belief in the power of canons or a canon, I must admit that I find validity in Davey's recognition that there are always already several different and intersecting canons at play in the field of CanLit, but also in Lecker's general notion that one specific canon has emerged as the dominant standard-bearer for the academic field in general. Lecker's work on the 94

NCL certainly makes a strong case for this assertion, especially given my later argument that the educational apparatus is still largely the driving force behind both popular and academic considerations of CanLit. His point, though, becomes incongruent with Davey's when he resists the impetus to address collections of work and schools of thought that are excluded from this dominant CanLit canon as canons themselves. While Lecker seems to require the dominance of a hegemonic norm against which resistance can then be mounted,

Davey desires a kind of democratization of literary value that resists such binarism and allows texts to group themselves according to whichever criteria their readers please. The point underlying both critics' critiques is that, as Blodgett suggests, "[l]iterature.. .is the site of inevitable competitive operations which belong to the operation of canonization, a primary sign of change in the literary field" (7). In short, several canons exist, and all wield differing degrees of power. Barbara Godard makes the most prescient point of all on this topic in recognizing that canons are, above all else, Bourdieusian legitimations in much the same way as awards:

According to Bourdieu, the logic of relative autonomy in the functioning of the different instances of legitimation establishes a process of differentiation and exclusion upon a principle of cultural legitimacy... Restricted positions are subject to limited circulation and long-term rewards, as is the case with consecrated texts, deemed classics and taught in the academy. Those positions receiving 'large-scale production' compete in the marketplace in search of a profitable return on investment in the short run, as is the case with best-sellers. Without appearing to submit to the interference of the economic, political, or religious power, the institutional practices of distinction reproduce isotopically the relations of power in a stratified society. (275)

Inasmuch as winning an award increases the marketability and potential profitability of a new book, it pushes that book towards fields of large-scale visibility and consumption.

While the book might always remain in the field of restricted production due to the fact of 95 its producer's social position and its potential canonicity, it demonstrates the simultaneous ability to breach the larger field — a breaching that may, in fact, determine its canonicity and position in the restricted field. The book is forever a player in the field of restricted production, whereas the prized, or better yet, the scandalous book, might access other fields thanks to its newly-imposed adjectives. Guillory insists that "[t]he distinction between serious and popular writing is a condition of canonicity" (Cultural Capital 23). Still, the makers of that distinction provide the condition, and, in fact, prizes often aspire to make that distinction themselves.

Again, I feel the need to digress in order to make my own distinction between canons and other such constructions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Metcalf would dispute my construction of the canonical field as an open one in which any number of canons might be constructed by interested readers and critics. Preferring to refer to a "tradition," Metcalf would deny those writers that Cain revives their place in any kind of collective literary standard — be it a tradition or a canon. Still, he insists that "mere survival does not constitute a 'tradition'. A tradition is alive, various, densely populated, intricate. It is interconnected" (What Is 40). While this may, at first, suggest that he is in fact doing my dirty work for me by alluding to the ways in which readers do the intricate interconnecting of works in a densely populated field, a few breathless pages later, he famously quips: "A literature is a relationship between books and readers. A tradition implies an audience. A tradition honours and bequeaths; it is a gift handed down from generation to generation"

(What Is 42). Aside from the not-entirely-coincidental use of the word 'gift' here, this is a tradition in the mode of the Leckerian canon: one that honours and bequeaths the works deemed worthy of honouring and bequeathing; the works that it deems worthy, or that juries have deemed worthy, of consecrating. Alan C. Golding, on the other hand, suggests, like Hunter, a tripartite division of canonicity by suggesting that "the potential canon constitutes the entire archive of literary production, the accessible canon includes those works which remain in print, and the selective canon is made up of accessible literature that is deemed to be of the highest quality" (qtd. in Kelly 73). All of this may indeed have to do largely with that force to which Metcalf defers as the ultimately 'objective' canonizer, time itself, which has the tendency to allow canonical victors and architects to cover their tracks when the history books are written. But an amalgam of Golding's accessible and selective canons is what seems to fit with the ethos of literary awards; of the accessible (read: eligible books for a given contest) work in a given field, a literary award has the ability to transport its constituents from one generalized field to a more culturally restricted field by way of gifting to them the distinction tied to the prize. If literary value is determined by awards, readerships, and/or canonization, awards must be said to offer a breach in the wall between restricted/ selective fields and large-scale/accessible fields through which cultural capital is exchanged in both directions.

Classes, Classes, Classes

None of this means, of course, that we can speak of canons and awards interchangeably. Certainly, if we ourselves choose to approach the list of winners of major or specific awards as a canon then a direct connection between the two phenomena is forged, but it seems more logical in a general sense to see awards as agents or players which exert cultural pressures in and around the processes of canonization. Given the significant role that direct evaluative judgment plays in the consecration of texts through literary awards, the route from prize-winner to canonical stalwart might be said to follow similar patterns of power and subjectivity, but Guillory is quick to point out the importance of the contexts in which such formative judgments are made:

I would like to suggest that the question of judgment is the wrong question to raise in the context of canon-formation. The selection of texts for preservation certainly does presuppose acts of judgment which are indeed complex psychic and social events; but these acts are necessary rather than sufficient to constitute a process of canon-formation. An individual's judgment that a work is great does nothing in itself to preserve that work, unless that judgment is made in a certain institutional context, a setting on which it is possible to insure the reproduction of the work, its continual reintroduction to generations of readers. ("Canon" 237, his emphasis)

Prizes then, inasmuch as they borrow the same sociological framework of distinction from the canon's procedural economy, might better be seen as the first step in the reproduction of a celebrated text and its eventual 'objectification.' Receipt of a major prize has the ability to establish the kind of winning book (lyric, narrative, culturally thematic etc.) as a normative standard for the field the prize represents, as well as establishing the specific book itself as exemplary of noteworthy excellence and historicization in that same field.

But what of the books that, since winning notable awards, have fallen out of favour, been ignored or willfully forgotten by canonizers, or that have proven to be dated or inappropriate for modern contexts?

While Moss suggests above that canons should reflect current trends and phenomena in some significant way, one wonders how symbiotic that relationship might need to be. Sela-Sheffy reminds us that

Taken simply to reflect social hierarchy, canonicity is believed to be in constant flux and redefinition.. .It follows therefore that this view reduces the idea of the canon to no more than a row of fleeting fashions. Yet combats between competing taste-makers are rife in the cultural-market which ceaselessly produces ad hoc trends without necessarily guaranteeing their long lasting value. For the most part, the winners of these ongoing battles quickly fall into oblivion, whereas canonized items maintain their position as orientation points in the cultural market regardless 98

of its vicissitudes (often surviving even radical revolutions). (144-5, my ellipses, her emphases)

It is certainly true that even specialists in the field of CanLit are usually unlikely to have read Think of the Earth, Earth and High Heaven, The Fall of a Titan, or A Dream Like

Mine, so Sela-Sheffy's point is well-made. But the broken relationship between fleeting fashions, ad hoc trends, and canonicity is complicated with the bestowal of an award that wields any kind of cultural authority, even if bestowed in a particular and fleeting moment in time. This is especially true in the Canadian context and with the GG Awards which embody the authoritative thrust of the nation-state itself. Following Bourdieu in making the distinction between trends and dominant canons, Sela-Sheffy sees the latter functioning

"rather like a safe, into which, once an item is accepted, its value is almost irreversibly secured" (146-7). In the case of official state-sanctioned consecrations like the GG Awards, then the establishment of the framework to create, and then celebrate particular kinds of writing as being indicative of a national character has the ability to confirm its standards of taste, and to legitimize new ones. The question whether or not canons can be seen as generative will be discussed more thoroughly below, but suffice it to say for the moment that the canon is neither fully the sensor of ongoing cultural battles in a given field, nor the imposition of a set of rules governing production, although it remains a bit of both. Like awards, canons initiate conversations through which the field can more fully articulate itself against the backdrop of the norms they have largely established.

The fact remains that in the processes of both prizing and canonization, class plays a significant role. Corse recognizes that with canons, as with awards, "[a] group of specific people — academics, critics, editors, publishers — with certain class positions and 99 specialized types of training select and value one group of texts over others" (16). While there has been much critical discussion of where canons are most effectively constructed and disseminated, the fact remains that they are moulded by the position and power of every agent in their given field. It is true, however, that despite all of these pressures

(institutional, economic, personal, cultural, political), most of these discussions continue to take place within the institutional framework of academia (see Althusser 26). This is not to ignore the significant foundation that the Canada Council has laid, and upon which the very study of Canadian literature in the capacities in which it exists today have been made possible, but to reaffirm that the majority of the poetry-reading (and poetry-buying) public in Canada passes through the gates of a post-secondary institution that allows the industry to survive in the way that it does. Gorak argues that "most anti-canonists agree that the canon exerts its greatest impact in the classroom" (5) because they assume, as Michael

Barnholden does, that academic critics are guided by a sense of their own "responsibility to the canon" (par.9). But again, it is not the canons at play that are themselves the problem; it is the reproduction of the canons, and the re(a)warding of the same kinds of literature year after year in a given contest that purports to speak on behalf of a country whose array of literary periodicals, small publishing houses, literary events, and specialized academic specialists suggest a literature whose aesthetic and creative styles and tastes remain wildly, vastly diverse.

It is, in fact, in the classroom where the 'norms' are articulated and circulated, even if they are counterbalanced by work that resists them via diametrical opposition (and thus anti-canon-formation). Althusser recognizes that schools are "one of the essential forms of the ruling bourgeois ideology.. .which represents the School as a neutral environment 100 purged of ideology" (30) when in fact its rhetorical stances are rooted just as equally in a given ideology. If indeed "[t]he ultimate condition of production is therefore the reproduction of the conditions of production" (Althusser 1), then the institutional canons — the teaching canons that students are told they must familiarize themselves with before they can critique them — strive to reproduce the same kind of poetry readers who will expect the same kind of poetry that they have been taught to recognize as quintessentially

Victorian, feminist, avant-garde, or Canadian, for example. Guillory puts it unequivocally, if ideally: "The problem of the canon is a problem of syllabus and curriculum, the institutional forms by which works are preserved as great works. One might contrast this institutional function of the school with the function of the library, where ideally everything is preserved and where the system of preservation makes no distinction at all between good books and bad" ("Canon" 240, his emphasis). In the world of awards where the nominated and winning works are ranked according to their degree of greatness, the 'problem' of the canon offers a trenchantly similar model of how divisions like national literatures, or the best of a national literature, might come to be forged. The fact of who, then, has access to this kind of normalized poetic education must be a significant one. "Literacy culture in general, and the university in particular, are by no means structurally organized to express the consensus of a community; these social and institutional sites are complex hierarchies in which the position and privilege of judgment are objects of competitive struggles"

(Guillory, Cultural Capital 27). When a text is chosen for a reader by a teacher or an award, an act of judgment is made on their behalf, but to attain the capital, both actual and cultural, to fall into a position of having that judgment made for them, there emerges a kind of double-exclusion. In this squaring of the institutional framework of dominance, only those embodying certain values themselves may become privy to the again-artificial canons of the field of restricted production.

It is perhaps in the educational canon that the exchange of cultural capital from abstract to concrete occurring in the economy of prizes is most clearly evident as well. If abstractions like prizes have the ability to become concrete through their bestowal (in that they can then be listed off and relied upon as empirical and factual proof of a work's quality or value), then books that are admitted into the major educational canons also achieve a similar kind of quantifiability. Canonicity, like a prize, offers a kind of empirical evidence to a potential or future reader of its well-established value as a work of high literary quality. Non-quantifiable evaluations become quantifiable through awards and are, literally, reproduced in a way that Althusser and Guillory may not have quite intended — more books get printed and circulated, and wedge themselves into the contemporary

'available' canon (and thus increase their chances at joining other canons) in the same way that tangible awards that are conferred for rather intangible achievements become the

'factual' and empirical basis of the recipient's given position and status within a particular field.

Another significant question that must be addressed with regard to awards and canonicity is not only how the former affects the latter, but vice versa. To what extent do popular, institutional, or otherwise dominant canons generate literary work that may reflect any number of biases that render it eligible for awards or canonicity? To what extent do

"institutional caveats actually determine the types of contemporary writing?" (McCaffery,

"An Interview" par.6-7). If a canon contains within it the range of possibilities of its own constitution, any award purporting to celebrate work thought to be exemplary of that canon 102 must enter into a dialogue of reflection or refraction with said canon. Richard Jewell, in exposing the Eurocentric biases of the Nobel Prize, wonders "Are the Nobels in literature fair — that is, are winners chosen justly to represent the best of world literature? Part of the answer to this question lies in determining what is the literary canon. In fact, one can argue that the history of the Nobels in literature is to some extent a history of how the literary canon has been — and will be — determined" (97), even though some Nobel winners have proven to be just as susceptible to popular erasure as any other cultural workers. Given the cultural history of writing itself, then, his question seems well-founded against the list of the prize's recipients: In well over a century only two African and two Japanese writers have ever been thus recognized, and the one Indian writer to have earned the distinction

(with the arguable exceptions of Kipling [1907] and Naipaul [2001]), Rabindranath Tagore

(1913), was only thus celebrated after his work was released in English translation. Only one Chinese winner, Gao Xingjian (2000), has ever been recognized, and only as an ex-pat critical of China's political structure. Suffice it to say that, as with all awards, "choosing

[Nobel] prizewinners has always been based to a certain extent on a mixture of politics and poetics" (Jewell 100). While the politics may be rather evident in the case of Xingjian in particular, the poetics of the prize remains somewhat more unstated, as evidenced by my earlier arguments about the Nobel in Chapter 1. In short, the prize, (standing in for its administrators and institutions) must recognize its own aesthetic standards (or at least its aspirations thereto) in its consecration. It must understand the winning works in the context of the canons with which it is subjectively and exclusively familiar, despite any claims of any guiding global consciousness. The institutions behind prizes remain acutely aware that, in same way the prize recognizes itself in winners, it will then appropriate new winners (as 103 such) in order to redefine its own scope and profile. The question becomes, then, to what extent do awards regurgitate the established tenets of a particular canonicity? If Alex

Good's construction of the Giller-bait novel, or Jennifer Scott and Myka Tucker-

Abramson's complaint that award-receiving literature in Canada is homogenized are valid, then we are right to be concerned, as John Steffler is, that "[p]rizes, kind of like a magnet, can deflect or distort art by pulling it toward the imagined tastes and standards of the prize- givers" (3). We must assume then, that the relationship between awards and the canon is generally a reciprocal one.

I would go so far as to suggest that the processes of evaluation and consecration at the heart of both canon-making and prize-giving are in many ways also akin to those surrounding the archive. Derrida asserts that the archive "in general is not only the place for stocking and for conserving an archivable content of the past which would exist in any case, such as, without the archive.. .No, the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event" {Archive Fever 16-17, his emphasis, also see Foucault, The Archaeology of

Knowledge 145-147). That is, the archiving archive of the CanLit prize creates CanLit as it recognizes CanLit because it claims to recognize itself in its candidates. If indeed GG winners are always already "calling for [their own] archivization because [they] already containf] the seeds of [their] own archive" (Prenowitz 110), then those seeds must be planted within the dominant canons constituting the field for which the award purports to speak. While awards themselves are notoriously unpredictable (which remains a large part of their scandalous appeal), it stands to reason that themes, styles, forms, and contents thought to be generally characteristic of a given canon would be evident (in some direct or indirect way) in works of literature celebrated as exemplary of that canon. When an award is won, then, (when an item enters, or is brought to the front of the archive), the canon is both re-confirmed and broadened, thus demonstrating the particular literature's inclusivity of newness while maintaining a significant degree of recognizability as such; it belongs in the archive because it is worthy of being archivable, and because it is recognized as archivable in the first place. Thinking about awards in terms of the archive seems pertinent given the cultural and historical gravitas that institutions like the GGs lay claim to as they consecrate. Catherine Bates argues that "[a]rchives represent the official" by selectively preserving the items from which their keepers can then construct a coherent narrative (of nation, of history, of literary excellence) even if the archive itself "has only a veneer of tidiness, and cannot remember coherently" (14-15). The archive, like the prize, needs benefactors and administrators who can oversee its operations as it "performs a process of selecting and rejecting" that conceals the archivists' roles in those processes. Also like prizes, the archive is "controlled by the people with economic power in society" (Bates 10), and can thus serve itself and/or the institutions for which it stands not by recognizing or

"representing] what is important" but by "constructing] what is important" (Bates 8) by publicly and authoritatively declaring it so to be. As I argued in Chapter 1, having a canon of valuable and accomplished cultural products is essential to any nation-state desirous of maturity and stability, so canons, and prizes especially, perform public consecrations of excellence in the modus operandi of the selective archivist; they conspicuously "keep up appearances" (Bates 10) of cultural value to observers within and without the nation-state. Prefiguring Consolidation from Basecamp

The starkest divide between the canon and contemporary prize-winning works is always rooted in the newness of the winning work to the field itself. If prizes set the stage for canonicity by facilitating a reputation for, and facilitating the availability of, selected works while the canon itself can be said to set the stage for prizeability, one wonders how the canon of awards and the larger canons with which they are in conversation change and evolve (if in fact they do). Sela-Sheffy, in echoing a widely-held opinion that canons are cultural regulators because they serve as "counter-balance to accelerated change" (150), the critic observes that "canonized goods are neither immediately dependent on, nor fully compatible with actual consumption and market value" (148). While the conversation between long-canonized and newer award-winning works may flow both ways, the matter of canonicity is only in question for the newer works. The very fact of the conversation re­ confirms the canonized work's canonicity as it acts as a 'norm' to which the newer work must somehow relate in order to enter the canon, but the relation between the two texts cannot be too intimate. That is to say that a book must exhibit a degree of newness and a sense of cultural evolution that builds upon the canonized works but that nonetheless remains familiar enough (in theme, form, style etc.) to be clearly conversant in the language of the particular canon to which it proposes inclusion; it must offer the canon incentive for including it (by standing as an example of cultural evolution or progress) inasmuch as it must appeal to the canon's established tenets. This leads, according to Sela-Sheffy, to a reproduction of 'canonical' contents and forms that can then be seen as evolving with the progression of time and imagined national cultural maturity. She notes, however, that "it is claimed that past canonized items have been reactivated for innovations in the field of production' but that "it is not so much the particularities of their generative models as their outlines, or labels, extrapolated from specific items, that are usually adopted" (151). Thus, as Lecker and Good both argue, the establishment of a popular Canadian canon that remains rooted in social mimesis and geographical realism, or of a prize that continues to favour the Giller-bait novel. Not surprisingly, those who can profit — both culturally and financially — from the establishment of such imaginarily concrete essentialisms, are the institutions behind canons and awards that stand to gain various returns on their symbolic and financial investments:

The distinction between high status and generativity is clearly manifested through collecting institutions: whereas literary periodicals or art galleries tend to act as trendsetters (or at least aspire to act this way) in the field of actual cultural production; anthologies, libraries or museums are more often responsible for sanctioning their collections and suspending them from the cultural market. (Sela- Sheffy 148)

I would argue, here, that literary awards offer us yet another example of the movement of capital between and beyond otherwise separate fields of cultural production; in their recognizability alongside cultural work that Sela-Sheffy sees as suspended from the contemporary cultural market due to its canonicity, award winners straddle the gap between trendsetting and trendkeeping. They manage to maintain the relevance of the culturally suspended work by re-placing it in canonical conversation with new and immediate texts, as well as within a coherent and linear literary history. In much the same way that Harold

Bloom has famously argued poets perform an intentional yet relational swerve away from that which they know to be exemplary in the canons to which they aspire (see Conclusion), award-winning works must not merely repeat the texts of the past — they must, as Pound urged, make it new. Not different. New. 107

While I will address again the role of judges and canonizers below, suffice it here to say that, with regard to awards, they are forced into a position that offers them the opportunity of doubleness. They can increase their own cultural capital by selecting 'the correct' work that proves the relevance and evolution of the constructed tradition, or they can court controversy and a more immediately exchangeable cultural capital with an

'incorrect' selection. Generally, "canonizers' strategies oscillate between two conflicting tendencies. The one is that of consolidating and sanctioning an existing repertoire

(sometimes marking a phase of socio-cultural stagnation), and the other is that of prefiguring a new repertoire and sanctioning it from the outset (usually indicating a deliberate ambition at revolutionizing a certain field)" (Sela-Sheffy 153, her emphases). By

'prefiguring' a new vision of what might be considered prizaeable literature the canonizers and jury members are making a clear effort to evolve the larger tradition for which the canon or the prize claims to speak by appearing, on the surface, to break from that tradition and to thereby acknowledge a kind of evolution of the field as a whole. Not only does this explain seemingly anomalous or controversial winners of major prizes, but it marks again the proper functioning of both the award and the canon as a consecrator and legitimizer of a tradition that, based on its more 'radical' inclusions, proves its own openmindedness or evolutionary progress. Of the urge to prefigure or 'open' canons, Sela-Sheffy argues that it often only occurs at a point when the institutions and agents behind a canon or prize are secure enough in their consolidation that they can venture into the realm of diversification:

Prefiguration

is only ripe at later stages, after new producing agencies have already gained recognition through affiliating themselves with old canonized doctrines. Only then their mandate is acknowledged to fabricate a new repertoire that would be 108

recognized as a legitimate prognosis for further cultural production (instead of being rejected as merely a form of cultural aberration). In other words, the prefiguration of a new canonized repertoire is usually preconditioned by a prolonged — if less conspicuous — process where conformity with an existing canon existed. (155)

The canon, then, can only be 'opened' by the inclusion and consecration of newer and alternative works that are seen to evolve the national literature when its authority has been confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt. As Corse puts it, the question '"Do we have a unique national literature?' becomes less important and the focus shifts to reacting to and against the established national tradition" (103). While the GG Awards in English-

Canadian poetry, for example, have made relatively few 'radical' or 'prefigurative' consecrations (with the arguable exceptions of George Bowering, bpNichol, Fred Wah, and

Erin Moure), other awards like the Griffin Prize have seen fit to recognize more alternative and radical works by poets like Bok and Sylvia Legris.

Given the Griffin's relative newness and its scandalous oppositionality to the stalwart GG awards, it may indeed be no surprise that the newer award's prefigurations directly resist the more canon-like selections of the GGs; neither the Griffin-winning

Eunoia or Nerve Squall were even shortlisted by GG juries in their respective years of eligibility. Of these examples, Bok's book opens the most significant chasm between the awards and potential canonicity, as it has proven (through its 26+ printings, its recent success in the UK, and its 2009 re-release by Coach House) its staying power in the

Canadian cultural imaginary. Still, even a champion of the avant-garde like Marjorie

Perloff notes that its receipt of the Griffin Prize came "to everyone's amazement" because

"it is hardly a standard volume of poetry" (33), especially in the Canadian tradition. This assumption — that a winning book must be recognizable as such — is prevalent not only in prize culture, but also in discussions of canonicity. The celebration of works that

'prefigure' where the canon or the literature might be going is also, in several ways, a safe and loaded bet. Inasmuch as a winning work's radicality might incite a minor scandal or controversy because of its seeming incongruity with the canon, it is often because of the scandalous controversy borne of the consecration that a work becomes recuperated by the larger canon to which it at first seems to oppose. Andy Weaver puts it thus: "there is a period of time when an experimental text exists outside of the mainstream, in a marginal zone from which the text is eventually grabbed, pulled, or pushed into the center" (310) by critics and academics who, through their own work, teach larger publics how to read the text, and how to read it as Canadian. The receipt of an award, I would suggest, puts an immediate end to that outsider status and marks the official beginnings of the text's recuperation into the comfortable canons of CanLit. Weaver further suggests that the very idea of recuperation is "a notion that plagues formally experimental writing by implying that any formally experimental text that has been canonized must have been complicit with the dominant system all along" (309) because, through academic and popular critical work on the text itself, "the codes it introduces become naturalized and realistic" (Weaver 312).

In much the same way that Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers courted outrage, attention, adoration, and conversation in 1966 and has been since met with such a significant wave of critical and popular attention as to be embraced as a Canada Reads contender in 2005,

Eunoia is experiencing its own recuperation into the CanLit canon: an increasing number of reviews and articles addressing the work are beginning to appear in mainstream industry and academic publications like Books in Canada, Canadian Poetry, and Textual Practice. 110

The relationship between canons and awards is never a simple, direct, predictable, or definite one. Although prizes are undeniably always already contributing to the processes or circulations and canonization, they do not offer guaranteed admission or alteration of the canon itself. James English notes that "if the prize is declared the base camp of canon formation, it is deprived of its higher legitimation on the ground of art and hence of its capacity to circulate capital in misrecognized form" (245, his emphasis). By

'misrecognized,' he refers in part to the aforementioned exchange that capital undergoes

(from symbolic to actual, from cultural to political etc.) as it circulates throughout the prize economy, and yet also to the various forms of capital that are themselves generated from the machinations of the functional prize economy itself. One example of this alternative capital of is that of innovative capital which is, through recuperation, eventually afforded to works that may have originally been seen as being outside of the tradition with which a canon or award is concerned. Another example is the capital afforded to the canonizers and jurists who, after recuperation, can be seen as visionaries or restricted-production specialists imbued with the ability to distinguish quality not yet familiar to larger publics.

Sela-Sheffy notes that "their action is governed by either the tendency to evoke long established canonical repertoires as sources for legitimation and prestige, or by that of rejecting these repertoires in their aspiration to establish their own sources of legitimation"

(156). Both, as I have suggested, have the potential to increase a juror's cultural capital, but a prefigurative choice has a greater ability to court controversy and gain entrance into larger fields of production and consumption through the vehicle of scandal at the time of the choice, as well as the longer-term cultural legitimization as a cultural visionary upon the eventual recuperation of the work into the canon. As discussed in Chapter 1, judges enter Ill into a kind of economic transaction upon addressing the prize: they purport to already be holders of significant cultural capital while proposing to increase that capital by participating in the act of prize-giving and consecration. Inasmuch as they lend their cultural capital to a prize (and thus both gain and lend varying degrees of prestige), the prize has the ability to increase their cultural capital in both short and long terms. More tellingly though, English sees the greater power being wielded by prize administrators and institutions who "must find ways to exercise their increasing control over the contentious and always potentially calamitous processes of evaluation, adjudication, and selection without appearing too openly as the bosses of the prize workplace, managing to be seen more as facilitators of decision making than as decision makers in their own right. They must contrive to remain in the background of the cultural field even as they assume an even larger and more powerful role in our contemporary processes of canon formation" (154).

Just like canons, then, awards have the ability not only to circulate and exchange different types of capital, but to generate capital themselves and again to be used to generate capital by other interested agents in the fields of cultural production, not the least conspicuous of whom are the institutions and individuals behind Canada's significant prizes.

Can Can-Con Con?: Counting (on) Canadian Canons

As scholars too numerous to list have implied in their dogged attention to canons,

"the canon equals the longevity of a culture" (Sela-Sheffy 145). Beyond longevity, though, and in cultures that remain, despite long political and social histories, comparatively new in a global context, canons equal the legitimacy of a culture — usually construed nationally

— worth preserving into longevity. Gorak posits that "[d]uring the twentieth century canons have functioned as vehicles for national politics, as declarations of cultural 112 independence by a critical avant-garde, as instruments to calibrate the nuances of creative excellence, and as the source of encyclopaedic, mythical, or historical narratives" (221).

The dominant canons of CanLit then, fulfill the institutional and political desires of the government and the Canada Council for the Arts by continuing to pursue the dissolving ideals of thinkers (and poets) like Thomas D'Arcy McGee who posited in 1857 that

"[e]very country, every nationality, every people, must create and foster a National

Literature, if it is their wish to preserve a distinct individuality from other nations" (qtd. in

Moss, "Strategic" 12). Towards this end of distinguishing 'nation' within and around literary output, it is unsurprising that "canons become a primary device for educating the polis into the ideology of the nation state" (Hunter 18) and its desires for unity, coherence, and civic responsibility. As I will confirm in Chapter 4, Canada's major canons have tended to favour the "thematically coherent and the mythological" (Hunter 26) as means by which to create and legitimize a collective history and culture which can be circulated and exported as a commodity. Hunter notices, then, that "[c]hoices made in canon-formation also seem to necessitate the exclusion of writing which engages in intense formal play, not only because it is in practice more inaccessible, with readers usually having to learn how to read it by exposure and comparison or by training, but also because learning how to read it may focus attention on underlying structure and again provide readers with the strategies by which to diverge from coherence" (20, her emphasis). The existence of structural and non- thematic canons has not been denied here, although those canons have often had their validity as 'Canadian' (or, in extremis, as 'literature') questioned by major critics like D.G.

Jones who asserted in 1984 that the postmodern poetry of Daphne Marlatt, Ondaatje, bill bissett, and Wah "lead[] farther and farther from home, from Canada and from poetry" 113

("Canadian Poetry" 255). The evaluative questions surrounding Canadian canons — like those surrounding Canadian awards — have long been those of nationalism as much as they have been of literature.

This discussion, again, has been more thoroughly and succinctly pursued by Lecker and Davey in the pages of Critical Inquiry and in their subsequent respective books,

Making it Real and Canadian Literary Power. Suffice it to say here that the Leckerian canon is one that has been manipulated and enforced by economic agents and interested cultural workers, and its adoption as the basis for the study of CanLit in the post-secondary institution has both determined the norms and characteristics of CanLit and set the standard against which alternative canons can be built in relation to the dominant one. The

Daveydian canon, on the other hand, is not a canon; it is any number of possible groupings of texts assembled subjectively by any number of agents within the cultural fields. Texts, for Davey, can participate in any number of canons simultaneously, but they are always already exerting and being used to exert differing degrees of power on their respective cultural fields. Where Lecker's canon is reliant upon a master-canon which legitimizes a norm in order to embrace and even support dissent (which thus strengthens its own standing as a legitimate qualifier of literary taste), Davey's refuses binarism and strives to trace the movement and uses of texts throughout various markets of construction and deconstruction; if the Leckerian canon is a mountain against which texts and groups of texts must measure themselves (and thus identify as in-relation-to), the Daveydian canon is an open field in which any number of possible groupings might occur given the push and pull of ever-wrestling winds blowing from all directions. My reductive summarizing of these two positions does not do either position justice, but it sufficiently alludes to the 114

Leckerian fear that the lack of a dominant master-canon will bring the field "not independence and freedom, but fragmentation, and finally anarchy" (Making 68) with solipsistic groups struggling for ownership and supremacy, and the Daveydian criticism that a centralized and nationally-appropriative canon remains insensitive to specificities of region, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. If Lecker's canon, then, is a national one, (and if this canon is but one of Davey's possible canons), we must assume that it is predicated upon a given ideal or essence of representation. Corse suggests that "selection into [a] national canon... [has been] predicated on the responsiveness of texts to the national character [sic] interpretive framework and their amenability to being read through the lens of national character. National canonical status is thus rooted in national exceptionalism" (4). This suggests, of course, "an articulated or unarticulated ideological basis for the canon" which poses "a particularly important question for new canons which include living writers, because the topical issues they address are immediate and may, and indeed do, tend to dominate" (Hunter 22). If indeed awards posit contemporary canons, and given that so much of CanLit is still a not-so-distant memory, the question of Canadian canons needs indeed to address its debts to the major literary awards in the country; they establish and re­ establish the institutional tendency for unity and thematic recognizability, but they also participate in the expansion of canons and the permeability of many of their perceived boundaries. Awards create and address canons that are at once both Leckerian and

Daveydian; they select texts which have apparently proven themselves against the backdrop of their competition, but they also create canons of winners that will necessarily enter and influence larger and more diverse canons of Canadian writing predicated on regional, cultural, ideological, aesthetic, generic, sexual, or thematic lines. They also embody the 115 fleetingness and mutability of canonicity itself by embodying and demonstrating the ways in which literary fields undergo change by discarding texts, and yet remain consolidated by appropriating the contexts of a text into itself.

At this stage it is no pioneering act of criticism to point out the political functions that awards might serve both nationally and globally. Corse notes that "[l]iterary prize winners.. .serve as an international benchmark of the state of national culture" because of the very fact that

literature often serves in part as yet another forum for nationalistic posturing. Like canonical texts, prestigious award winners also may serve political functions. Rather than contributing to the process of nation formation, however, highly visible award winners serve as an ongoing validation of nationhood, as markers of a flourishing national culture and identity. The production and possession of contemporary high- culture genres, perhaps especially literary, is one key avenue for participating in the increasingly global cultural arena, for demonstrating suitability for inclusion in the activities of the world system 'core'. (101)

While critics like Barbara Godard have more thoroughly examined the value of wielding an established national literature on an international stage (see especially "Notes From the

Cultural Field: Canadian Literature from Identity to Commodity"), the political function of national awards within the self-construction of the nation itself remains equally, if not even more important. Perhaps because of the nation-building ethos behind the Massey-Levesque

Commission and the Canada Council itself, the GG Awards have both created and reflected a relatively homogenized vision of Canadian writing, even for its more recent emphases on diversity and transnationality (see Chapter 4). Awards winners that consolidate and/or prefigure CanLit, then, "gain legitimation for their vision of the national experience.

Literary prize-winners, like canonical novels, become one of the representations of legitimated national experience available to society, although with less absolute authority. 116

The status of prize winners, and thus their cultural authority, is more nebulous than that of the canon, the reception of such texts [is] always open to charges of faddism, political favoritism, and the failure to past [sic] the 'test of time'" (Corse 102). If, as I argued above, the receipt of a major award is not a guarantee of, but rather a significant push towards canonicity (especially in Canada where canons and 'contemporary canons' are much closer due to the facts of our foreshortened cultural history), then the relationship between the legitimated national experience (that a winning book is suddenly made to represent) and the imagined reading public is an exclusive one. That is, the prize tells a readership that the work is an example of what "Canadian" "literature" looks like just as dominant canons do.

Again in Canada, perhaps more than in other countries with larger and more lucrative and independent publishing industries, most canons remain inextricably tied to the university or the educational institutions which educate a significant segment of the reading public about Canadian literariness. It is important to note, of course, that both contemporary and long-term canonicity are never solely the territory of academia. W.H.

New goes so far as to imply that, while the machinations of this kind of institutional canon- making worked more covertly, the rise of a literary culture — the likes of which Gord

Ripley largely attributes to the rise of awards (par.l) — in the early and mid-twentieth century set the stage for the fostering of more direct canons: "While scholarly criticism affected general readers indirectly, by influencing teaching practices and the construction of curricular canons, reviews in newspapers, magazines, and broadcast media spoke directly to the book-buying public" (New, '"Read Canadian'" 481). Furthermore, New notes that, facing an ever-growing number of cultural publications with the advent of the little magazine and the industry journal, "readers turned to still other guides [of literary merit]: 117 announcements of national and local prizewinners, weekly lists of bestsellers, weekend entertainment sections of major newspapers, and media interviews" ('"Read Canadian'"

483). Still, though, the division between the academy and a more general imagined readership has always been dubious and negotiable at best. In a categorization befitting of

Stephen Harper and his 'ordinary Canadians,' Lecker posits that "[t]he chief link between academics and the public is students. After all, students originate in and ultimately constitute the public" (Making 241). Placing the question of how certain citizens are socially and politically positioned to become students aside for the moment (see Guillory's

Cultural Capital), this construction of academics as somehow being extra-public verges on the disingenuous. It is true that as professors, academics exert a kind of specialized and exclusive cultural power over given audiences that can then become members of the

'general' public, but to deny the citizenship and subjectivity of the professors as members of that same public is to defer to an unsophisticated binarism. Professors in Canada very often, (and it must be said that Lecker is one of the best examples of such a phenomenon) exert literary citizenship beyond their respective institutions in ways that are significant; they sit on juries, they participate in interviews and cultural media publications, they comprise a reading public outside of the confines of academia, they edit, and they are, quite often, writers themselves. Still, this concession to an imagined ivory-towerism (itself a

Dobsonian 'politics of purity') persists in much conservative criticism. W.J. Keith, who of course enjoyed a lengthy professorial career at McMaster and the University of Toronto, for one, argues that canons are in fact best formed in the halls of academe, otherwise, upon whom would the reading public rely in order to determine quality within the contexts of

CanLit? "[T]he popular reviewers? The writers of literary gossip-columns in our 118 newspapers? The prospect is disturbing" (qtd. in Lecker, Making 42). What is in fact disturbing, however, is the oversimplification and the straw-manning of both academics and the reading public in these constructions of Canadian canonicity. The fear that, in

Canada, "the actual reading community inhabits a tiny island in a sea of illiteracy" (Lecker,

Making 233) suggests a crisis for CanLit, but the even-further division of that island's readers — more Lord of the Flies or Lost than Gilligan's Island — denies the implication of all literary citizens and readers in the processes of canonicity and cultural evaluation, and hinders the ability and desire to examine the processes and politics surrounding the division, if not the island itself as a whole.

I do not mean to denigrate Lecker's arguments in Making it Real, which has been a formative and fertile text for the field and for this dissertation in particular. His eloquent worry that CanLit is moving further and further indoors {Making 5) and becoming inaccessibly specialized is indeed worthy of concern. This is why, I think, a discussion of awards is both timely and necessary to contemporary considerations of fields and the canons upon which they are built. Awards, to put it simply, help to bring CanLit back outside, and back to what everyone hopes (for whatever reasons) will be larger and more engaged readerships. Given that the impact of an award on a winning work's sales can be

"significant" (Luneau and Panofsky 121) and can thus increase its general availability and its chances of entering larger and more permanent CanLit canons, the extent to which

Canadian awards reflect Canadian contexts becomes important in that it begins to explain why Canadian canons — and particularly those represented and solidified by major awards

— exhibit the characteristics that generations of critics have argued that they do. Hunter, thus, notes the potential power of mere accessibility through various conditions in the 119 publishing world and initiatives like awards: "Canons are made up of works which address issues perceived to be relevant, in a generic mode appropriate to their status, and have to be accessible to the reading practices of the public on both counts.. .works also acquire relevance by accessibility alone, simply because they are accessible many people read them and talk about them. Accessibility indicates the degree of intimacy with prevailing ideological patterns toward both issue and structure" (19). While works that 'prefigure'

(and thus enforce) impending shifts in the expectations for CanLit through the receipt of significant awards may indeed take their time in entering larger Canadian canons, their initial stamp of approval via said award initiates a shift in the larger cultural fields of canonicity and literary history through the award itself. Winning works that are immediately better-suited to the delineations of particular canons because of their supposed familiarity to a readership, however, are more likely to gain entrance to those canons rapidly. Althusser, in his discussion of ideology, suggests of any such appropriative and instructive impositions (national canons, national ideologies) that they turn particular particulars into more universal generalities: "while admitting that they do not respond to reality, i.e. that they constitute an illusion, we admit that they do make an allusion to reality" (36) — in short, and for the sake of my argument, the active and natural cultivation of the belief that the Canadian canon reflects something essentially Canadian upon the likes of which the cultural policies behind the GG Awards rely.

The conditions of the processes of canonicity are always unique dependent on the particular specificities of the contexts in which they are played out. Northrop Frye was among the first modern critics to note the game of cultural catch-up going on in Canada in

1965: 120

English Canada was first a part of the wilderness, then a part of North America and the British Empire, then a part of the world. But it has gone through these revolutions too quickly for a tradition of writing to be founded on any one of them... This foreshortening of Canadian history, if it really does have any relevance to Canadian culture, would account for many features of it: its fixation on its own past, its penchant for old-fashioned literary techniques, its preoccupation with the theme of strangled articulateness. (826)

The (ahem) irony here, of course, is that it was largely this particular Frygian utterance that would come to alert a generation of formative critics to recognize these thematic threads he mentions as literarily Canadian. While others have built upon Frye's time-travelling thesis

(perhaps most notably Robert Kroetsch in his assertion that "Canadian literature evolved directly from the Victorian to the Postmodern" ["A Canadian Issue" 1]), Lecker was among the first to address this historical foreshortening in terms of canon-making — a critical move that brought to the fore the fact that economic and extra-textual forces that have always already been integral parts of Canadian canons — however they may be conceived.

Hunter, picking up from this observation as well as that of Frye, argues that "[t]he early federal government strategies for subsidy and award in the 50s and 60s provided many of the first candidates for contemporary canonization. The speed with which these writings were authorized raises in a particularly acute manner the related set of questions about what the canonization of a living writer does to the work of that writer" (24). The relative immediacy of Canadian canons, then — the fact that they are, in very large part comprised of writers whose legacies are still relatively recently minted or who are still in the process of forging them — suggests an even more intimate relationship to the contemporary canons forged by awards. In Canada, to put it bluntly, awards have the potential to hold more sway on an author's national cultural profile, accessibility, and future canonicity, than they might in other (historically broader and deeper) literary cultures. 121

As an extension of this complication that Canadian contexts bring to the relationship between awards and canons, we must address Sela-Sheffy's argument that "canonicity distinguishes certain items as legitimately inconsistent with current norms of cultural production and consumption" (149). Given the closer relationships between canons and prizes here, and given the popular construction of prized CanLit as "Giller-bait" or

"homogenized," I would argue that this has not been the case. Sela-Sheffy continues: "the more strongly an item is sanctioned, the lesser its availability as an active model for interfering with contemporary production or consumption" (148-9). Under this model of canonicity, inclusion into a significant canon actually suspends a text's generativity by frustrating its value in terms of market exchange. As my Case Studies (particularly for

1991) will suggest, and as I argue in my Conclusion, canonized works seem still to be serving as clearly recognizable modes and models for contemporary prize-winning poetry, even if the prized work performs — prefiguratively — the necessary evolution away from the canonized models against which it is necessarily assessed. Even the most cursory glance at a CanLit section in a bookstore or an introductory post-secondary syllabus will suggest this truism. One might think, generically, of the long poem which can be traced back to Oliver Goldsmith the younger, yet which was celebrated in the 1940s by Frye as exemplary of "the best poems of our best poets" (268) in his article "The Narrative

Tradition in English-Canadian Poetry," in the 1960s by Dorothy Livesay with her canonical article "The Documentary Poem: A Canadian Genre," in the 1970s by Michael Ondaatje as editor of The Long Poem Anthology, in the 1980s by Kroetsch as the genre par excellence of postmodern eroticism ("For Play and Entrance"), in the 1990s by critics like Manina Jones

{That Art of Difference) and Smaro Kamboureli (On the Edge of Genre), and again by 122

Sharon Thesen with the updating of Ondaatje's anthology. While each of these critics has proposed and executed major shifts in the history of thinking about the genre by way of moving beyond the cosmologies and canons of earlier critics (see Kroetsch, Lovely

Treachery 132), the example of this model remains fresh and generative in the field, as might that of the short story, traceable back to the Confederation poets and beyond, yet still now the domain of perhaps our finest writer in Alice Munro. The trends are much the same in thematic terms, especially given the current popularity of so-called 'ecopoetry,' or the wild success of historical fiction like Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes. And this is to say nothing of the more literal and direct re-workings of past textual models like Atwood's

The Journals of Susanna Moodie, Kroetsch' s'The Man From the Creeks, or Lorna Crozier and Dennis Cooley's re-workings of As For Me And My House in A Saving Grace: The

Mrs. Bentley Poems and The Bentleys respectively. While Sela-Sheffy does admit that

"[cjanonicity is independent of whether or not the items serve as generative models for current cultural production" (141), the models for canon-formation and canonical change that she observes in different traditions cannot be wholly applied to CanLit. The point could be argued that Canadian literature's false-fronted and fluid canons are not actually yet canons in any larger sense (and Metcalf in fact does mount this argument). If we are still in the very earliest stages of literary development, and the true test of canonicity is time, then circumstances have not yet had the chance to form canons in the way that they are traditionally understood to been formed. Leon Edel, writing in 1944, went so far as to suggest that "Canadian literature quite simply has not yet achieved its own flavour. As soon ask a young boy to be mature. Yet that should not prevent him from being his young self: articulate and full of promise" (70-71). This is not to negate the formative and significant 123 work done towards the imagining of CanLit in the time since the Second World War, but to re-consider the fact that canons, as collections of texts, are generally flexible enough to facilitate a bias towards the contemporary which, in CanLit, arguably coincides with the institutional imperative for canons in the first place. It is undeniable that our view of the canon at present is much more inclusive of the literature of our own, and our preceding eras, than it will be in a century. Works that are seemingly canonical to us may well disappear from the consciousness of our children and certainly from theirs while others that we have soundly ignored may be lauded in hindsight. Such is the nature of canons, and such is the complication that awards pose to canon-formation in Canada.

Even if, then, awards like the GGs have the potential to more significantly affect a text or writer's inclusion in larger canons, there remain no guarantees. Davey, himself a GG nominee in poetry (for King of Swords in 1972) argues that the winning of the prize offers

"no assurance of long-term significance" ("Tales" 5) in larger canons. In fact, Davey argues that the winning books by Robert Finch, James Watson, Douglas LePan, Wilfred Watson,

R.A.D. Ford, John Glassco, Dennis Lee, Miriam Mandel, Milton Acorn have already become forgettable footnotes in larger Canadian canons, while the books of more recent winners like Paulette Jiles, Heather Spears, Lorna Crozier, Don Coles, Robert Hilles, Anne

Szumigalski, and E.D. Blodgett will soon be proven to be similarly forgettable ("Tales" 4).

While he admits elsewhere that significant literary prizes can become a source of "textual certification" ("Canadian Canons" 676) in a given cultural field, he also posits that "[i]t's quite possible that the cumulative results since 1936 would have been equally credible if juries had been confined to drawing up shortlists and the awards had been made drawing the winner's name from a hat" ("Tales" 15). While there might certainly be a case to be made for this statement, the question of canons persists: How are we to distinguish between contemporary canonicity and more 'legitimate' (read: long-term) canonicity with recent work? What, in fact, does "credible" imply in terms of literary history? The fact that the works were shortlisted places them immediately into the very kind of canon that Davey himself has so prolifically advocated; one unbound by strictly evaluative means, yet which is always already thus formed; one in which texts remain on relatively equal footing with regard to cultural hierarchy, yet which demonstrate the influences placed upon them by both literary and extra-literary forces; canons in which any number of combinations, consecrations, and comparisons remains possible. John Ellis' definition of a literary celebrity as a "performer in a particular medium whose figure enters into subsidiary forms of circulation, and then feeds back into future performances" (qtd. in York, Literary

Celebrity 12) is relevant here: if 'prize-winning' can be read as (temporary) shorthand for

'canonical' or at least 'important' when it comes to writers, then the adjective signals their potential staying power as an example and arbiter of literary quality or, indeed, 'Canadian- ness.' The career and canonical profile of any writer who wins a notable Canadian award, as was the case with Mazo de la Roche, must be seen as "a portrait of overlapping, competing spheres of cultural production" (York, Literary Celebrity 74-5). David Solway's complaint that Canadians "have failed to make the necessary distinction between merit and celebrity on which a vital literary culture is predicated" (12) must be re-configured as it comes to understand 'merit' as an equally subjective and fluxing construction as those of

'celebrity' and 'prize-winning.' If my suggestion is true that awards and canons are much more closely linked in CanLit due to a foreshortened and forced cultural history and an unabashed governmental initiative to create a nationally distinctive literary character, then 125 we must not consider this relationship a failure, but rather a fact of our literary-historical contexts and environments. This is certainly not to suggest that hands are tied or that cases are closed, but instead it means approaching these canons within their own contexts and not those of other literary traditions, colonial or otherwise. Case Study —1981

Great Scott!? How Could They Not?

Shortlisted Books: Canadian Poetry in English Bailey, Alfred G. Miramichi Lightning: The Collected Poems of Alfred Bailey. Fredericton: Fiddlehead Books, 1981. McKinnon, Barry. The the. Toronto: Coach House, 1980. Scott, F.R. The Collected Poems ofF.R. Scott. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1981.

Jury Members: Patrick Lane, Raymond Souster, Anne Szumigalski

*

1981 was the first year in which the Canada Council deemed both Poetry and Drama to be worthy of their own categories for consecration. Since 1936 the genres had shared a category and a prize as if they were the self-same kinds of texts with the self-same traditions and standards of evaluation. At worst, they were exchangeable and interchangeable, with one genre deemed, each year, to be worthy of recognition at the expense of the other. In the Poetry GGs' first year as their own category, they consecrated the career-spanning text of a man who was, for all intents and purposes, already a foundational master-figure in the field of Canadian culture and Canadian literature. F.R.

Scott's receipt of the 1981 GG was unsurprising from a political standpoint; it capped off a year in which the by-then-elderly Scott had been feted and consecrated at a major academic literary conference held in his honour in February of 1981 at Simon Fraser University, which included participants like Pierre Trudeau, Louis Dudek and Therese Casgrain. In her written contribution to the conference's proceedings, Casgrain took the opportunity to celebrate Scott's social and political achievements with regard to his work within the politically and culturally volatile province of Quebec by suggesting that "[i]f all Canadians from coast to coast had possessed some of Frank's admirable qualities, our country today 127 would be united instead of having to deal with the severe problems facing us at present"

(3). In the year after the then-uncomfortably close Quebec referendum, the consecration of the life's work of a man who had dedicated himself to national unity and the Quebec question itself, and who was largely responsible for the cultural exchanges between Quebec and the rest of Canada through his translations and his work as a constitutional lawyer, in fact did unite the country, at least on behalf of the institutions behind the GG Awards. In this sense, the 1981 contest represents not so much a courageous and daring coming-out party for the Awards, but a tentative and conservative consolidation of the CanLit national vision and canon. Furthermore, the unnecessary addition to the honours of a poet whom

George Woodcock would dub "Canada's Man For All Seasons" and name as a version of a national poet laureate {Northern Spring 226), can be seen as a two-way consecration which, as with all awards, garners prestige for both the grantee and the grantor by allowing each to tap into and accrue the other's extant cultural capital. Scott had proven himself to be not only consecratable to begin with, but to be consecratable by the GGs, as he had won the

1977 non-fiction GG in non-fiction in English for Essays on the Constitution: Aspects of

Canadian Law and Politics. A collection of his verse translations, Poems of French

Canada, had also won the Canada Council Award for Translation in 1977, and Scott had been awarded the Royal Society's Lome Pierce Medal in 1962.

If Scott's victory is to be seen, then, as a consolidative rearguard action at a moment of uncertainty for both the nation-state and its representative institutions, it is hardly surprising to learn that Scott's literary work has generated countless critical articles and, at last count, seven book-length studies of his literary life. Alfred Bailey's poetry, on the other hand, has been largely ignored by recent critics, inspiring only one significant critical essay 128 and one widely published interview both conducted by the poet's mentee and friend M.

Travis Lane; Lane's declaration in 1986 that "[i]t is time we took another look at the poetry of Alfred G. Bailey" ("A Sense" 1) has not, it seems, been heeded. Similarly, critical responses to Barry McKinnon's poetry have been limited to a light smattering of brief review articles and interviews, mostly in regional and non-mainstream journals and magazines. Despite Patricia L. Belier's claim that Bailey's verse has been "widely anthologized" (in New, Encyclopedia 87), neither he nor McKinnon were included in significant anthologies like Margaret Atwood's New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in

English (1982), Robert Lecker and Jack David's two-volume New Press Canadian Poetry anthology (1982), nor have they been in more recent anthologies like Donna Bennett and

Russell Brown's New Anthology of Canadian Literature in English (2002) or Laura Moss and Cynthia Sugars' recent Canadian Literature in English; Texts and Contexts (2009), in all of which Scott is extensively and centrally featured. In the original Literary History of

Canada (1965), Scott's poetry and satires are mentioned and discussed several times, whereas Bailey is only included as an academic contributor, a contributing editor, and the author of the chapter "Overture to Nationhood." It is my contention that Scott's poetry, by

1981, had already been appropriated into the institutions of the nation, and that it in fact had stood as the very example for what an institutionally appropriate Canadian poetry should do and be. His receipt of the 1981 GG, then, was one that demonstrated the correct and proper functioning of a cultural award, but which also embodied the potential failure of the GG Award specifically to live up to its stated mandate to honour the best poetic work of

1981.

* In his review essay on a posthumous biography of F.R. Scott, Canada's most celebrated poet Al Purdy deemed his friend "a Canadian aristocrat" ("Purdy's Scott" 126) with regard to the sociocultural influence he had exerted over his generation. As Djwa and

R. St. J. Macdonald assert in their introduction to the collection of essays On F.R. Scott,

"[a]ny summary of F.R. Scott's achievements reads as an index to Canadian culture and society over five decades. He was largely engaged by the nationalist movement in art and poetry in the twenties, by politics and constitutional law in the thirties, by internationalism in the forties, and by the struggle for human rights and fundamental freedoms in the fifties and sixties" (ix). Having been born the son of Confederation-era poet F.G. Scott, Scott-the- younger was seemingly already poised to enter the world of Canadian letters with significant moxie and pedigree, but his influence over the conception, and eventually the very constitutional framework of the Canadian nation itself would become difficult to overestimate by the time of his death. According to Djwa and Macdonald, Scott's well- documented work in the fields of literature, law, and politics was all held together by one abiding thread: "It was the concept of a Canadian nation — and then a Canadian poetry and a Canadian constitution to express the cultural, political, and legal aspects of this nationality — that fired his imagination" (x). As in Bailey's case, the majority of Scott's writing was non-fictional, sociological, political, and historical. Nearly all of it, though, reflected Scott's abiding interest in shaping and strengthening the Canadian nation. His notable books including Canada Today: A Study of Her National Interests and National

Policy (1938), Canada's Role in World Affairs (1942), Make This Your Canada: A Review of CCF History and Policy (1943), The Canadian Constitution and Human Rights (1959), and Civil Liberties and Canadian Federalism (1959) all point to a staunchly national citizen who remains convinced of the nation-state's value in serving and representing its citizenry. On this point Scott quibbled with the libertarian anarchist George Woodcock who decried him as a centralist who trusted the state to "safeguard the liberty of individuals" in a move akin to "confiding a herd of antelope to the care of a pride of lions" {Northern

Spring 228). But many of Scott's social and legal contributions to the nation were real and tangible, prompting Woodcock to concede that "[w]e might be much less free as persons now if it had not been for his work in the 1950s" {Northern Spring 228). Scott was, suffice it to say, a Canadian giant in several very significant fields of national definition.

His legendary status within the arena of Canadian social history aside, Scott has come to be seen (along with his friend A.J.M. Smith to whom The Collected Poems ofF.R.

Scott is dedicated) the major Canadian poet of the mid-century, and is widely considered to be the bridge between E.J. Pratt's late Victorian mythologizing and the (post)modern poets of the era of cultural nationalism in the Canadian 1960s. His editorial work in the founding and production of little magazines like The Canadian Mercury, The Canadian Forum,

Preview, Northern Review, First Statement, and Tamarack Review, ostensibly established and serviced an audience for modernist Canadian poetry in the country and laid the foundation for all that was to follow from this movement. Alongside Smith, his editorial effort in producing the "epoch-making anthology" (Woodcock, Northern Spring 229) New

Provinces in 1936 has stood in the annals of Canadian letters, as "rather more than a milestone on the way to a distinctive Canadian literature" (Purdy, "Purdy's Scott" 127).

Scott's own poetry has been described by Louis Dudek as one of divided loyalties and foci

(see "Polar Opposites in F.R. Scott's Poetry") because of the disparity of his two main poetic subjects, the unpopulated northern Canadian landscape and the social (and literal) 131 politics of the Canadian nation-state. The Collected Poems ofF.R. Scott then, naturally, exudes both a poetry of "the northern lakes,/And the fall of a crisp leaf ("Frost in Autumn"

39) alongside staunchly po/z's/policy-based poems like "Ode to Confederation or How It All

Happened" (258) "National Identity" (271) "The Beaver" (280) and "Canadian Social

Register" (292). In reading Scott's politically-infused verse, Woodcock compares him to

Aeschylus, Milton, Marvell, Hugo, Zola, and Tolstoy (Northern Spring 225); in approaching Scott's nature poems, Tracy Ware declares that they "join his friend Smith's as the literary analogue of the work of the Group of Seven" (in New, Encyclopedia 1027).

At 380 pages, then, The Collected Poems ofF.R. Scott achieves a heft analogous to the weightiness of the cultural figure it represents on the 1981 shortlist.

Arranged and edited by Scott himself at the tender age of 82, this book is comprised of 11 sections which arrange Scott's poetic texts into thematic and generic categories which represent his nature poetry, his political poetry, his war poetry, his satires, his translations, and his found poems to name but a few. As a result of the collection's undiscerning breadth, (which Woodcock pins on Scott's "essential honesty" that makes "no attempt to conceal literary weakness or intellectual folly" [Northern Spring 230]), this is a "warts-and- all collection, offering his less inspired divagations as well as his real triumphs"

(Woodcock, Northern Spring 231). Amongst Scott's more widely anthologized poems discussed below, the reader finds curious and ineffectual verses like "Eclipse" ("I looked the sun straight in the eye./ He put on dark glasses" [176]) and "Street Cry":

Mushrooms! Mushrooms! Who'll buy My mushrooms? Fresh from Los Alamos! Very big, One is enough, Who'll buy? Who'll buy? (Ill) which reflect what Woodcock calls "misfiring shafts of wit" (Northern Spring 230) that, under a more discerning editorial eye, may have been excluded on the basis of exhibiting little more than the poet's self-indulgence. There are also several "ephemeral squibs" like

"Creed" ("The world is my country/ The human race is my race/ The spirit of man is my

God/ The future of man is my heaven" [89]) that demonstrate what Woodcock equates to

"hollow rhetoric" (Northern Spring 230) when measured against Scott's more specific, scathing and pragmatic political poems like "W.L.M.K" who "blunted us" and gave us "no shape/ Because he never took sides" (78). Scott was a garrulously oppositional figure in the field of politics much like George Grant, who agreed, in Lament for a Nation, with Scott that "the seeds of Canada's surrender [to American influence] lay in Mackenzie King's regime" (6). Poetically, despite his own well-documented penchant for the imagistic verse of unpeopled landscapes, though, Scott "tried to fill the need that he identified in 1942:

'But alas, all Canadian art has done for us is to teach us to admire our landscape through pictures: it has not yet opened our eyes to our social vices or portrayed for us a glorious future'" (qtd. in New, Encyclopedia 1026).

Second only to his focus on landscape, Scott's poetry of the polis tended to focus on an engagement with the Canadian literary scene of the day. In what is likely Scott's most famous, if not his most anthologized poem, he attacks the members of the Canadian

Authors Association as "[v]irgins of sixty who still write of passion" and "expansive puppets" who "percolate self-unction" and emit a "Victorian saintliness" that is ignorant to the cosmopolitanism of Scott's day. Indeed, 'The Canadian Authors Meet" contains some of the most infamous stanzas in all of Canadian literature:

The air is heavy with Canadian topics, And Carman, Lampman, Roberts, Campbell, Scott, Are measured for their faith and philanthropies, Their zeal for God and King, their earnest thought.

Shall we go round the mulberry bush, or shall We gather at the river, or shall we Appoint a Poet Laureate this fall, Or shall we have another cup of tea?

O Canada, O Canada, O can A day go by without new authors springing To paint the native maple, and to plan More ways to set the selfsame welkin ringing? (248)

By including his own father and namesake in the list of outmoded and zealous and earnest

(if awful) poets, Scott furthers his own alienation from Victorian and Romantic strains that had dominated Canadian verse since its beginnings and signals — as he would in his little magazines and in New Provinces — the dawn of a new era for Canadian verse that would supercede the old colonialism. In terms of Canadian poetry specifically, a particular favourite verse target of Scott's was Pratt, whose epic poems "Towards the Last Spike,"

"Brebeuf and his Brethren" and "The Titanic" had laid much of the groundwork towards a distinctive Canadian poetry by establishing a mythological poetic literature for several of the master-narratives of Canadian history. By pointing to the numerous social and historical injustices committed on behalf of Christianity throughout history, Scott questions Pratt's celebration of the martyrdom of "Brebeuf and His Brethren" by wondering if in fact "priest

[is] savage, or Red Indian priest?" (189). In "Happening at Aldridge's Pond" (201), the speaker (rather unfairly) chastises "Ned" the "scuba poet" from Newfoundland who wrote of "the tin-can death of the Titanic" for the publicized killing of a fin-back whale in an inlet; an incident which Pratt presumably had nothing to do with at all. Most notably, however, is Scott's "All the Spikes but the Last" which begins to write back against the oppressive and forgetful narrative of the completion of the CPR:

Where are the coolies in your poem, Ned? Where are the thousands from China who swung their picks with bare hands at forty below?

Between the first and the million other spikes they drove, and the dressed-up act of Donald Smith, who has sung their story?

Did they fare so well in the land they helped to unite? Did they get one of the 25,000,000 CPR acres?

Is all that Canada has to say to them written in the Chinese Immigration Act? (194)

By undermining and calling into question much of the rhetoric underlying Pratt's more virulently nationalistic poems, Scott both consolidates a Canadian poetic tradition by deeming it to be worthy of correction (see Corse 165), and stages a degree of dissent to the tradition in order "[t]o prove to the world that the nation has shed its colonial past and achieved mature nation status" (Butling 42). Sarah Corse recognizes that, in the development of any national literature, there comes a point when the question '"Do we have a unique national literature?' becomes less important and the focus shifts to reacting to and against the established national tradition" (103). F.R. Scott undoubtedly took his poetic stand by initiating this precise moment in the Canadian tradition. The matter of timing and deferral on the part of CanLit's institutions in recognizing this stand remains another matter altogether, and one with which I will deal more thoroughly below. Suffice it 135 to say, though, that it was largely through Scott's apparent resistance to 'Can.Lit' that

Canadian literature was to become CanLit.

The influence of European modernism so often associated with the Montreal poets of mid-century is certainly evident in much of Scott's poetry, but his opposition to the parochialism and colonialism of Canadian literature that he derides in "The Canadian

Authors Meet" was always tempered with a staunch nationalism that he rooted, according to Djwa and Macdonald, in a distinctive northern landscape that he saw and portrayed as

"open, unexplored, unpeopled," (xi). Despite Thomas Berger's insistence that Scott's poetry allows that "[i]n our northern land there is a place for minorities, and a role for dissenters" (180), significant criticism of Scott's erasure of First-Nations peoples from these landscapes would follow (by Marilyn Dumont, D.M.R. Bentley and others; see Ware in New, Encyclopedia 1027). Indeed, Scott's imagistic nature poetry proved to be "hardly less romantic about the Canadian landscape" (Tippet 28) than other poets and artists of his generation. Inspired by what Maria Tippett calls "the growing movement of social protest at home" (28) that emerged out of the Great Depression, Scott in fact often eschewed the more historical traditions in favour of the pure potential of the land to grow its own national

(poetic) character. In "Surfaces" he urges his readers to forget their imposed cultural history in favour of engaging with an equally ancient Canadian landscape ("Dip your small civilized foot in this cold water/ And ripple, for a moment, the smooth surface of time"

[39]) while in "New Names" the speaker boldly declares "I am more moved by the lake sheen/ When night is come/ Than by all the tales of Babylon/ Or Rome" (40). For a more thorough example of the national potential that Scott saw in the northern landscape, consider "New Paths": Child of the North, Yearn no more after old playthings, Temples and towers and gates Memory-haunted thoroughfares and rich palaces And all the burdensome inheritance, the binding legacies, Of the Old World and the East.

Here is a new soil and a sharp sun.

Turn from the past, Walk with me among these indigent firs, Climb these rough crags And let winds that have swept lone cityless plains, Gathering no sad tales of past endeavour, Tell you of fresh beauty and full growth. (37)

Not only do we see Scott here praising the potential of the landscape to define and shape its

(new) people, but we witness the invitation of community and communality offered by the speaker in terms of establishing what D.G. Jones calls "[t]he sensibility of Canadian poetry" of aspiring towards "the pastoral dream of an organic society" ("Canadian Poetry"

258) that Scott pursued so fervently through his work in politics and law. Although Jones traces this 'sensibility' back to the eighteenth century and the poetry of Burns and

Goldsmith ("Canadian Poetry" 256), he notes specifically that "[t]he vision persists into the twentieth century. It can be glimpsed in F.R. Scott's 'Laurentian Shield,'" ("Canadian

Poetry" 257). Another of Scott's hyper-canonical poems, "Laurentian Shield" has become the archetypal Scott poem: it wonders at the splendour and potential of the northern landscape, it warns of the evils of exploitation, and it aspires to a Utopian ideal in which the

"deeper note" of the "language of life" (58) will be sounded by a new generation of

Canadians. The importance of establishing a textual culture (if not a literature) is also explicit here in the poem's opening lines:

Hidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer, This land stares at the sun in a huge silence Endlessly repeating something we cannot hear. Inarticulate, arctic, Not written on by history, empty as paper, It leans away from the world with songs in its lakes Older than love, and lost in the miles. (58)

In portraying the land as a blank page awaiting "its language" and "[a] tongue to shape the vowels of productivity" (58), Scott suggests that the land can become articulate only through our reading and writing of it (see York, "The Ivory Thought" 47). And as Scott traces its gradual writing, beginning with "pre-words,/ Cabin syllables,/ Nouns of settlement/ Slowly forming, with steel syntax," the hopefulness that the "millions whose hands can turn this rock into children" can curtail "the long sentence of its exploitation"

(58) remains strong. "Laurentian Shield" is a rare poem in which Scott's disparate foci come together to form a more complete and plural exhibition of his poetics.

Within Scott's opposites, though, Woodcock suggests that we might find the institutionally-valued Canadian ideal of cultural harmony within an environment of difference. In this equation, however, it is not Scott's poetry, but the figure of Scott himself who comes to stand in for the Canadian ideal. Biographically, "[t]he authoritarian existed beside the libertarian. The public ideal existed beside the private sensibility. The social planner existed beside the individual rebel. And in his poetry the harshly didactic voice existed beside the purely lyrical. Such contradictions, rare in our staid society, mark Scott as an exceptional being in his time and place, A Canadian of historic importance as well as a historically important Canadian poet" {Northern Spring 228). How, then, could The

Collected Poems ofF.R. Scott possibly be denied its recognition as exemplarily Canadian by the 1981 GG Award? 138

*

The cultural shadow cast by Alfred Bailey across the fields of poetry, history, and the institutions of culture in Canada is similarly impressive, if less public. Also hailing from the mainstream Canadian political and cultural aristocracy (having familial and personal connections to such figures as Sir John A. Macdonald, Lord Beaverbrook, Izaak

Walton Killam, E.K. Brown, Bliss Carman and Sir Charles G.D. Roberts), Bailey dedicated his working life to the recovery and celebration of New Brunswick's cultural history first, and the establishment of the cultural Canadian nation second. A Fellow of the Royal

Society and an Officer of the Order of Canada, Bailey is often considered to be the "father of ethnohistory" ("An Interview" 226), and is widely recognized for his academic historical books like Culture and Nationality (1972), and his co-founding of Canada's oldest literary magazine, The Fiddlehead. Lane admits, though, in her article "A Sense of the Medium:

The Poetry of A.G. Bailey," that he was "never...primarily a poet" (1), but suggests that the only reason he did not achieve a poetic profile similar to that of Scott was because "[h]e was too busy—as historian, archivist, librarian, administrator—working to rescue and reawaken New Brunswick's cultural heritage" (3). Immediately, then, he would seem to be a prime candidate for a consecration such as the GG Award which aims to recognize the values and designs of the institutions from which it emerged. Miramichi Lightning, however, poses a problem to such logic by exploring not a divided poetry like Scott's but a divided poetics that sometimes complicates, contradicts, and runs counter to the patriotic public profile of a poet whose non-poetic work and writing aimed to establish, define, and characterize a cultural imaginary for the nation. 139

While his cultural work off of the page portrays a Bailey interested in national cultural solidarity, much of Bailey's poetry tends to ignore the ideal collectivities underlined by Jones in favour of a more high-modernist individual intellectualism.

Although Scott too claims Eliot as an aesthetic forebearer (predominantly for his satires), it is perhaps the "self-conscious intellectualizing" (Lane "A Sense" 2) in Bailey's poems that more clearly reflects such an influence. According to Lane, it was indeed Eliot who pulled

Bailey's verse out of the realm of comfortably-recognizable Canadian poetry by inspiring him to "writ[e] about something other than nature or love" ( "A Sense" 3). The traces of

Bailey's intellectual and literary pedigree are evident in poems haunted by the voice and landscapes of Eliot (in the Prufrockian "Variations on a Theme" [65]), Yeats (in "The

Unreturning" [19]), and Frost (in "His Age Was On" [27]), while his poems like

"Observations After Kant" (179) and "Disquisition on the Id" attest to his erudition as both a scholar and a poet. In the opening lines of the latter poem, incidentally, the reader senses

Bailey's appreciation of the subconscious and the surreal: "Pond water qualifies frog croak,/ bogans, other wet crevices beside,/ qualify subaqueous blastings./ Dragonfly water flecks up moon water,/ no flake of wind drying below night's loomings" (94). Additionally,

Miramichi Lightning is dotted with poems that celebrate — above clear and direct referentiality or meaning — "the buried words within words, the semantic possibilities of the pun, the decorative and sometimes almost irrelevant surface details of the text, and the literary suggestiveness of context" which Lane aptly characterizes as Bailey's poetics of

"verbal dandyism" ("A Sense" 3). The playful sonority and aurality of a poem like "how in the dark our index page to find" which opens "dock take ship/ trundling/ bundled in funnel's/ smoke; devil take/ sea chop and oil slick" (30) attests to Bailey's experimentalism and sense of textual play, as well as asserting (post)modernist leanings towards the privileging of ambiguity and plurality. The collection's most experimental poem, "time down end," opens with the lines "poem intur caws/ noes noes noes/ thes thips bilk/ free pts and barrels/ fell" (156) and at no point aspires to any kind of coherence of narrative or lyric at all. Most often, though, Bailey's verbal dandyism structures its delight in the materiality of language through more recognizably readerly syntax like that of "Fits and Projections" which begins:

simple apple form is love given out from it the tracks of anti-apples project binomially, sweep towards galaxies of podless nouns (68).

Bailey's is a poetry, then, that can often defer to abstractions and openness which insists that, in the reading of a poem, "[fjhinking is necessary and profitable, but it is a process, a motion in flux, not a seizing of precise patterns" (Lane, "A Sense" 6) and that "life is lived most intensely in the emotional intellect rather than in unexamined sentiment" (Lane, "A

Sense" 1). .

In keeping with its modernist impulse, Bailey's verse also sometimes eschews the rural and the local in favour of the urban and the cosmopolitan in a literary tradition built upon landscape. In an interview with Lane, he suggested of Canada's poets that "[tjhere may be mute, inglorious Miltons in the country, but they would not be mute and inglorious when stimulated. Contemplating the beauty of nature is all very well, but it doesn't accelerate mental interaction. I prefer the city!" ("An Interview" 227). Miramichi

Lightning''?, 187 pages, then, are often imbued with the poetics of an urban sophisticate 141 who, although he regularly deals with the natural world around him, does so through the filter of cosmopolitan intellectualized speakers and storytellers, thus informing poems like

"Megalopolis" which is full of "the skirl/ of the traffic/ that throbbed like an ill-set wheel in his/ burning thought" (25). This is not to suggest that Bailey always eschews the rural or the regional which he upholds so virulently in his non-poetic writing. In fact, the poem

"Here in the East" expresses its regionalism (if not its parochialism) explicitly when it complains that "the barns are empty of grass/ and commerce has moved to the focal canals/ and freight yards/ of the smoking west" and that "[t]he tons of timber buoyed on the bend of the teeming/ river/ are nothing now but a yellowed notation/ in an archivist's scrapbook." The poem hopelessly concedes that, despite being taught their regional history, the children of the Canadian Maritimes "will forget all that and/ go to live in Toronto"

(121). The point remains that, moreso even than Scott in his 380 pages, Bailey the poet, and

Miramichi Lightning, contains multitudes of perspectives, voices, philosophies, and influences.

To suggest, then, that Bailey is definitively a high-modernist poet or an avant-garde writer would be misleading. Bailey is certainly these things at various moments, but considering the full breadth of Miramichi Lightning, this brand of cosmopolitan intellectualism must be said the be closer to the exception than to the rule. Lane, for one, is too generous in ascribing such sophistication to Bailey's poetry entire when in fact, his notably experimental and playful poems are few and far between compared to his more traditional lyric and narrative "Canadian" poems. As a whole, Miramichi Lightning would not elide the criticisms of readers like David Solway who decry the "curious amalgam of nature-and-sociological description that infests [recognizably Canadian] poetic territory" (26). In fact, in her article, Lane celebrates the complexity of thought and the historical and sociological ponderings that typify [Bailey's] mature writing" ("A Sense" 2). In poems like "Canadian Rag Debate" (133), "Confederation Debate" (136-7) and "The Shadow of

Mr. McGee" (134-5) about Thomas d'Arcy McGee, Bailey engages directly in the mythologizing of the archetypal moments in Canadian history. Less directly, poems like

"North West Passage" (37-38), or the sonnet "Elm" (45) engage the stereotypical CanLit trope of the threatening natural world. (The latter poem, for example, warns its reader to

"[l]ook well upon the elm whose wittol root/ roams like a hungry rat the eternal damp/ and sorrowful ground" [45].) Another example of the kind of poetry that fills the majority of

Miramichi Lightning's pages is represented in the opening stanza of "The Night Country":

The night enveloped lakes and

hillocks of the broken country, night noises under their feet or somewhere in the shadowed nearness that seemed to brush their cheeks, to rise and sigh like a great breathing of the sky and earth. They could not stop their ears though they tried to do it. They could not calm their hearts in hazard of the murky gullies that loomed beside them. What was this night country through which they passed? (20)

The subjects in this poem are seemingly assaulted by a landscape that is more wilderness than land — meaning that the threat it poses to the subjects is entirely imagined and proscribed. The poem achieves a tone very similar to that of his friend Roberts' "The

Skater" who is spooked by the "startled hollows," the "fir-gloom" and "hearing the wilderness talk in sleep" as he enters into the "inviolate solitude" of a darkening landscape (32); Bailey's subjects, in turn, encounter a similar' wordlessness" that "left them undone"

(20). Also like Roberts, what Bailey achieves here is a blurring of the wilderness of psyche with that of the landscape. The solution to the question that the night country then poses them is found in any number of collectivities that critics have called organic communities or, more aggressively, garrisons:

They could find no answer to this question and so took counsel together, saying that unless they could make utterance of the holy names there would be no way out, and no end of the night country to be found anywhere, but that it would go on and on in this fashion for ever and ever. (21)

The naming of the night country (the answering of the question), then, provides the only possibility of enlightenment and development for Bailey's subjects. In a poem very reminiscent of Scott's "Lakeshore" entitled "Regression of the Pelasgians," Bailey explores the timelessness of the Maritime landscape and its potential to become (or to be discovered as) a mythical geography that is both concrete and abstract. The poem begins by describing that "the land's features are far and gone to the eye./ A school of slate-backed whales recoups the tide-rips,/ is suddenly gone as our lives are gone" (31). Like Scott's

"Lakeshore," in which

The water's deepest colonnades Contract the blood, and rise to this home That stirs the dark amphibian With me the naked swimmers come Drawn to their prehistoric womb (50), 144

Bailey's speaker notes that "engraved upon the sea an eye looked up./ It was our stare, we had of it a movement seaward" (31) before postulating that

Before the pastures of the sea were green, and all its animals in classic shoals. There was the creep of the sea, the crackle of lightning hills spilling their light like a heat over the shore and out. But here it is hidden and no eye left alive

could hope to beware of a whole sky fathering it. (31)

In its (pre)historical vision, "Regression of the Pelasgians" affirms the impermanence of the land/seascape when compared to the human perception and conception of it. In doing so,

Bailey strikes a familiar note in the world of CanPo by ascribing an agency to the landscape that is indifferent, if not threatening, to human consciousness, yet one which can be, the poem presumes, understood.

Perhaps because of his training as a historian and an anthropologist, Bailey's verse is often imbued with historical material and narrative which, despite his erstwhile preference for the provinces of the intellect, works to delineate a usable and affirmable past for Canada and its citizenry. Most blatant in this regard would be poems in which he puts his ethnohistorical training to work and re-envisions/appropriates the histories and myths of

Canada's indigenous peoples. In this regard, poems like "Algonkian Burial" (75), "Lament for the Montagnais" (76), and "Thuja Occidentalis" (77) echo D.C. Scott's better First-

Nations poems by acknowledging (in however flawed a manner) the historical presence and legacy of First Peoples within the Canadian geographical imaginary. Lane notes that

"Bailey had from his earliest childhood a strong sense of history as multi-cultured, multi- layered" and that he demonstrates in his poems a "sense of human history as a fluid and altering web of interactions rather than of stable patterns" ("A Sense" 5). Particularly, a poem like "Hochelaga" manages to predict the kind of historical and cultural archeology that would come to such productive fruition in the work of postmodern poets like Purdy and Robert Kroetsch by intimating both the productivity and the futility of trying to excavate a landscape's history. The poem opens as "[t]he steam-shovel spits and coughs" and "[t]he pick-axe/ at best does little more than scratch this hard/ ground" (78) as it attempts to access the past. Aside from the ineffectiveness of technological tools in recalling the past, Bailey manages in the poem to emphasize a postmodern understanding of synchronous history — the invitation for the haunting of ghosts, if you will — that, while deferring to the stereotype of Rousseau's Noble Savage and appropriating his voice, brings the history underfoot alive for the contemporary reader:

The bones of Hochelaga and the bones of this generation draw nearer as the clock ticks the seconds into centuries. My Mohawk wife is of the Turtle clan. She has a field of maize three arpents wide. My bark lodge grows smoky and I walk outside. The hatchet wielded rightly does not fail to scatter brains for fertilizer here (78)

This speaker, though, is not himself relegated to the past, but refers to the very moment of the poem's composition by pointing out that "[a]cross the river where a dog walks/ there was a warrior roasted on a spit/ within a musket-shot of the old French fort" (79). The infusion of a particular landscape and a particular history with a mythology that opens historical possibility and forges new ties to a contemporary readership is no small feat, nor is it out of step with the institutional imperatives to foster just such an appreciation in its citizenry through art that would come to structure twentieth-century cultural production in Canada. Indeed, in Miramichi Lightning, Bailey "presents] history as memory, legend, emotion, conflict, and interaction, and as presence — not as a stable description, but as a living and mutable web" (Lane, "A Sense" 1). This movement towards a more

(post)modern understanding of history and the palimpsestic nature of colonization offers a bridge between Scott's strident and essentializing nationalist histories and McKinnon's disavowal of history altogether as poetic fodder in The the. Bailey's verse, despite being at times "charmingly patriotic" and displaying a "blatant, sentimental patriotism" (Lane "A

Sense" 6, 7), often resists realism and privileges intellectual and linguistic play over straight declarativity. Still, Bailey's simultaneous fascination with (re)establishing cultural and mythical histories to Canadian geographies makes his poetry more readily recognizable as CanLit. Against a lesser cultural figure than F.R. Scott (or rather against Scott's poems, of course), Bailey would likely have been an ideal candidate for consecration.

On the critic's more cynical days, s/he might be tempted to suggest that Barry

McKinnon's shortlisting for The the performs the role of both regional and stylistic tokenism to which George Bowering suggests the GGs aspire ("Of Prizes" 4) in their processes of speaking for the nation entire. As if to directly engage the storied and tradition-bound eastern-Canadian poetic profiles of both Scott and Bailey, McKinnon exists as the consummate outsider to the CanLit nation in nearly every facet; making his physical and literary home in Prince George, BC, where, as a poet he, in 1983, felt "totally isolated, alienated" ("Interview 165) from any kind of cultural community, McKinnon has eked out both a career and a living as a poet only at home in the margins. As a national cultural figure, he remains of the hinterland even in the context of his already-alienation from the CanLit centre through his initial Western-ness. To Scott's foundational work in the nation's biggest little magazines and Bailey's quarterbacking of The Fiddlehead, MacKinnon offers his employment at the then-radical Talonbooks. To Scott's tome from McClelland &

Stewart and Bailey's meaty Collected from Fiddlehead Books, McKinnon's comparatively slight 92-page bpNichol-edited Coach House publication reflects a marginality of both practice and ethos in the realm of poetics. McKinnon's own active shying away from publishing in book-form and his alternative preference to "revive that whole notion of the chap-book" so that "you don't have to go begging for grant money or much in the way of facilities" ("Interview" 161) suggests a further incongruity in terms of public patronage and nationally-distributable text that reinforces McKinnon's ideological resistance to much of the very framework sustaining and (re)producing Canadian poetry like that of Scott and

Bailey.

The the is undoubtedly the most formally and stylistically innovative of the three books on the 1981 shortlist, and, it must be said, the most accurately reflective of the general poetics of the moment. Soon after the publication of The the, Jones would deride the influence of "the philosophy of process" ("Canadian Poetry" 254) emerging from the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty that had begun to reveal itself in the poetry of

Canada's emerging postmodern poets by suggesting that this turn "leads farther and farther from home, from Canada and from poetry" ("Canadian Poetry" 255). Jones, as evidenced above, privileged the imagined organic unity of earlier Canadian verse like that of Scott as characteristically 'Canadian,' despite the fact of a place like Prince George's geographical inclusion in the country's political reality. Despite Jones' resistance to the impending postmodern aesthetic turn, his recognition of the "bias of Canadian poetry"— that the 148

(conspicuously gendered) Canadian poet "orients himself in space, in relation to an immediate environment, which may mediate some more ultimate or divine reality but which remains for the English-Canadian primary" ("Canadian Poetry" 255) — might be argued to be one of McKinnon's primary concerns in The the. It remains a collection largely formed by its place. While the book's specific landscape is itself on the far edges of the 'English-Canadian primary,' it does provide a more ultimate reality for McKinnon that enforces, by its 'nature,' a newer poetics of process and provision than is established in the poetry of Scott and Bailey, and that would come to characterize much postmodern poetry in the 1980s and 1990s.

In a sense, McKinnon writes as if his specific geographical isolation has freed him from the canon and constraints of more mainstream Canadian poetry that privileges the naming of geography, history, mythology, Romantic realism, or cultural irony. In an environment where "everybody seems hostile and against any kind of this so-called sensitivity to the world" ("Interview" 165), McKinnon's verse adopts a focus that leads him to evade and dismantle the lyric impulse. In "Living Here," he writes "the death of a lyric/ poet is living here//at the end of the line" (26) where, McKinnon claims in an interview,

"[y]ou keep observing, you keep seeing things that don't quite make sense. You're constantly reminded really what this civilization's come to, at least the industrial part of it. I think it was important for me to get to a place like this" ("Interview" 168). It is not only the industrial impulse that facilitates The the 's poetics of isolation and realism, but also the fact that in Prince George, McKinnon claims, "[t]here is no reading public" and those readers that do exist are "looking for 'moose' rhymes and so forth" ("Interview" 167) that are characteristic of more Romantic Canadian poetry which elides the real relationships that humans have with their natural surroundings. Thus, one of the book's (ironic and sarcastic) epigraphs is taken from a radio advertisement for a local poetry contest promising that

If you write poetry this is your chance to be discovered (CKPG Radio, Prince George) (9).

If, for McKinnon, the human and the natural cannot be reconciled, and if they are both, because of a limited or old-fashioned readership, contributing to a new poetics, then the isolation spurred by McKinnon's lack of poetic and national community becomes, in The the, an over-turning of "the pastoral dream of an organic society" ("Canadian Poetry" 258) that Jones characterized as the essential thread uniting Canadian poetry. The geographical and social landscape that inspires The the is explicitly un-organic, as well as being un- communal; they are industry-scarred wildernesses that lead to a hostile and exclusive versions of the Frygian garrison, and that re-form the Laurentian thesis by doubling the isolation and aggressiveness of the environment by eliminating the comforts of community.

For the speakers of The the, "the whale/ is no illusion" ("The Whale" 32) — it is doubly threatening.

Mark Cochrane has noted that, "[s]uspicious of knowledge systems, wary of falsehood and phoniness, McKinnon is uncommonly adept at writing around his subject...registering observations before they sublimate into fixed ideas" (in New,

Encyclopedia 731). Like Bailey, then, McKinnon often prefers to elide concrete descriptions of things, 'Canadian' or otherwise, in favour of wandering in the ambivalences and possibilities around them. As a result of this troubled relationship to subject and surroundings, then, McKinnon's poetry in The the aspires to shirk the artifice of more traditional poetry of place by focusing on the immediacy and mutability of all human constructions including that of nature. Resisting, then, the impulse of poems like Scott's

"Laurentian Shield" or Bailey's "Night Country" that move toward establishing a broad history or a cultural legacy, McKinnon believes that "[t]he impermanence of everything gives things a sense of urgency" ("Interview" 171) that needs to be reflected in the poetry by an emphasis on process and becoming, not obfuscated by illusory constructions of national history, mythology, or character. In explaining the difference between his poetics and those of earlier poets, he claims that "[t]he rational mind never interested me much.

The beauty of poetry is that all of those structures that were imposed for whatever reasons just don't work in poetry.. .With poetry — the mind, collision and flight of ideas, the interesting combinations of words and language that might not be grammatically and syntactically correct but still..." ("Interview" 169). As a result, The the is a collection that

"rejects the phrase line and conventional syntax in favour of quirky breaks, enjambment, scattered notation, contrapuntal voicing, and shifting points of view" creating a poetry that is "circumspect, laconic, fragmentary, and poised in the moment" (Cochrane in New,

Encyclopedia 731). As a result, there exists a tension in McKinnon's poetry between the lyric and the anti-lyric that attempts to access a more accurate and genuine version of the real in the things that it addresses. In the collection's title poem, McKinnon suggests that, from where he is, "the real is different: strippers in The Canada/ are ugly and bruised — better than most poetry — but not/ beautiful/ if you look close" ("The the." 73-74). "The

Canada," presumably a bar or strip club, must also stand in for the poetic tradition it denotes here: it is full of artifice, bad poetry, and beauty that is not true or legitimate when closely examined because it, like the strippers, is selling an illusion through the office of 151 the lyric. In the long poem "Sex at Thirty-One," the speaker admits "the fool in me is an old lyric — the disembodied/ source I long for" (54), but not the one that The the, as a whole, pursues. Instead, McKinnon himself elsewhere admits that in the poem "I was trying to write an old lyric poem that I'd already beaten to death, or something like that. So

I really was on some kind of search for forms" ("Interview" 165-166). This would come, I think, to set The the far enough apart from the conventions of CanPo at that time as to further reduce its chances of being consecrated against the two giants with which it shared the 1981 shortlist.

In a way, The the is well matched to the collected collections of Scott and Bailey; it is not a collected works per se, but it does represent the bringing-together of several suites, sections, and individual poems that McKinnon had previously published as chapbooks and broadsides between 1975 and 1980. The most immediate difference between the three shortlisted books, however, may be in the ways that they have been presented to their readers. While Scott and Bailey's works offer comprehensive and closed tomes encompassing the product of entire careers, The the is itself the embodiment of process.

Like bpNichol's completely incomplete Martyrology, Robert Kroetsch's ever-shifting

Completed Field Notes, and perhaps even like Whitman's constantly rustling Leaves of

Grass long before them, The the's resistance to textual stasis and collectedness becomes a significant part of its overall poetics. McKinnon's poems here concede immediately that

"poetry won't allow all to be told. this is a fact" ("The Organizer" 67) and insist that they are not to be taken as final declarations, nor as final versions of themselves. The book's opening page actually houses a photocopy of a handwritten draft of the "The

North," a typed version of which appears on the facing page (12). Other handwritten versions of poems are speckled throughout the book's opening section, complete with edits, crossed-out stanzas, and amendments, and in poems like "In the Face of It No One Wld

Touch Her" (15), and "Bingo/Dance" (19), the typed lines are altered and manipulated by handwritten punctuation, strike-throughs, and marginalia. Along with the inclusion of poems like "a draft" (80) and "Six Songs for a Small Lounge" which contains only four stanzas and trails off "forgive me// that these songs go unfinished" (42), The the is an exercise in becoming. The title section of the book, 'The the. (Fragments,' itself remains consciously open, while the book's closing section, 'Wired Music' is referred to by

McKinnon in a 1983 interview as the beginnings of a project that the poet has continued to craft since the book's 1980 publication ("Interview" 172). The book remains not a permanent collected but an ongoing project of impermanent collection.

None of this is to suggest that McKinnon's work in The the, or his poetics in general, are entirely without precedent within the Canadian tradition. As I have suggested, there must exist within the work some modicum of recognizability and accessibility as

CanLit (if not as prizeable CanLit) in order for a work to be brought forward for potential consecration in the first place. Corse puts it bluntly: "Contemporary prize-winning literature is driven by an ongoing national cultural dialogue and chosen within that tradition" (128), even if the relationship it posits to that tradition is an oppositional or antagonistic one. In The the, however, there is in fact much evidence in this collection to suggest a direct engagement with the poetry and poetics of mainstream CanLit. Take

McKinnon's "Bushed," for example:

I am in a desert of snow, each way to go, presents an equal choice, since the directions, & what the eye see's is the same

if there were some sticks, you wld stay & build a house, or a tree wld give a place to climb for perspective, if you had a match, when the wind didn't blow, you wld burn the tree for warmth, if the wind didn't blow & you had a match

there is this situation where love wld mean nothing, the sky is possibly beautiful, yet the speculation is impossible, & if you could sing, the song is all that wld go

anywhere (12)

In addition to the lack of a match and the ceaseless wind that is preventing the warmth of a fire (via the burning of wld), the landscape here enforces a predicament in which love itself is usurped by a sense of stasis. The speaker here is not himself trapped, but his addressee, rather, is one who might fall prey to the overwhelming panic of isolation that McKinnon seems to borrow from Margaret Atwood's "Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer." Atwood's pioneer, like McKinnon's speaker, "stood, a point/ on a sheet of green [white] paper/ proclaiming himself the centre" and eventually shouts "Let me out!" (780) upon suspecting that "unstructured/ space is a deluge" (782). Perhaps a more appropriate connection is forged to Atwood's poem "The Wereman," whose speaker describes how her "husband walks in the frosted field/ an X, a concept/ defined against a blank;/ he swerves, enters the forest/ and is blotted out" {Journals 19). The title of McKinnon's poem also calls out to the poem of the same name by Earle Birney, and we might suspect that the song sung by

McKinnon's subject shares its origins with that which Birney's hermit (who built his own 154

"shack on the shore") waits to "come singing into his heart" (59). Elsewhere, McKinnon's

"Journal: Earl's Cove July, 1978" seems even to address the Frygian bush garden of

Atwood's "Dream 1: The Bush Garden" which has "gone to seed" (Journals 34):

leave the garden wild, or trim it back with tools only held by hand, with your own sweat know it will all come back

this may haunt some &

give purpose ("Journal: Earl's Cove July, 1978" 78)

Elsewhere there are traces of conversations with other established Canadian voices filtered through McKinnon's poetics of wonderment and process. Most obvious is perhaps the trace of Purdy's beer-drinking, bar-fighting "At the Quinte Hotel" that undergirds the following passage from McKinnon's "Pearl":

I know everything & ponder the mysteries of the Prince George Hotel: dark, 4:30PM ponder the imported Vegas singer — what does he think of it — the town, where someone sd everyone seems to be missing a & has a split mouth from an authentic drunken fight (20)

Here, Purdy's opportunistic philosopher who engages his immediate community with fists and wit becomes McKinnon's isolated yet standoffish speaker who merely wonders at the lives of others while being sure to emphasize his separateness in an 'authentic' wilderness of hostility.

In addition to the collection's geographical specificity in poems like "Bathtub Races

(Nanaimo" (33) and "Nanaimo Bars" (40) (about drinking establishments, not desserts) which serve to render places literary even if "I left my heart in/ Prince George does not work, we are out/ of context" ("Bingo/Dance" 19), The the is speckled with the imagery of northern landscapes dotted with trees, lakes, and haunted by the call of geese and ravens 155

(see, for example, "Astoria" 13, "Willow" 27, and "Wired Music" 91). The absence and emptiness of the Canadian landscape is also prevalent in The the, as it is in Scott's northern poems, though McKinnon's designs remain less declarative and appropriative than those of poems like "New Paths" or "Laurentian Shield." Again, like Earle Birney's "Can.Lit" in which "it's only by our lack of ghosts/ we're haunted" (49), the search for historical or heroic presence in Canada depends primarily on the searcher: "there is no possibility for an/ epic I this lack of heroes, unless/ it's yourself inside & outside these//details"

(McKinnon, "Notes: the deer" 36). Furthermore, The the demonstrates a prophetic evolution in the development of Canadian nature poetry by exhibiting a staunchly ecological conscience that moves beyond the lamentations and fears of most of Scott and

Bailey's verse. McKinnon's speakers, by speaking around their natural subjects and not for their natural subjects, predict the surge of ecopoetics and poetic ethics that would come to the fore in more recent discussions of eco-literary approaches to nature, landscape, and environmental colonialism. In the collection's opening poem, for example, the speaker realizes of the land that "possession is nine tenths of the law/ theft makes up the rest" and wonders "what men have walked these/ woods, carried chains/ & instruments/ of exactitude," ultimately recognizing the foolhardiness of such attempts at mapping and colonization, and deciding that "to own nothing becomes/ achievement" ("The North" 11).

Elsewhere in The the, the speaker traces this same foolhardiness out from the land and into the sea, which embodies the very impossibility of human ownership or possession of land:

"these/ small facts & natural laws for perspective, as neighbours/ shout across the bay, argue ownership/& legal lines/ of trespass. yet I know/ below the tide, anyone!lean swim" ("real estate" 38). As an extension of this recognition of the human hubris inherent in 'capturing' the land, the ecological sophistication of nature poems like "Willow" (27) and "Notes: the deer" (35) emphasize the poststructural gap between word and world by underlining the impossibility of genuinely representing natural phenomena in language.

McKinnon offers, in the end, a concession to the human-nature stereotypes of CanPo when, in the collection's closing, untitled poem concedes "so it goes, slowly to realize yr own/ mortality: it gives the trees an edge & a/ beauty" (91). Even if this connection that the speaker forges between the dependence of nature's beauty on the human perception of it, McKinnon manages to manipulate many of the tenets of Canadian poetry in order to fashion a new voice that, in The the, articulates its own transience in the place that the poetry of Scott and Bailey attempt so vigourously to populate with a sense of permanence, legitimacy, and history.

The 1981 contest offers us, I believe, a near-perfect glimpse into the inherent imperfections of the awards system and of the economy of awards in general; in their inaugural year of generic independence, the GGs in English-Canadian poetry functioned in precisely the way that I have suggested that institutionally initiated cultural awards inherently function. The institutions (the Canada Council, the GGs) recognized themselves within the winning work (because, of course, the vision of that work was essentially adopted by the institutions) and thus publicly reaffirmed their ideological values through the consecration. Politics and the otherwise extra-textual undoubtedly contributed to the consecration by factoring in the symbolic and cultural capital at stake on the shortlist, and by navigating the possibilities of both tapping into the cultural capital attached to Scott, and contributing their own prestige to Scott's legacy. At the same time, the awards, and specifically, the GG Awards, expose the glaring aporia between their stated intentions to, literarily, celebrate the best book of poetry of the year, and their actual consecration of a

CanLit figure rather than a CanLit text; in this regard, they fail spectacularly in fulfilling their stated mandate, and yet manage to succeed stupendously in fulfilling their unstated institutional function. It worked, then, in precisely the opposite fashion that Scott himself proposes in his poem "Prizes":

Prizes are gifts from the old To the young who are old.

Those who have arrived Search in the mirror of youth For their own reflection. (81)

There is also the matter of differing evaluations of literary merit. Despite his centrality in the canons of CanLit, Purdy, for one, willingly admitted of Scott that "his poetry was not exactly top-drawer, although something much better than a mediocre average. But I wish he'd been better than he was, in that medium he cherished" ("Purdy's

Scott" 130), and Frank Davey has argued that "Scott received his [GG Award] belatedly... and largely for poems earlier judges had considered unworthy" ("Tales" 7), thus implying that Scott's consecration was due, yet without being earned, and pointing out the fact that none of his seven books of verse nor his two poetic translations had been deemed consecratable by earlier juries. George Woodcock suggests of The Collected Works ofF.R.

Scott, that "[w]hat Scott obviously understood.. .is that a poet's collection is much more than a garland of the best poems, even more than a monument to a memorable career, which is what it probably seems to the publisher and to most of the readers" (Northern 158

Spring 231). If not a collection of a writer's 'best' poems, then, we must ask what qualifies it for consecration as the best single work from a given year?

The actual work that Bailey and Scott undertook throughout their non-poetry careers was foundational to the institutions that would come to form the institution of CanLit as a whole. The Award, even if it mistakes work (v.) for work (n.) in 1981, still recognizes the values, designs, and ideologies underlying its very existence in the symbolic capital propping up Miramichi Lightning and The Collected Poems ofF.R. Scott. These poets, in a sense became the CanPo that the GGs are designed to recognize and celebrate by virtue of their work in erecting the sustaining framework of CanLit. It is little surprise then, that

McKinnon's postmodern text might never have stood as a true contender for the Award at all. In fact, in an interview with Don Precosky conducted shortly after McKinnon's shortlisting and non-receipt of the GG, he expresses a resistance to the very framework out of which the Award itself had emerged, and that both Scott and Bailey played significant roles in erecting:

I thought it was a wonderful joke in a way to have [been shortlisted]. In another way there is this feeling.. .gee.. .living out here, feeling isolated this long, if I won that award what the hell would I do? The first thing that came to mind was, it's the kiss of death, so if I won I'd probably feel really shitty, and if I didn't win it, well, who cares?...a bit more recognition, a couple of more reviews, a couple more readings, for whatever it's worth.. .it was an interesting experience but it'll soon be forgotten. (172-173)

By realizing the fleetingness and transience of such a recognition from the nation,

McKinnon represents a threat to the consolidated nation by resisting his appropriation into it through the office of the Award. Still, though, it is important to recall that Scott's verse

— once considered to be equally threatening to the nation and considered avant-garde — had since been appropriately recuperated into the national literature to the extent that it had, 159 by 1981, become the mainstream. In reading The the alongside more recent work in 2009, it becomes clear that McKinnon's style and aesthetics have become naturalized within the

CanPo tradition to a certain degree through a similar move towards critical and popular recuperation. Even if "the nation supports oppositional culture, it also co-opts (and thereby normalizes) the work of radical writers to its nationalist goals" (Butling 42) by recognizing it as (at least potentially) consecratable, and therefore jumpstarts the processes of the work's recuperation into the mainstream CanLit of the future. Scott, the poet who Dudek called "the clearest poetic voice of this century in Canada" ("Polar Opposites" 43) and whose "poetic voice and distinctive evolutionary landscape are reflected in poets as diverse in tone as Al Purdy and Margaret Atwood" and stands, "with E.J. Pratt and Earle

Birney.. .as one of the major twentieth-century Canadian poets" (Djwa and Macdonald xiii), might hardly have been able to lose in 1981, but the process of his recuperation took well over half a century. McKinnon might expect a phone-call, by this sarcastic rationale, around 2030.

In a sense, then, the politics and poetics of the jurists seem relatively inconsequential in 1981. The Award and the institution behind it achieved a desirable result through the agents on the jury who proved themselves to be complicit with the logic of the prize. There is little fodder, really, to incite any kind of scandalous aura around the 1981 jury consisting of Szumigalski, Lane, and Souster. In terms of conflict of interest, there might exist the fact that Souster (who won a GG in 1964) had his earliest poems published in Preview, and that Andrew Stubbs has suggested that as a poet in his own right he "found his major affinity with politically-aware, leftist-oriented writers in Canada such as F.R.

Scott, Dorothy Livesay, and John Sutherland's First Statement Group" (in New, Encyclopedia 1062). Patrick Lane, himself a GG winner in 1978, shares little aesthetic and political ethos with Scott outside of being a "populist poet" (Querengesser in New,

Encyclopedia 609), and any connections to the prairie-poet Szumigalski, who would win her GG in 1995, seem even more tenuous. Further traces of scandal — that Bailey's work on the Social Sciences Research Council of Canada and the Humanities Research Council led to the "Canada Council [coming] into being" (Bailey "An Interview" 244), or that Scott was in "the prophetic vanguard of an idea" (Dudek, "Polar Opposites" 31) in his advocacy for the introduction of the Canada Council (to say nothing of the fact that, in 1981, Scott's former student Timothy Porteous was the Director of the Canada Council itself [Djwa and

Macdonald xx]) — seem to lack substance. Woodcock was correct to note the irony between the laudatory Scott conference at SFU and "The Canadian Authors Meet" when he suggests that "it was evident that the mulberry bush had indeed been there and much circled" (Woodcock, Northern Spring 226). The GG consecration, then, helped to assuage

Al Purdy's warning in his poem "On the Death of F.R. Scott" that "it will not be forgiven us/ if a man like this is entirely wasted/ another leaf fallen in a maple forest/ become humus on the forest floor" (Beyond Remembering 463) by ensuring that, officially at least, the

Canadian nation had named Scott as one of its cultural exemplars.

Whether we see the 1981 GG contest in English-Canadian Poetry as the institution lagging behind the field and celebrating the last gasps of Canadian poetic modernism, or as the dominant CanLit canon asserting itself by celebrating its own constitutive texts, the critical reader suspects that it is an instance of the prize being awarded to the poet and not the work. That the GG ceased considering collected works after Al Purdy's GG win in

1986 must be seen as an attempt at correcting such a situation as the 1981 shortlist 161 presented its jurors, as in earlier and later years respectively, both Miramichi Lightning and

The the would have been very strong contenders for consecration given the parameters I have elsewhere suggested. The Collected Poems ofF.R. Scott might readily be called The

Collected Works ofF.R. Scott. That earlier juries had deemed his poetry unworthy of recognition despite, like Purdy, their possible desire for the work to be better, suggests that the texts of both Scott and Bailey that were presented to Lane, Souster, and Szumigalski offered nothing new to the world of CanLit; what was offered were not texts, but the collections of two lives of service to the genre and a field that the Award represents: the sum of poetic achievements over a pair of lengthy careers of more than fifty years each.

The importance of their contributions to these fields has never been questioned, but their textual contributions to the bodies of CanLit are more remarkable for their size, and range, and what they represent. By the logic of the prize, to ignore the magnitude of these contributions to the field and the nation would be tantamount to failure, or the failure at least, to engage in an economy of prestige that would pay out symbolic dividends to all involved. The best book of English-Canadian poetry, then, might have had very little to do with the 1981 selection at all. 162

Chapter 3

Restating the Nation: The Canada Council, Nation-State Ideology, and the Institutionalization of CanLit

Isn't it amazing what you can accomplish When you don't let the nation get in your way? No ambition whisperin' over your shoulder... Isn't it amazing? You can do anything! The Tragically Hip, "Fireworks"

In his 1944 introduction to Canadian Accent — an anthology of selections by

Canadian writers designed to be sold to European audiences — editor Ralph Gustafson provides the following apology for Canada's (lack of) literary cultural history:

In the urgency of utilizing her material resources, of building her cities, Canada meantime was largely content to import her culture ready-made from easy and inexpensive sources. The standard inevitably was low and false. The result was critical dislocation. The imprint of an English or American publisher became the criterion of excellence. The Canadian publisher had perforce to by-pass Canadian manuscripts. The practice of the arts came to be generally regarded as a luxury for sporadic self-indulgence; the poet or writer himself puritanically suspect. National identity was in danger of being lost, for the spirit of a nation is nowhere more secure than in its literature. (7)

As a primer for many of the overtly nationalist pieces in the anthology, Gustafson's introduction reflects much popular thinking of the time with regard to the lack of tangible

'spirit of nation' yet produced by Canadian artists in their works. And while Gustafson argues, eventually, that this situation was on its way to being remedied (offering Canadian

Accent as evidence), the call to fuse the 'sporadically self-indulgent' arts with the 'spirit of the nation' did not go unheeded. The assembly of the Royal Commission on the National

Development of the Arts, Letters, and Sciences Commission (known popularly as the

Massey-Levesque Commission) was just 5 years away, and the Canada Council for the Arts would be theorized, instituted, and operational within just over a decade. Given Gustafson's 163 implicit cultural embarrassment in the above passage, it becomes (only slightly) less absurd that John Metcalf believes that "Canadian literary culture dates, roughly speaking, from

1957 when The Canada Council was founded" {What Is 96). In making the same point

(somewhat less conspiratorily), Richard Cavell argues that the Canada Council has instituted "a system of cultural funding remarkable both for its immense generosity and for its statist interventions in what is often conceptualized as the culturally and socially isolated sphere of literary production" (86). While Metcalf s 'speaking' is certainly 'rough,' I find it difficult to disagree with his further suggestion that "[Canadian literary culture] is almost entirely the creation of the State. It continues largely dependent on state subsidy. The State desires a literature because it seems to believe that a literature is one of the marks of a mature and civilized country and because it seems to believe that the possession of a literature will somehow unify us as a people and define our national identity" (What Is 96-

7). While he also treads too closely to hyperbole here in his construction of the Canada

Council as a strawman, the ringing of truth in his sentiment is difficult to deny.

As if heeding Gustafson's call directly, the state take-over, or rather, structural invention, of a national arts community through the Canada Council remains not only the single-most important moment in Canada's cultural history to date, but also much of the very reason itself that we might begin to speak about 'Canadian cultural history' without immediately falling into oxymoronic contradiction. In light of the astronomical amount of

CanLit 'work' done already in the interest of defining, placing, and re-placing the nation through its literature, my goal in this chapter is to heed Diana Brydon's call that we "need to pay as much attention to the state as we have to the nation. Not only must we pay attention to institutions, but we must also value them for how they can enable literary work, 164 even while recognizing the constraints that they impose and seeking to reform them to better match the needs of our profession" ("Metamorphoses" 2-3). The discussion of the

Canada Council, the GG Awards, their relationship to nation-state ideology, and the definition of a national literary aesthetic through critical and creative work that follows is designed, in part, to recover the possibility of the nation-state in the current age of transnationalism and to observe how its apparatuses like the GG Awards have become increasingly outmoded with the increasing power of transnational capitalism (Habermas

65) and globalizing conceptions of culture.

Instituting Institutions

The reason that Metcalf's facetious remarks about the late beginnings of Canadian literary culture have drawn such ire from fellow writers and critics is that they consciously, in fact willfully, ignore several centuries of cultural production in and about Canada, and several decades of sustained, structured, and subsidized cultural promotion by arts organizations, societies, and artists' groups around the country. Maria Tippett, in a more positive — and historically removed — assessment of earlier organized cultural production in Canada than Gustafson's, argues that in fact a mature and burgeoning cultural life was extant in Canada prior to the institution of the Canada Council (see also Woodcock,

Strange Bedfellows 31-52). She notes, with a generous idealism that collides directly with

Metcalf s cynicism here, that had there not been bustling cultural communities, even if they were nearly exclusively regional, the cultural maturity warranting the support and professionalization offered by the Council would never have been noticed by government in the first place: "it was not until the country's population growth, political unification, economic strength, and technological sophistication were sufficient to produce a wide range of organizations, institutions, and patrons that a foundation able to support a reasonably mature cultural life appeared" (x). Tippett also points out that there were extant cultural organizations that claimed national scopes and scales operating in pre-Council days such as the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and the National Gallery of Canada, and several significant provincial and regional museums, organizations, patronage systems, societies, and leagues. All of this led to a system of healthy, if largely amateur, cultural communities webbing across the country. She is quick to note, however, that "[i]mportant as it was, all of this activity could be no real substitute for a sustained, well-funded, and comprehensive program of support for the arts" (80-1). While theatre, music, and the visual arts were all supported in these cultural circles to a varying extents, by and large the literary arts remained the predominant cultural form tended to by these organizations; it was generally accepted that, because of its relative formal accessibility and thus its equally accessible tradition, literature was one of the more viable art forms to support and promote. This fact was not lost on the government when the time came to initiate a subsidy program with the underlying goal of asserting cultural autonomy in the face of the growing threats of

Americanization and the impending Cold War. As Peggy Kelly suggests, "[literature was seen as a means of nation building and of developing national unity" (74), so with the advent of the Massey-Levesque Commission, the focus remained intensely on writing and publishing and the development of an identifiably Canadian tradition and literature.

When Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent introduced the Massey-Levesque

Commission in Parliament in 1949, he declared unequivocally that "it is in the national interest to give encouragement to institutions which express national feeling, promote common understanding and add variety and richness to Canadian life" (qtd. in Moss, 166

"Strategic" 8). In addition to advocating for the establishment of what would become the

Canada Council, this commission would go on to underline the value of the arts as a patriotic activity, thus fostering a creative environment that could support professional artists and endeavours in the name of the nation. In this way "the link between culture and nationalism [was] made explicit" (Tippett 66). Despite being funded directly through the government with an initial single endowment (see Cavell 86), the Council initially operated without direct supervision or scrutiny, and it was able to begin the processes of establishing a vibrant and visible national cultural life while itself remaining as invisible as possible.

Frank Milligan goes so far as to suggest that "from 1957 until 1965 it functioned essentially as a private foundation. Among the general public, too, there was little interest in what the

Council did" (72) because raising the profile of the Council, despite the significant boost it offered to major cultural events, was not made a priority. Public profile aside, this remains a fact about the Canada Council, though it is often obscured or ignored; while it is now funded annually by the federal government (to the tune of $182 million in 2007-2008

[Canada Council, Annual Report 11]), "it is, in other respects, not an arm of government.

Its Act of Parliament declares it not an agent of the Crown. It employs its own staff on terms of its own choosing.. .It can accept gifts and bequests for any purpose, it invests and manages its own funds, and can carry unspent revenues from one year to another. In all these things the Council more closely resembles a private, non-profit foundation" (Milligan

68).

In fact, until 1965 the Council was rarely associated with the government at all in any public capacity. Only when its original endowment ran out and the arts community which it had begun to subsidize naturally grew, the Council was forced to engage in a more 167 closely political relationship with the federal government in order to sustain its programs

(Woodcock, Strange Bedfellows 60). In doing so, it has been increasingly forced to adapt to the 'governmentality' of government. This led, according to George Woodcock, to direct exertions of political pressure onto the policies and procedures of the Canada Council, which have turned grant-and prize-winning artists, increasingly, into "the servants of the state" and "victims of the profit motive" from "government departments that seek economic evidence of the benefits of government aid" (Strange Bedfellows 8-9). Council-supported

Arts have been recruited to provide an image of Canadian culture and literature, upon which the political nation-state has been able to rely as a marker of its maturity and purely autonomous cultural history, on both national and international stages. With the rise of the

Council's profile that came with its direct association with the federal government, "[t]he new, central source of funding, producing a quasi-official taste and a quite sizable cultural bureaucracy, altered the way in which cultural activity was carried out. More even than that, it changed the character of what was produced" (Tippett xii). As Milligan ominously suggests, because of the Council's inability to support a subsidy budget that had, by 1965, surpassed $1.5 million/year, it was forced into an intimate relationship of dependence with parliament, and "[wjhat had been a public but autonomous activity would become, unmistakably, an arm of government" (77).

Milligan suggests that the ideological shift associated with this coupling originated even earlier than 1965 as the Council began, ever-so-subtly, to shift the power of evaluation away from the adjudicating artists with which it populated its juries (see Conclusion).

While the Council adapted to calls for 'due process' and transparency in their decisions by administering grants and prizes through juries of peers, at the height of its independence as 168 a cultural patron, "[w]hatever was meant by promoting the enjoyment of the arts, it did not mean tastemaking" (Milligan 65). The Council's 1960 Annual Report is unequivocal in its assertion that "[i]n the allocation of its funds it is important that the Council remain a completely impartial agent attempting in no way to impose its own standards of taste" (qtd. in Milligan 62-3). Just a year later, though, Milligan notices that the 1961 Annual Report announces that "[i]t is the Council's function to ensure that the funds are awarded in a way that may be expected over the years to do the most good. To determine what in fact will do good the Council therefore turns to the artists among others for advice" (qtd. in Milligan, his emphasis). This minor change was indeed the harbinger of the ideological influence that the State would come exert on the Council and its consecrations in ever-accelerating degrees. After the administrative change of 1965 which required that the Council not only report more thoroughly and regularly to parliament, but that they must apply for the renewal of their funding annually, the increasing levels of bureaucracy in government spilled over into the Council's administrative practice. By the early 1970s the government required that the Council earmark every dollar for which they applied, presumably to allow both greater transparency and greater potential for censorship and critique from those parting with the money. In the years surrounding 1967, during which cultural nationalism was at its peak, the government, through the Council, worked very hard to establish a national frame of reference for CanLit by funding several major critical studies addressed below. Suffice it to say, though, that "something happened in the sixties (which of course in

Canada lasted until 1975)" (Barnholden par.5), and by 1977,

the sum of $1.1 million was identified by the government as 'thrust funds,' to be used in the humanities and social sciences program for prescribed purposes. Later in the year, the Council was invited to propose new activities in support of the arts that could be construed as contributions to national unity, to be financed under a supplementary expenditure program devoted to that purpose. In both cases, the method of applying the new money was to be proposed by the Council but the objectives were defined by the government. (Milligan 75)

With this new pressure, more funding was designed to go towards explicitly nationalist projects, more of which would then be produced and circulated within and without the institutions, thus promoting and eventually solidifying a consensual general and academic view of CanLit (and CanCrit) that only recent critical threads have allowed us to examine as exclusive, patriarchal, and closed. David Helwig reports that "by the late seventies, a number of things began to suggest that the party was over: continuing inflation raised costs and eroded the value of each dollar earned; governments began to feel that fiscal restraint was necessary or fashionable or both; the universities were under siege.. .a new economic conservatism began to demand that the arts prove themselves in the marketplace" (12).

Tellingly, the funds that the Council initially had to apply for in 1965, for example, were embodied in what was then called an "Unconditional Annual Government Grant"

(Woodcock, Strange Bedfellows 62); they are now officially referred to by the Council as its annual "Parliamentary Appropriation" (Annual Report 11, Larocque-Poirier, personal interview 13).

When the Liberal government announced in 1978 that, in the face of economic uncertainty, it was going to trim expenditures by "among other things, cutting subventions to the arts," a large number of arts organizations came together as the '1812 Committee' to object and to emphasize the importance of the arts: "For the first time ever, the arts became an election issue in the 1979 election" (Helwig 8). The Canada Council had indeed been successful in raising the profile of the arts in Canada to a significant level, but the impact of the government's ideological involvement borne of the economic necessity of the nation's collusion with the state is still yet to be definitively assessed because, as Hunter would note as recently as 1996, "the activities of the Canada Council have at present been subsumed into greater government control" (26) and, as Len Findlay would write in 2007, "[s]ocial cohesion is an ongoing concern for governments, and, more often out of desperation than conviction, they look to culture as a form of nation-building that will produce political stability and hence support economic growth" ("TransCanada Collectives" 174). With this understanding, and springing in many ways from this increasingly active federal ideology,

Dobson can now suggest without objection that in Canada, much writing "has been appropriated to a national project" which now comprises "Canada's contemporary, institutionalized form of literature" (Transnational Canadas xii).

The closer and tighter ties to the governmental purse that the Canada Council was forced to initiate in 1965 have, additionally, had several effects on the levels of creative freedom and license that have contributed to the more general ideological pressure that the

State has been allowed to exert on the nation as the nation; not the least of these has been the realization of Woodcock's fear in that the State has, in no insignificant capacity, changed "from patron into director" (Strange Bedfellows 12) in its administration and policing of cultural funding. While the cases of public outcry regarding grants and endowments have increased as the public has come to understand the Council as an arm of their government1, the awarding of GG prizes to controversial works has also become a

Milligan notes that "public indignation has been aroused by money given rather than by money denied — by grants to 'kooks and perverts' or to those whole loyalty is in some eyes suspect. Outraged citizens and editors castigate the Council as a supporter of scatology and separatism. To 171 political issue: "Not infrequently, the challenge has been taken to the public and to

Members of Parliament of ministers, with an implicit — and occasionally explicit — request that the politicians intervene in the affairs of the Council and instruct it to reverse the disputed decision or, at least, to mend its ways in the future" (Milligan 69). While

Joanne Larocque-Poirier, as Head of Endowments and Prizes at the Council, claims today that these kinds of political pressures are never exerted on the institution by the politicians and governmental bodies who might feel compelled to answer for or protest Council decisions (personal interview 15), Milligan suggested in 1980 that "the effect of political interventions — no matter how steadfast the Council might be in resisting them — has been to remind the Council and its officers, and the politicians as well, of the ambiguity of its status as a public but not-quite-governmental body" (71). The awkwardness of this arrangement seems immediately unjust: the Council 'enjoys' none of the legitimate freedoms of an independent granting body despite the loud declarations on all sides to the contrary, yet it remains susceptible to all of the public and national scrutiny of a governmental institution without the official status with which to deflect accusations of its propagation of a specific nation-state ideology. In the world of Canadian literary awards, the Giller Prize has taken its lumps but it has been quite explicit in asking for them by plying media attention at every turn. It also has the advantage of being privately funded and thus remains ultimately immune to direct pressure from the voting citizenry. The GGs, on the other hand, because of the 'official' framework erected around them and their funding,

the champions of the Council, and especially to the artists themselves, the support of the unorthodox — in art or politics or even in styles of living — may seem the strongest justification for the autonomy of status it claims; to its critics, those disputed grants invalidate that claim" (70). 172 remain an easy and legitimate target for citizens in search of a functional system of literary evaluation and consecration. Like the GGs, the Council as a whole "does not move in a vacuum, and its passage is a study in political [sic] aerodynamics: small protuberances generate a noisy turbulence" (Milligan 69). Based on the scandals still generated by the GG

Awards on what seems like an annual basis, they must be said to remain overtly successful as awards, yet entirely unsuccessful in satisfying an increasingly diverse cultural public's impossible desire for 'getting it right' when it comes to prizing Canadian writing.

Governing the Nation Generally

Canada's governors general have always, as an implicit part of their very job description, been among the most public patrons and supporters of Canadian cultural production, even in the days before the GG Awards and the formation of the Council. That support, however, even if it has been designed to celebrate native (read: homegrown) cultural products, was often designed to reify Canada's colonial heritage and to produce, in essence, a very specific version of 'Canadian' culture. Tippett elaborates:

From Confederation to the outbreak of the Second World War Canada's viceroys did more than any other group within the public service to give direction to the country's cultural life. At Rideau Hall they set an example through the paintings they hung on their walls and the musical and theatrical programs they organized for their own entertainment. Outside of their official residence they gave status to prize- giving ceremonies and to cultural events and organizations by attending them or merely by giving them viceregal patronage. Some established festivals of music and drama; others, academies of art. In doing these things governors general were recreating the cultural environment they had left behind and setting standards of taste and excellence for the budding dramatists, writers, composers, and performers in their midst. They were also fulfilling what many of them considered to be their mandate: unifying the culturally diverse and geographically dispersed people of the Dominion through exposing them to the institutions, sentiments, and culture of Great Britain. (63) As with all colonial legacies, the economic and cultural advantages that might dangerously be said to have been gained from the 'generosity' of the colonial influence must be measured against the restrictions, erasures, and suppressions that this kind of cultural enforcement necessarily fed. The culture promoted and celebrated by the GGs on behalf of the Canadian public was most often that which adhered to the tenets of European, and specifically British, cultural history and aesthetic. Despite Tippett's argument for the cultural maturity of the nation in anticipation of the Canada Council, that maturity must be said to have been necessarily colonially-inflected in the way that Gustafson suggests. But alas, it was a start.

To a certain extent, colonial influence — be it psychological or physical, imagined or invited — cannot readily be avoided in any cultural production, as the Foucauldian archaeology of knowledge and influence of cultural producers are rarely restricted by national boundaries or concerted patriotism. If in fact, however, the cultural facilitation done by the viceregal officers was designed simply to replicate rather than to remake colonial modes, the beginnings of what would come to be identified as the Canadian penchant for the ironic are underscored. When the Canadian Author's Association approached John Buchan for his support of the Governor General's Awards in the early

1930s, the impetus seemed clearly 'native': to build and celebrate a distinctly national literature despite the titular nod to colonial supervision. Clearly, as Luneau and Panofsky suggest, the GG Awards were "designed at least in part to raise the profile of a national literature" (117), so when Buchan, at the inaugural gala for the awards in 1937, declared that they were designed to create or at least recognize literary "Masterpieces" with which

Canadians '"should live in close contact" in order to foster in us "a standard of values" that might "influence our lives, dominate our thoughts, and colour our speech" (qtd. in

Larocque-Poirier 60), the question of whose values were being standardized was already implicitly answered. Tippett goes further in suggesting that Buchan's cultural benevolence was marked by a particular ideology that, in fact, worked theoretically against his declaration to foster 'Canadian' literary masterpieces:

That his interests were elsewhere than in the fostering of a uniquely Canadian cultural life was made clear, however, when he stressed before the Canadian Bookman's Association in 1936 the importance of uplifting and improving immigrants who did not have 'much of a literary education behind them, and in whom the reading habit will have to be carefully fostered'. His broader concerns were evident, too, in his insisting to the University of Toronto's Canadian Poetry Night in 1937 that while 'Canada must make her own music,' she must also have a 'proper respect for, and a more intimate knowledge of, the great masterpieces.' Nationalism, he implied, could too easily become particularism, and nothing was more clearly the enemy of the broad, uplifting, imperial spirit he was above all interested in encouraging. (69)

Still, with the institution of the GG Awards, Buchan and the Canadian Authors Association succeeded in broadening the audience for Canadian literature and in fostering a sense, or at least a belief, that a national literature that could express a 'spirit of nation.' In this way, and under the watchful eye of the viceregal authorities on what culture actually looked like, the institution of the GG Awards was able to, on a national level, "designate structures that

[were] obviously doing the work of distributive management" in the same way that Stephen

Slemon argues "the research granting councils, or the Canadian Radio-television and

Telecommunications Commission, or whoever it is that administers the Junos" would come to do in future (72). Buchan's designs for the Awards were indeed, according to Larocque-

Poirier, to encourage and promote "national unity" (personal interview 2) by fostering a sense of collective identity and shared (literary) values. The establishment and fostering of a definitively (or supposedly) national literature and culture through a system of awards is certainly not unique to twentieth-century Canada.

English traces the interdependence of awards and nationhood back to the drama contests of ancient Greece: "With their complex protocols of judge selection, the Athenian holders of state office both maintained control over the prize process and used that control seemingly to neutralize their own biases, thus positioning the prize as an official state event, a political event, which was somehow innocent of politics. In this regard, the ancient prizes were at least as bureaucratic as they were Dionysian" (37). The next best example — and one which smacks much more loudly of the Canada Council and its push for 'Canadian literature' may be that of the French academies of Richelieu from the mid-seventeenth century: "These institutions were machines for securing and extending their own authority, for ensuring that whatever hierarchies of value obtains on the fields of national culture referred back to the academies themselves, either directly or indirectly. An artist's importance could be measured only in terms of his or her relationship to the academy and its standards of training and achievement" (English 38). This continues today through grants etc., but also through the GG Awards, which recognize literature that is often criticized for its stronger emphasis on 'Can' than on 'Lit.' English elaborates on the change in award-granting systems with the fall of colonialism:

As the era of explicit colonial occupation and control began to wane, cultural prizes — long intertwined with the apparatus of colonial indoctrination, and widely deployed to that end in schools and colleges — became (without altogether surrendering this earlier function) part of the struggle to formulate and project a coherent indigenous national culture ... It required development of a specifically national system for production and distribution of symbolic capital — the establishment of an autonomous national marketplace for esteem, and hence of a domestically controlled hierarchy of prestigious 'native artists' and 'native 176

intellectuals,' at least partly distinct from the hierarchy that had been produced by the colonial (exported European or British) educational and cultural systems. (265)

If 'Canada' as an institution can even today claim to have shed its colonial past, then the takeover of the GG administration by the Canada Council in 1959 and the appointment of

Vincent Massey himself as the first Canadian-born GG in 1952 would seem to be the obvious moments to which to point. But even in Metcalf s logic this cannot signal a complete, or even a major, shedding of the colonial legacy, nor the emergence of a distinctive Canadian literary culture. The residue of the imposition can surely not be so easily and administratively swept away, especially for a critic who, in 1988, posited that "in another fifty or seventy-five years we might be able to begin to describe [the Canadian canon]. At the moment, we can't" (What is 92). My point is not that a Canadian literature cannot exist, but that, a Canadian literature that is distinct and autonomous from any and all external and extra-literary influence cannot. As Jonathan Kertzer puts it, Metcalf "does not look beyond national literature but ahead to it" (4) in an impossible dream of purity that makes him complicit with the "desire to exclude" he so abhors in "most of our critics"

(Metcalf, What is 13).

What cannot be readily disputed is Metcalf s observation on the Council: "[i]t does not much matter whether there exists an arm's length relationship with government. The essential point is that whether subsidy is administered by direct government ukase or by carefully neutral juries of peers, it remains an aspect and arm of State policy" (Freedom

24). (One might, however, readily dispute the gendered implications of his statement that state subsidy has "emasculated our literary world" [Freedom 31]). Even if this subsidy, which I have argued is both literal and symbolic in the case of awards, is not requested, as 177 grants and fellowships are, the acceptance of the symbolic capital extended by the Council necessarily implicates a cultural worker who might depend upon it for production. Metcalf continues, suggesting that "[t]he acceptance of subsidy means that consciously or unconsciously the writer is joining the State's enterprise. However arm's length the relationship, the writer is entering into a partnership with the State. The acceptance of subsidy draws the writer deeper into the world of CanLit" {Freedom 28) by nature of being both recognized and appropriated, by and as, the nation. Indisputably, the GG Awards have the ability to alter constructions of CanLit by including and excluding, remembering and forgetting. And while Metcalf whines that subsidy and the support of the nation-state

"skews and distorts the nature of our literature and the workings of our literary world"

{Freedom 22), his complaint is rooted in an implicit Romanticism that literature can ever be produced, promoted, celebrated, and consumed in cultural fields that remain unbesmirched by politics, economics, and the ideology of power-wielding players who desire literature(s) for purposes beyond merely the aesthetic. The trick then, and the pragmatism to which

Metcalf is not willing to defer, is in finding a productive and fertile criticism that aspires to move beyond merely wishing that Canadian literature were not so thoroughly institutionalized.

Stating the Nation

Even when we consider the truism of literature's ambiguous power — that it has the ability to "make...the nation both possible and impossible, imaginable and intolerable"

(Kertzer 12) — the fact that it comes from, and is directly facilitated by the nation-state itself immediately complicates the power politics of what is made possible, impossible, imaginable, or intolerable, and how. If indeed "literature also teaches us to remember what we forgot" (Kertzer 13), it also necessarily forgets all that it has chosen not to reclaim; the selection of one text over a group of others on top of this fact further limits the scope of what is remembered by the formal institutions of Canadian culture and government, and what then can be remembered by future generations to whom the canons will be left.

Kertzer contends that "[literature knits people together, but it also shows us how the knitting was accomplished and at what cost" (14) but the consecration of a body of texts through the institution of the GG Awards knits an imaginarily coherent and evolutionary literary tradition together that manages to avoid exposing the seams by which it is held together and the subjects, texts, and alternative/resistant literary work that those seams seal out of the master narrative of official Canadian literary history. Larocque-Poirier, suggests as much in her championing of the awards' prowess at remembering: "The GGs now bring attention to books we might otherwise have ignored ... The GGs generate a high media profile. Much ink is spilled in national newspapers over the announcement of the finalists and the laureates. The excitement of reading shortlisted and winning books is only matched by the admiration we all have for writers whose determination and talent are making

Canadian literature a true reflection of the complex resonance of our country" (61, my ellipses). The promotion and attention drawn to selected books must surely remain a positive force for the health and popularity of CanLit, but it also remembers to forget the shortlisted books that do not win, as well as the books that do not warrant reading at all because of their failure to appease a select and subjective threesome of readers working under the guise of compromise and the banner of the nation. In this way, the State is able to create the nation in its image (or in the image of what it desires or believes) by selectively sculpting an imaginary national ideology or standard of normalcy and pattern for CanLit. 179

Despite the GG Awards' administrative belief that the canon of GG winners "[c]ollectively

... represent the enormous wealth and breadth of our literature: diverse, thought-provoking and uniquely Canadian" (Larocque-Poirier 62), they remain singular and generically compartmentalized works figuring a representatively 'unique Canadianness' on behalf of all of the works the Awards, and the nation-state, choose to forget.

By 'nation-state,' I mean "the independent nation as the representative unit of political organization in modern times" (Webster's New World Dictionary 947); that is, politically and culturally independent and autonomous of other nation-states. In this configuration, the hyphen uniting the term 'nation-state' marries the nation (conceived of here as the constituent and collected citizenry) and the state (the administrative structures which legislate, organize, and otherwise contain the nation), thus fostering the perception of ubiquitous and natural collusion between the two and allowing one (usually the state) to speak to and on behalf of the other with a degree of self-legislated authority. Smaro

Kamboureli has recently argued that "CanLit is marked by a precariousness suggestive, in part, of the nation-state's politics of remembering and forgetting, on the one hand, and the positivism with which Canadian literature has been supported and exported by government agencies, on the other" (Preface viii). The government agencies alluded to by Kamboureli

(likely the Canada Council, Heritage Canada, and, to a lesser extent, the Department of

Foreign Affairs) all rely to a significant degree on the conception and configuration of the nation that the government as a whole has actively worked to promote through the aforementioned agencies themselves. The strategic remembering and forgetting conducted through these agencies have worked towards the formation and dissemination of a coherent and predominant, if shifting, vision of Canada. This vision can be offered, if not imposed 180 upon citizens internally, and neatly exported to the world. Hunter suggests that the promotion of an imaginarily coherent and complete national ideology through which the generalized essence or natural character of its citizenry can be articulated is merely the promise of "a means of delivering stability... [the nation's] stability of representation depends upon the public's willingness to forget that it is a representation" (15, my ellipses) and not, in fact, a comprehensive or democratically inclusive reality. Relying heavily, if indirectly, on the Andersonian 'imagined community,' government agencies like the

Canada Council have appealed to their citizenry by emphasizing the latter's "presumed commonalities of descent, language, and history" (Habermas 64); the selling of this imaginary of connectedness remains an integral part of what Habermas refers to as the

'peopling' of a particular geographical territory on the assumption that "[o]nly the symbolic construction of 'a people' makes the modern state into a nation-state" (64) and thus viably suitable for further articulation of a definitive character, ethos, or ideological norm for that people. If indeed the nation-state "depends on the development of a national consciousness to provide it with the cultural substrate for a civil solidarity" (Habermas 64), then what role have the Canada Council and the GG Awards in particular played in forming, manipulating, and disseminating a coherent picture of the nation and/or its distinct literature to its citizenry and the world? Godard carefully notes that the Council is "[o]nly one of the semi- autonomous cultural agencies forming the apparatus through which centralized pedagogical strategies tackle[] the problem of liberal democratic governance, that of simultaneously ordering individual citizen and national whole" but that it "nonetheless has a dramatic impact on the field of cultural production" (247). In the following paragraphs I hope to follow in Godard's and Hunter's rather large footsteps in examining not only the impact of 181 nation-state ideology on cultural production through the Canada Council as a whole, but how the GG Awards might be said to be, in fact, the ultimate marker of the nation-state's politics of remembering to remind its citizenry of the way it expresses itself textually.

Louis Althusser, following Marx, defines "ideology" as "the system of the ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group" (32). When these ideas and/or representations, especially with regard to culture, are actively imposed upon, or at least disseminated amongst a citizenry by the State in its attempt to establish a culturally coherent nation-state, the State can be said to be working actively to

"consolidate/incorporate/commodify a culture as part of an ideological project" (Hunter

17). The ideological project, in turn, is generally that of manufacturing cultural identity within the framework of the nation, and indeed manufacturing consent to the administrative and political processes involved in the generation, maintenance, and dissemination of that national cultural identity. In this way, "[i]deology uses the medium of state institutions to imply that there is a norm, a convention, a natural state" (Hunter 16) by which a member of the nation-state — a Canadian — might recognize, define, or identify themselves, thus marrying the citizen's desire for sociocultural parameters within which to belong to "the nation state's need for a fixed, stable subject" (Hunter 15). The underlying motivations for such an ideological project are, according to Hunter, far from economically innocent or uninterested (29) even if they purport to exceed economics. In a nation-state with a clear and certain — if artificial — understanding and projection of what it is, where it fits both locally and globally, and what kind of culture it produces, the nation can count itself amongst (and against other) politically and culturally distinct and autonomous nations. It is little wonder then, that the push to develop a national literature voiced by Prime Minister St. Laurent was quickly heeded by the Massey-Levesque Commission in the interregnum between the post-war economic boom and the impending Cold War against communism. It is true now, however, that "[njation state ideology is no longer the only or the main site for power, nor is the private individual the main site for the construction of desire" (Hunter

88). Still, in Canada the matter of national cultural ideology has always been especially relevant, for perhaps more literally than in other countries in contemporary times, "[t]here is no way out of the game of culture" (Bourdieu, Distinction 12) because of the Canada

Council's historical omnipresence; Althusser puts it more generally, if just as unequivocally: "you and I are always already subjects, and as such constantly practice the rituals of ideological recognition" (46, his emphasis).

In keeping with Althusser's thinking in On Ideology, it may be fruitful to consider not only the complicity that the Canada Council is forced to provide the government, but also the way in which that complicity is concealed or obscured. If, as he posits, "the State is explicitly conceived as a repressive apparatus" which "functions by violence" (11, 17) — that is, direct, unapologetic, and literal political exclusions, grantings, and limitations of citizens' power in order to accommodate the State and reduce actual and ideological threats against it — then what he has famously theorized as Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) remain party to, yet distinct from, the bureaucracy of the state itself; they "must not be confused with the (repressive) State apparatus" (Althusser 16). IS As remain "distinct and specialized institutions" which function not through violence or direct political exertion, but through ideology and social coercion in indirect but implicit support of the State's ideological project. Apparatuses are conceived of as educational, religious, legal, and cultural bodies that traffic primarily in ideological social capital and yet which maintain an 183

'arm's length' distance from the governments that fund and shape them. If the Canada

Council is indeed a cultural ISA for the repressive state — a kinder, gentler exertion of pressure rather than the exclusionary violence of actual political will — then the questions I have asked about awards themselves in my Introduction must be re-formed and posed anew, as Althusser does: Given their sociopolitical prowess, "what exactly is the extent of the role of the Ideological State Apparatuses? What is their importance based on? In other words: to what does the 'function' of these Ideological State Apparatuses, which do not function by repression but by ideology, correspond?" (22). Althusser eventually answers his own question by proposing that the relationship between RSAs and ISAs remains an interdependent one, but because of the unquestioned repressiveness and direct political character of the State as an entity — as an RS A which must preserve, through violence, its own capital-driven interests — corresponding ISAs exist as democratic red herrings which allow room for dissent, protest, regulated and monitored diversity, and civic participation which is ultimately monitored by, and appropriated into the ideology of the RS A as staged proof of its openness to criticism and accessibility to its citizenry. Reading Althusser's formula microcosmically might also, I believe, be fruitful in that it allows us to think about the GG Awards themselves as an ISA in relation to the RSAs of the larger Canada Council as a whole2. Althusser opines that "Whereas the (Repressive) State Apparatus constitutes an

2 Given the parameters of my engagement with Althusser here it is important to address the political and technical fact that, as Milligan nostalgically recalled, "from 1957 until 1965 [the Canada Council] functioned essentially as a private foundation," (72) and that even in 1980 "the Council more closely resemble[d] a private, non-profit foundation" (68) than a visible governmental agent. Althusser would suggest, though, that even if the Council were financially independent of the government it would still fall unmistakably into the realm of the ISA because of the particular ideology it fosters and disseminates: "someone is bound to.. .ask[] me by what right I regard as 184 organized whole whose different parts are centralized beneath a commanding unity, that of the politics of class struggle applied by the political representatives of the ruling class in possession of State Power, the Ideological State Apparatuses are multiple, distinct,

'relatively autonomous' and capable of providing an objective field to contradictions" (23).

If the government and the Council both pride themselves on their arm's length relationships from one another, just as juries pride themselves on their arm's length from the Council that has consecrated them as prestigious and worthy arbiters of literary taste on behalf of the nation, neither government nor Council can justly be accused of exerting their ideological biases through the subjects it has turned into agents.

The fact remains that, like the Council in its relationship to the government, or the

GGs in their relationship to the Council, "Ideological State Apparatuses may be not only the stake, but also the site of class struggle, and often of bitter forms of class struggle"

(Althusser 21). The matter of class is in many ways a laughable one with respect to literary awards, as all literary awards, by nature (and even the anti-award awards) are symptoms of a bourgeois culture verily concerned with various competing modes of cultural distinction as I argued with respect to Veblenian cultural consumption. Where we might, however, think about class is not, as Althusser and Marx have it, only in social classes, but also in

Ideological State Apparatuses, institutions which for the most part do not posses public status, but are quite simply private institutions...The distinction between the public and the private is a distinction internal to bourgeois law, and valid in the (subordinate) domains in which bourgeois law exercises its 'authority'. The domain of the State escapes it because the latter is 'above the law': the State, which is the State of the ruling class, is either public nor private; on the contrary, it is the precondition for any distinction between public and private. The same thing can be said from the starting-point of our State Ideological Apparatuses. It is unimportant whether the institutions in which they are realized are 'public' or 'private'. What matters is how they function. Private institutions can perfectly well 'function' as Ideological State Apparatuses" (18, his emphases). 185 literary ones. Textual classes. Generic classes. The homogenized literary culture celebrated by Canada's major awards (and here it is important to note that the Griffin might be said to more readily evade this criticism than the GGs or the Giller) points to the predominance of a specific 'kind' of literature being circulated as exemplary or meritorious. The complaint, as with Good's formulation of the 'Giller bait' novel, is that Canadian writing remains limited by several of the critical and artistic structures that have been built up around it as a result of the governmental subsidization of literary culture — something that Metcalf has been so bold as to identify as merely "ideology masquerading as culture" (Freedom 39).

The ideology — that a socially mimetic and comprehensive national literature exists, and that its predominant characteristics are those of community, order, survival, irony, and region-based disunity among notable others — is that so clearly desired by the machinations of the state in its funding of the arts and its invention of a professional cultural community in Canada. Althusser continues:

Given the fact that the 'ruling class' in principle holds State power (openly or more often by means of alliances between classes or class fractions), and therefore has at its disposal the (Repressive) State Apparatus, we can accept the fact that this same ruling class is active in the Ideological State Apparatuses insofar as it is ultimately the ruling ideology which is realized in the Ideological State Apparatuses, precisely in its contradictions.. .Whereas the unity of the (Repressive) State Apparatus is secured by its unified and centralized organization under the leadership of the representatives of the classes in power executing the politics of the class struggle of the classes in power, the unity of the different Ideological State Apparatuses is secured, usually in contradictory forms, by the ruling ideology, the ideology of the ruling class. (20-23)

This is, ostensibly, why the GGs which are designed to celebrate and consecrate CanLit seem to demonstrate fairly coherent patterns of consecration; they choose books that are either definitive examples of what the critical and popular structures of reading, reception, and criticism (almost entirely funded by the Council) have taught us CanLit is, or books that, although they may innovate, deviate, or dissent from the established institution of

CanLit, contain within them some recognizable grain of one of the recognizable 'national' ideologies and can thus be officially subsumed into CanLit through the consecration of an award which moderates and qualifies the work's political or ideological reactionism and resistance to established cultural tropes. As celebrated examples of CanLit excellence, they are appropriated by awards and subsumed into a general complicity with the ideology of the State.

As with the refusal of an award or a consecration, ideology (and the agents of ideology) chooses its subjects, and it is the choosing — not the acceptance, questioning, or refusal of the ideology — that confirms the authority and legitimacy of the ideology to choose. This is especially relevant in the case of refusals of awards, and particularly of national awards like the GGs; "ideology hails or interpellates individuals as subjects" and

"it interpellates them in such a way that the subject responds: 'Yes, it really is meP if it obtains from them the recognition that they really do occupy the place it designates for them as theirs in the world, a fixed residence" which depends upon "the absolute condition that there is a unique, Absolute, Other Subject' (Althusser 49-52, his emphases). Thus, the refusal of an award on political grounds, such a rejection actually confirms the status of that award as a distinction worthy of refusal. The consecration of Hubert Aquin or Leonard

Cohen reminds them, as it reminds the world, that they are subjects of the State even as they exercise the rights (afforded to them by that state) to express their disagreement or seeming non-complicity with what they imagine the award represents. One of the functions of IS As is to provide just such an arena for these kinds of performances of dissent and politicking which in fact do much of the work, as Hunter notes above, of forgetting that the 187 structures are ideologically and artificially constructed and imposed to begin with. Allow me to elucidate this seeming contradiction: by refusing one's membership in national, social, or political group through the refusal of an award, one exercises a freedom to choose one's own ideology. But in performing that resistance — and the emphasis is on the word

'performing' in its implication of an audience — one reconfirms the ideology it purports to dismiss by negation. It is an act of dissent that still concedes, especially when one considers the fact that, if we believe Althusser, the RSA facilitates and monitors the ISA as a confined and controllable space, a refusal confirms the ability to resist the RSA that has been facilitated by the RSA as a manner of concealing its actual unthreatened power to legislate its citizens.

This is to say that the ISA — the GG Awards — provides a safe arena in which the

RSA can allow its citizens to believe in their own legitimate power to resist ideologies imposed upon them. Althusser continues: "the structure of all ideology, interpellating individuals as subjects in the name of a Unique and Absolute Subject is speculary, i.e. a mirror-structure, and doubly speculary: this mirror duplication is constitutive of ideology and ensures its functioning" (54, his emphases). In declaring a work to be exemplary or excellent examples of a given field, the ISA immediately declares that it recognizes itself in the work and that it must celebrate that recognition. Althusser proposes that what ensues after that recognition, through the announcement of an award for instance, is as follows:

The duplicate mirror-structure of ideology ensures simultaneously: 1. the interpellation of 'individuals' as subjects; 2. their subjection to the Subject; 3. the mutual recognition of subjects and Subject, the subjects' recognition of each other, and finally the subject's recognition of himself; 188

4. the absolute guarantee that everything really is so, and that on condition that the subjects recognize what they are and behave accordingly, everything will be all right. (54-5)

In this formulation we get the creation of subjects — clients of the Council — their debt to the Council for having recognized them, their ideological likeness (or difference) to the

Council, and the confirmation for both that they are correct and true. The subjects' relationship to the ISA allows them to set the terms and dynamics of that relationship so that even if a subject chooses to forge an oppositional or antagonistic relationship with the

GGs or the Canada Council, they are doing so at the IS As urging. Like the national prize, as the national prize, the ISA both initiates and contains the recognition — positive or negative — of the subject, and of the subject's recognition of it. In the confirmation of ideological positions that necessarily emerge in the consecration, acceptance, or refusal of a political award like the GGs, the State is able to reflect back to its citizenry the image of a comprehensive and open society which invites and perhaps even encourages dissent, when in fact the RS A contains the ISA itself. Indeed, "the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject, i.e. in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection" (Althusser 56, his emphasis) even if this is accomplished by expressing dissent at the Council's request. The mirror duplication is provided by the state through the ISA in order to promote its own artificial openness. In this way, Althusser is led to realize that "IS As are not the realization of ideology in general, nor even the conflict-free realization of the ideology of the ruling class. The ideology of the ruling class does not become the ruling ideology by the Grace of God, nor even by virtue of the seizure of State power alone. It is by the installation of the ISAs in which this ideology is realized and realizes itself that it becomes the ruling ideology" (59). 189

All of this says nothing of the works that are subsequently forgotten: "in the same way, but inversely, it is essential to say that for their part the Ideological State Apparatuses function massively and predominantly by ideology, but they also function secondarily by repression, even if ultimately, but only ultimately, this is very attenuated and concealed, even symbolic" (Althusser 19, his emphasis). That is, the politics of public and official remembering and forgetting through the institution of the GG Awards functions ideologically through positive reinforcement: winning works are lauded and circulated throughout and between fields of cultural production and consumption as examples of what

CanLit aspires to. The content, form, style, and tone of a winning work becomes a technical and exemplary benchmark in excellence within the field either by the State's recognition of its inherent CanLit-ness in content, form, style, or tone, or by its appropriation by the State as a natural evolution of CanLit. Not only is the consecration of a winner a benchmark of excellence, it is a declaration of what kinds of literature are henceforth acceptable as

CanLit; it is the setting of aesthetic parameters, it is tastemaking, on behalf of the Council, and on behalf of the nation behind it. We must equally say that the GGs, by nature of the erasure and exclusion involved in evaluation and consecration from amongst a constituency, function secondarily by repression and negation. This repression is not in any direct capacity attenuated or concealed; in fact, it becomes the ballast for the positive reinforcement of a particular ideology — a national literary ideology that Imre Szeman notes would itself suggest that "the writing produced in the nation must of necessity thematize the conditions of possibility of the nation itself (Zones 156) — that is expressed in the selection of a winning work. 190

All of this theory-speak might seem of little consequence given the fact that it does not immediately present the possibility for alternatives but focuses more intently on explaining the machinations of an ideological power structure that continues to work, against which there appear to be very few modes of resistance, save from an impossible withdrawal from the cultural field. The fact remains that this structure may be (imperfectly) functioning and serving the interests of its generators, but that awards do improve and augment the status, profile, and respect for writers and literature in an era in which we are so often told that literature is waning and books are being abandoned for computer screens and Twitter. I am — I hope I have made sufficiently clear — not anti-award in my thinking, but feel that it is important to recognize the cultural wake that is generated from these processes which ripple across all fields of cultural production and consumption in different but meaningful and potentially important ways. In this light, Althusser insists, "[i]deology has a material existence ... an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices. This existence is material" (39-40). Just as prizes are the material markers of the odyssean systems of self-remuneration that they incite, they (along with galas, press conferences, stickers on nominated and winning books, promotional material and placements) are the markers of the respective ideological project behind the RSAs and IS As which 'sponsor' them. They are the physical and social proof that we are engaged in and complicit with their stated, but — perhaps more importantly — also their unstated ideological framework.

Much of the criticism levied at the Canada Council and the GG Awards has often focused on a fact that seems, upon reflection, inevitable: that it is bureaucratic. Still,

Metcalf seems to find this self-evident fact distasteful: "Put briefly, literature in Canada, 191 because subsidized by the state, is bureaucratized. Writers are the 'clients' of the 'agencies' and 'councils.' Literature is 'administered'" {Freedom 45). In order for the Council to function as an Ideological State Apparatus, it must be an apparatus; it must conduct its business of financing culture in the manner of a business, and, in keeping with the reflection of openness, plurality, and dialogue that it must promote, "it must answer publicly for the choices that it makes. This means that the Council must be consistent in the grounds for its decisions.. .Consequently it must be guided by definitions, priorities and criteria — be as explicit as possible in making these known to all who might qualify for help so that they may be clear in their expectations — and be consistent in applying them in order not to disappoint those expectations. In short, it must be bureaucratic" (Milligan 68-

9). Were the Council unable to account for its processes and procedures (at least up to the point at which they hand the reins over to peer juries), or were it vague in its criteria for administering funds or awards, we might hardly imagine the sputtering vitriol with which

Metcalf would protest. The entire basis for Metcalf s criticism of the Council is rooted in a simultaneous despair that things have happened the way that they have, and that culture has developed in the way that it has, and a kind of pastoral idealism that posits that it has been, should and can again be different. Alas, it is not, and nor will it become different merely by wishing it so. The bureaucratic nature of the Canada Council is, and will remain, a fact, just as the invention of Canadian literature through the Council's active distribution of lucre for that very purpose cannot be obfuscated as part of Canada's literary histories, regardless of how organic they might claim to be. It is, in fact, the bureaucratization of the Council that allows it to function as an ISA and to provide space for the voicing of dissent and the 192 promotion of plurality, even if these virtues themselves are later subsumed into the national character by the State's claim to them.

If it seems that I have perhaps paid too much heed to a hopeless politics and that I have overestimated the power that the State exerts over its citizens, it might be fruitful to consider the extent of the Canada Council's historical reach in the creation of CanLit as a field. In short, the "sustained, well-funded, and comprehensive program of support for the arts" (Tippett 80-1) that was to hinted at in the "Sweet First Spring of the Canada Council"

(Woodcock, Strange Bedfellows 53) actually became, because of its wealth and benevolence, something genuinely close to comprehensive. It was even responsible for funding research and study in the social sciences and humanities until the advent of SSHRC as an independent body in 1978. The Canada Council, then, in its professionalization of the arts, funded cultural production of all kinds, criticism of that cultural production upon which academic canons and programs could begin, justifiably, to be built and institutionalized, and the promotion and dissemination of both to a public whom the State imagined was in search of a nation and a distinct and distinctive national culture. Hunter explains that "[n]ation state capitalism not only incorporates writing into the institutional discourses of ideology but also establishes a need for a writing critical of and responsive to ideology. This need has directed the work of poetics in the nation state as it has consolidated itself in different places during different periods of the last three centuries, and has become part of what we indicate when we discuss 'the canon'" (17). Just like the image of the nation as inclusive and open that the RSA promotes through ISAs like the Canada

Council or the GG Awards, the canons which come to constitute a 'national culture' must similarly laud and critique that culture in order to confirm its legitimacy, its worth, and its 193 ability to withstand criticism. The problem that most critics of the Council point to with regard to the kind of culture produced by its initiatives is that it has traditionally been overtly strenuous in its aspirations for national unity and coherence, most of which we must assume have arisen from the Council's increasing scrutiny by the State. Gertrude Laing, as the contradictorily-gendered 'Chairman' of the Canada Council in 1978, even addressed the parliamentary decision to require that funds be earmarked for particular projects before they were administered in order to facilitate a certain kind and focus of art by stating, in parliament itself, that "[t]he willingness to fund 'national unity' through the arts, but not adequately to fund the arts themselves, is evidence of an attitude to cultural policy which gives me great concern" (qtd. in Milligan 76). But the encroaching shadow of the State on the nation's cultural production and self-construction was not limited to creative producers and texts exclusively, but perhaps more importantly, to professional critics who in many ways, forged their receptions and destinies.

Schooling (and) the Critics

Like Antonio Gramsci, Althusser counts educational institutions as extensions of the state in the form of IS As (16), and this is especially relevant when one considers that grants, scholarships, and research funding were bestowed through the Canada Council until the formal independence of SSHRC as a granting body. E.D. Blodgett, in Five Part

Invention: A History of Literary Histories in Canada, agrees wholeheartedly that the formative critical texts like Literary History of Canada that were to become the figurative basecamp for academic, and then popular conceptions of CanLit, relied definitively on

Council funding: "Indeed, without its subsequent implementation such histories as Carl F.

Klinck's, not to metion [sic] countless other texts, would very probably never have appeared' (94). The role of acaderma in the invention of CanLit was not limited to the books that they wrote in order to build a framework around Canadian letters; it extended to how those books came to be funded in the first place. Hunter, citing Tippett, portrays the relationship between the academy and parliament as a clear and straight one in suggesting that "the government implemented the decisions of the Canada Council primarily through its jury system usually dominated by academics" (23). If there can be said to have emerged from this early and strategic administrative work a distinct sketch of what Canadian literature consisted of and how it was to be recognized, the impetus seems to have been, jointly, that of the Council and the (usually Council-funded) academy.

This configuration, factual as it was, has drawn considerable ire from critics like

(surprise!) Metcalf who sees what he believes to be the anemic and poor writing being produced in the country at present as the direct result of granting power to the ivory towers of academe. The situation as it stands today, or at least as it did in 1988, was such that

Metcalf could declare — if hyperbolically then not entirely inaccurately — that in Canada,

"[literature — its writing, its support, its criticism — has become a closed system. It is far more the possession of universities, schools, and its guiding bureaucracy than it is the possession of readers" {Freedom 127) and that "[a] literature ... is a relationship between books and readers. The Council has failed to foster that relationship and we can predict that it will continue to fail" {Freedom 34, my ellipses). Where the Council has perhaps failed is in ignoring non-academic 'readers' by relying on scholars who have a vested interest in propagating the field of CanLit. Because of this nearly exclusive attention to interested parties (as opposed to parties that would become, on their own accord, interested as a literature organically developed without the forceful thrusting of the several institutions 195 behind it), Metcalf is not wrong in his simplification of the fact that "[wjriting in Canada became CanLit. CanLit is fast petrifying into Culture" {Freedom 34). The academics, in stead of the Council, and in stead of the governmental interests in a viable CanLit, began and continued the work of recognizing themselves in the literature they consecrated, and in consecrating the work that they recognized; in establishing patterns, commonalities, and coherence that, if artificial, were tremendously effective in consolidating and commodifying a tidy vision of Canadian literature.

It is, naturally, a coincidence that the moment when the Council was forced to enter into a more intimate relationship with a government that would expect a certain degree of influence in exchange for their support, was the same moment that Northrop Frye would engage the nearly inescapable trope of identity for CanLit by asking where "here" in fact was, in his Conclusion to Literary History of Canada. In this respect, 1965 became the defining moment in the history of modern Canadian literary culture because it offered, with

Literary History of Canada, a significant, detailed, and citable tome which could be read alongside the recently-accessible and widely disseminated titles of McClelland & Stewart's

New Canadian Library Series (see Lecker, Making it Real 154-172). With Frye's call to move beyond evaluative criticism, which Lecker calls both "paradoxical and prophetic," came a new age for Canadian criticism and literature which, like the politics of the nation- state, created an artificial and subjective norm and then convinced itself to forget its artificiality: as Lecker puts it, "it was unnecessary to call for evaluation because the act of evaluation was over; the Literary History — and all the values it incarcerated in its dungeon of facticity — was complete" {Making 31). So at the very moment that the

Council's veritable autonomy began to wane, the standard that would preclude conceptions 196 of CanLit for the decades to come became available; if it was indeed a coincidence, it would prove to be an influential one, as we might presume that, as the ideological pressures of this closer relationship between government and the Council began to be felt, the reassuring Literary History of Canada was there to act as both measuring stick and guide for administrators and nation-builders intent on continuing to forge a national literature.

The critical stasis that this work would come to incite would last for two generations and then some, as the tendency to approach Canadian literature through, for example, Frygian lenses which highlight themes and structures, garrison mentalities, or Laurentian theses would become the dominant mode of Canadian criticism, and, in turn, the dominant popular conception of what CanLit looked like (see Chapter 4). The reproduction (and the funding of that reproduction) of the critical ideology of the Literary History of Canada in the years to come, it seems, calls upon Althusser's concept of how the nation-state, through the Canada Council, might be said to have solidified its version of CanLit: "the reproduction of labour power requires not only a reproduction of its skills, but also, at the same time, a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order, i.e. a reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology for the workers, and a reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and repression, so that they, too, will provide for the domination of the ruling class 'in words'"

(6-7). If the dominant conception of CanLit, the maintenance and reproduction of which was to become the goal of the nation-building granting bodies, was established in Literary

History of Canada (and more specifically in Frye's Conclusion), then the peaceable kingdom, community, and "peace, order, and good government" (Blodgett 6) aspired to by quintessentially Canadian writing indeed set the stage for Kertzer to assert that "English- Canadian literary history has been distinguished by its modest but persistent nationalism"

(3).

Again, to reiterate an earlier point about the potential for resistance against and within nation-state ideology, I turn to the seemingly impossible and static fact that "even as the nation supports oppositional culture, it also co-opts (and thereby normalizes) the work of radical writers to its nationalist goals" (Butling 42). The networks of artists who have organized to challenge the exclusionary cultural and political policies of the nation-state have also, most often, been "sustained by the centripetal, homogenizing narratives of the nation" (Butling 41) through the support of the Council. If indeed the nation-state

"structures its ethos simultaneously to build a norm as an artificial construction, and then to forget that it is artificial" (Hunter 16), then there exist but two logical reactions to that norm: acceptance and support, or questioning and resistance, both of which confirm the legitimacy, if not the dominance, of the imposed norm. Specifically, this binarism becomes concretized in the way that critics and awards have divided CanLit into fictionally distinct and unrelated canons of consenting (traditional/thematic) and dissenting (avant- garde/structural) literatures with regard to the unifying ideology of the nation-state. In this way they have forged a balance that implies the unity and wholeness of CanLit as a field.

Hunter notes that, despite this allowance, the literatures are not given, nor do they require, equal stead: "the structure of nation state ideology, which creates the possibility of the private individual, also creates an isolation that problematizes all social discourse.

'Realism' can be read as a set of devices that stabilizes an increasingly large and diverse audience, and fantasy as the reverse side of it that allows for the development of 198 concurrent, stable, isolated worlds for groups within that audience" (86); as a result, the mimetic, realist canon of Canadian literature that was to become CanLit came to dominate. Case Study —1991

Don of an Era

Shortlisted Books: Canadian Poetry in English Domanski, Don. Wolf-Ladder. Toronto: Coach House, 1991. Fitzgerald, Judith. Rapturous Chronicles. Stratford: Mercury, 1991. Lane, Patrick. Mortal Remains. Toronto: Exile, 1992. McKay, Don. Night Field. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1991. Michaels, Anne. Miner's Pond. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1991. Jury Members: Dionne Brand, Robert Bringhurst, Sean Virgo

The 1991 contest in English-Canadian poetry provides us with a significantly different evaluative scenario than the one posed by the 1981 shortlist. Rhea Tregebov, in reviewing the notable poetry published in 1991, determined that the five highlighted books comprised a "very prestigious short-list" (64), and that "[i]t is easy to understand the judges' decision"

(66) to consecrate Don McKay's Night Field as the best among a "very tough field" (66) of shortlisted books. Upon close reading of the shortlisted books, and of the cultural profiles of the shortlisted poets, it does become, I think, easy to understand the selection, but not necessarily for the reasons that Tregebov might imply.

McKay's 1991 consecration marked the beginning of an era of cultural notoriety for

McKay which continues to this day, and which would be highlighted by the receipt of two

GG Awards, a Griffin Prize, and being named to the Order of Canada. McKay's significance to the world of Canadian poetry (as a poet, teacher, editor, and mentor) is still virtually unmatched amongst working poets, as is the regard in which prizing institutions have held him — a fact which led George Bowering to feign exasperation at continually being beaten out by McKay on the shortlists of the nation's most significant literary prizes ("Of Prizes" 2). The 1991 shortlist, however, presents five poets who share much in common, including relative age, publication history and experience, and positions of prestige within their cultural fields (to say nothing of the length of their books, all between

67-94 pages, nor of their Toronto-centric publication). All of the shortlisted poets had, by

1991, accrued significant literary reputations for themselves and had already won significant caches of awards, grants, and institutional recognition from the Canada Council and/or the CanLit nation. The relative sociocultural homogeneity of the shortlisted poets

(all white, straight, popular writers hailing from Judeo-Christian cultural backgrounds) is certainly not reflected in the styles and aesthetics of their books; if anything, we might say of the 1991 shortlist that it collects together five texts which are remarkably distinct from one another in both form and tone. This lack of cultural diversity denies, however, the claim that the GG jurists had prioritized any kind of racial representativeness; an especially pointed refutation at a moment of ever-increasing appropriative awareness of multiculturalism in both academic and popular arenas of literary reading. 1991 also provides us with the potential for a jury-based scandal, by seeing McKay's book consecrated by a jury chaired by his good friend Robert Bringhurst who, as Pier Giorgio Di

Cicco did with Jacob Scheier's More To Keep Us Warm in 2008, had already consecrated

Night Field during its initial production by providing a blurb on its back cover.

*

Night Field is a book in which McKay's considerable skill not only as a lyric poet, but as a recognizably Canadian lyric poet are well on display. McKay's later consecrations for Another Gravity (the GG in 2000) and Strike/Slip (the Griffin in 2007) and as a member of the Order of Canada (2008) would go on to re-confirm his importance to the field of Canadian poetry which was first, officially at least, confirmed by the 1991 GG. Stephen

Morrissey calls McKay's vision in Night Field "unique in Canadian poetry and to be envied" even if he finds it lacking in passion (46), and Don Coles, although he is also somewhat critical of the book, argues that in several poems, McKay has "perfectly rendered" ("A Gift" 55) his subjects through the office of the lyric. Night Field is a book, then, that picks up where McKay's earlier poetry had left off (and presages his verse that would follow) in its exploration of a "wilderness poetics" (Cook xviii) that could address the natural world without appropriating and personifying it in the way that earlier nature poetry had done. McKay's objective as a poet is to find a way of unintrusively being in the world by accepting the irreconcilability of language and experience. Described most often as a "virtuosic metaphoriste" (Cook xiv) with an obsession with the rhetorical possibility of metaphor (see Coles, Cook, Bushell, Dragland), McKay, attempts to reposition the poetic speaking subject in the natural world not by re-placing archetypal Canadian speakers, but by addressing the familiarity of their positions in various philosophical and ontological ways. For McKay the wilderness is simply "what's outside the mind" ("The Appropriate

Gesture" 54) and represents what Stan Dragland calls the "unwordable untamable" (883) limitations of trying to address a natural world that is always already "participating in another gravity/ unfelt by us" ("Driftwood" 23).

Predictably, natural poems in Night Field like "Meditation on a Geode" (16) and

"Meditation on a Small Bird's Skull" (22) set the stage for a collection that attempts to place itself on the edge of the wilderness by exploring new possibilities of writing nature. I would argue that the most succinctly representative example of McKay's poetics both in Night Field and in general, is found in the collection's widely-anthologized first poem,

"Waking at the Mouth of the Willow River," quoted here in its entirety:

Sleep, my favourite flannel shirt, wears thin and shreds, and birdsong happens in the holes. In thirty seconds the naming of species will begin. As it folds into the stewed latin of afterdream each song makes a tiny whirlpool. One of them, zoozeezoozoozee, seems to be making fun of sleep with snores stolen from comic books. Another hangs its teardrop high in the mind, and melts: it was, after all, only narrowed air, although it punctuated something unheard, perfectly. And what sort of noise would the mind make, if it could, here at the brink? Scritch, scritch. A claw, a nib, a beak, worrying its surface. As though, for one second, it could let the world leak back to the world. Weep. (3)

In this poem it is the birdsong that brings the speaker back into the world of consciousness

(a world which instills in him the necessity of 'naming' and ordering the world around him) from a state of 'brinkishness' that might have somehow allowed the mind to exist in its surroundings as they actually are by eliding the order and appropriation of language. It is, in fact, the birdsong that seems to mock the speaker's snoring, an example of a world that remains, through language, perfectly unheard, or rather, untellable. It proposes a truce between the speaker and the territory he enters by allowing each to become one another.

Similarly, the long hiking poem "Black Spruce," which follows "the climbing I" (10) along a hiking trail near Lake Superior, devises a poetics through which human and nature become inextricably equal parts of the same ecosystem: "Eventually the pack becomes/ your hump" and represents "the weight of your forgetfulness" (7) of being human so that, by the end of the hike, Lake Superior embodies "forty thousand of our/ heartbeats in a single glance" (12). Hiking — engagement with a natural landscape — becomes poetry in

Night Field. In addition to its engagement with nature Night Field is also populated by stereotypically (if undeniably) 'Canadian' images and speakers that call back directly and indirectly to the facts and figures of CanLit. The collection's allusions — intentional or not

— to the institutionally sanctioned field of Canadian literature similarly abound. As if considering a microcosm of F.R. Scott's northern landscape in "Laurentian Shield" which, in its "huge silence" is "[n]ot written on by history, empty as paper" (58), McKay's conceiving of the body as "the home of a birch wood/ whose limbs are unwritten-upon paper, listening/ motionless" ("Bone Poems" 29) seems to celebrate a similarly imagined purity, if not even the invitation of an inscription of presence by the human onto the natural world. Elsewhere in Night Field, the "[c]attail torches" that "make dark/ darker" in "Night

Skating on the Little Paddle River" (66) might trace a genealogy to the "sheaf of cattails.. .on fire" that "lit the ice and.. .blinked through the trees" in the middle of a winter's night (field) in Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion (21). Perhaps most prominently though, through the "loping" (Cochrane in New, Encyclopedia 730) lines of

Night Field, often comes a distilling of the voice and vision of 1986 GG winner Al Purdy.

Although they are very different poets, one notices echoes. McKay's "Bone Poems" which trace "[a] lost/ civilization hinted at by cheekbones./ Little is known, except/ they knew how to be lost" (31), recall Purdy's archaeologically-conscious history of "vanished" and

"vanishing" "villages of the brown people" of "Remains of an Indian Village," the

"nomads down the centuries" who allowed "no calendars" to trace them of "Tent Rings," and the hauntingly present absence of a noble lost civilization "Lament for the Dorsets"

{Beyond Remembering 52, 107, 162). In another Purdy-esque turn to "the country of our defeat" {BeyondRemembering 80), McKay's poem "Regionalism" argues that "[tjhrough poetry and other savage/ poignancies we glimpse/ the hinterland," and although "[n]o one lives there.. .the rock is rich with loss" (46).

Aside from the collection's CanLit credibility, the geographical specificity of

several poems works towards rendering literary both a geography and a sensibility, even if through somewhat hackneyed jokes that seem to winkingly elbow their Canadian readers gently in the ribs. "Art's Auto Rad," as an example, portrays the "humilities of Lake

Inferior" as the poet/subject scribbles a poem in his disabled car while suffering through

"the national embarrassment of actually breaking/ down in Wawa" (18). Elsewhere,

"Nocturne MacDonald-Cartier Freeway" places the reader (through the use of the second- person) at a truck stop on the 401 highway in southern Ontario before asserting, puzzlingly, and in the collective, that "[w]e drive because we believe in the death of traffic" (36). The collection as a whole is populated with poplar trees "[w]ho feed[] the beaver, living in their culture/ as potato lives in Irish" ("Poplar" 56), eccentric aunts who "used to be addicted/ to lacrosse" ("Song for Wild Phlox" 64), and — as if answering McKinnon's denigration of the 'genre' directly — what McKay himself calls "moosey-faced" poems ("The

Appropriate Gesture" 56) in which moose and loons roam serenely and beautifully in the ever-disappearing bush ("Nostra" 73, 75).

While none of the poems might be said to make their Canadian-ness the belaboured point of their textual performances, it becomes difficult to deny the unificatory drive of several of Night Field's similes, metaphors, and imagery. In "Meditation on Snow Clouds

Approaching the University from the North-West," for example, McKay suggests that

"snow is the postmodern/ medium, or national equivalent to Lethe" (60) — a comparison that simultaneously confirms the nation's contemporary recognizability as a conceptual 205 project of remembering and forgetting, and translates it from (thus tying it to) the classic historicity and cultural value of Greek mythology. McKay's poem concludes with the following stanza:

The clouds look inward, thinking of a way to put this. Possibly dying will be such a pause: the cadence where we meet a bird or animal to lead us, somehow, out of language and intelligence (60) which Coles criticizes for its "not-all-that-fresh idea of some 'bird or animal' in its familiar role as a moral superior to our sapient but screwed-up selves" ("A Gift" 57). Indeed, while

McKay's poetics of "longing without the desire to possess" ("The Appropriate Gesture"

54) may not aim to appropriate the figures of the natural world, poems like these join a long tradition of Canadian verse that uses, Romantically, and to varying extents, the natural world to "remind[] you of the still, sad music of humanity"— a formula McKay himself claims to reject while still referring to himself as a "mildly reconstructed Romantic" ("The

Appropriate Gesture" 58, 61). Other poems like "Canadian Tyre," in which a Canadian bricoleur makes his kitchen shelves out of reconstituted KOHO/SHERWOOD/GLASS

STIFF" and "VICTORIAVILLE" hockey sticks (55), and "Old Ausable River in

November" with its "overarching maple limbs" and a canoe "cantilevered" on the speaker's knees inspires McKay's speakers to claim, on behalf of the reader, "this pause we know"

(17); it is safe to say that any student of the popular and/or literary iconography of the

Canadian nation surely will too. 206

Patrick Lane's fifteenth book of poetry, Mortal Remains, which Tregebov called an

"extraordinary" and "unprecedented" work within the trajectory of his career (64), presents itself as a similarly acceptable (if pathological) selection for consecration by the GGs.

Lane, despite lauding the work of McKay and Don Domanski ("A Brooding" 70), is a unique poet among his shortlisted colleagues, if only for his"[p]lainness" of language and his "search for the true word" (Woodcock, Northern Spring 296). Long heralded as an anti- academic writer who considers himself a "populist poet" (Querengesser in New,

Encyclopedia 609) (in Mortal Remains' opening poem he promises the reader "[w]hat songs I sing/1 return to you" ["Heron" 3]), Lane was awarded the 1978 GG for his Poems,

New and Selected. Thus he became officially a part of the institutional literary establishment that he had tried so visibly to refute in the construction of his persona and in his poems themselves. His book Winter was shortlisted for the 1990 GG as well. His bleak subjects, often dealing with violence, cruelty, and self-loathing, have led critics to dub Lane

"the poet of uncathartic defeat" (Harrison 81), and complain that his "obsessive and despairing poetry" (Morrissey 47) is unable to evade "the repeated discovery of self- betrayal" (McCarthy 52) to which Lane's speakers always seem to return. Mortal Remains, in this respect, is a predictable Lane collection, and even though the poet himself would later claim that he was satisfied with only half of the book's poems at the time of its publication ("A Brooding" 68), Stephen Morrissey, in considering the 1991 shortlist as a whole, deemed it to be "the most significant book among the five" (47).

The poems in Mortal Remains may tend towards the violent and cruel images of

Lane's earlier poetry (the speaker in "Woodshed" notes in the collection's opening pages that "it was morning/ and there was nothing else to do but destroy" [4]), but they also announce Lane as a recognizably regional and Canadian poet in much the same way

McKay's poems do. Pursuing what the poet himself sees as "a struggle towards order" ("A

Brooding" 64), the poems in Mortal Remains often root themselves in geographically specific spaces in order to implicitly name a place or an event as poetic and mythical.

The poem "Swift Current," for example, in addition to titularly locating itself, gives us a speaker who observes from his viewpoint that "[t]he poplars far below give themselves/ to fall, their tired leaves moving like hands/ in the troubled wind" (6). The hands then become those of the dying father of Lane's lover, which "still hold the shape that moved/ machines into the earth, the oil rigs/ and the combines of the west" (6); a synecdochal image denoting a specific Canadian regional-historical pedigree in the poem's speaker.

George Woodcock agrees that the "faith to place" that Lane exhibits in his poetry

"evoke[s] in a convincing way the spirit of a region where he has lived and suffered"

(Northern Spring 299) — namely, the BC interior. In the poem "Short Story," for example,

Lane's accessible, specific, regional, vernacular prose poem works hard to generate a kind of sepia-toned mythology around a particularly brutal event:

And then there was Billy, the quiet kid from Salmon Arm, Jesus, everybody liked Billy, who loved her so badly. He kept saying it: / love her, God, I love her, over coffee at The Coldwater Hotel, her in the bar, the baby crying. She was Nicola Indian, long gone down that road, and then Billy, after the strike and no money, the months of standing through the long winter of '56 while trucks and scabs rolled by, the RCMP young and tough, from places like Hamilton and St. John, went home and sat up all one night and in the morning took the baby by the heels and smashed it against the wall, and Rose, the Indian girl, the wife, came to our house, and said: That Billy, that Billy, and had a cup of tea and then went down to the Nicola River and this barely spring, ice still holding in the log jams, took off every stitch of clothes and floated all the way to Spence's Bridge. I think it was Cole Robinson found her, he'd been short-logging there, and when he asked he what the hell she was doing naked in the creek, said nothing, said: That Billy, 208

that Billy. (53, poet's emphases)

In addition to spanning a national geography through the lens of the regional, this poem begins in medias res, as part of a larger narrative of place and time to which the reader is not otherwise granted access. Its form allows it to be read as a performed story more than as a performative text, and despite Lane's own assertion that "[p]rose-like poems are flat and lack the incantatory chanting effect of a good poem" ("A Brooding" 73), it is, I think, generally representative of the tone and style of most of the poems in Mortal Remains.

Although there are few other prose-like pieces, the collection tends to privilege poems' content at the seeming expense of form. Curiously, Lane has complained: "I have always believed that much of the poetry published in the past fifty years has been formless prose broken up into lines in order to slow a reader down and make them pay attention to meaning" ("A Brooding" 71-72), yet Mortal Remains seems to commit just such an offence page after page. In direct opposition to the terse and condensed poems of Domanski or

Fitzgerald, Lane's poems like the 16-line "La Scala," are often comprised of a single breathlessly prosy sentence slowed down by line breaks:

Ready to go to her then, saying he was sorry to himself and almost believing it, saying it again as if it were a song a baritone sings during a opera in a provincial town while the tenor and soprano watch from the wings just before entering for the finale, the moment just after the tragedy, and always during the third or fourth performance when all the singers are at last sure of the version they have settled for, the reviews in, the songs always in another language which is never translated and which the singers had to memorize, their precise imitation making it another kind of beauty, and going to her 209

singing it, singing it. (46)

Much of Mortal Remains is infused with an unapologetic masculine bravado in its addressing of the violent murder of Lane's father and the premature death of his brother.

The speaker of "The Far Field" (12-13), for example, describes a violent but redemptive beating he once took from his father, while the poem "Fathers and Sons" (18) has been called, by the poet, "an affirmation of my own manhood, a putting away of childish things.. .being a man among men" and has been contextualized by Lane as a reaction to the rising tide of feminism that he felt had a tendency to demonize all men ("A Brooding" 72).

One of the major criticisms levied against Lane is that his poetry tends towards just such a misogynistic interrogation of masculinity. Tregebov accuses Mortal Remains of just such a flaw (65), while Morrissey is also quick to note that "[w]omen, in general, serve a one- dimensional sexual role in his poetry" (47). The poem "Wet Cotton" provides an apt example of this phenomenon as its speaker counts himself among a group of men watching the speaker's brother sexually assault a drunken unconscious woman with a sausage (32) before forcing each observer to take a bite of the meat in solidarity and witness. Other poems like "The Man in the Room Watching TV" (62-63) in which a man masturbates to violent pornography further complicate such criticisms by implicating male subjects in their own misogyny, but they offer no sense of respite or escape from what are portrayed as the facts of such sexual inequalities. While Morrissey suggests that Lane was not consecrated with the 1991 GG because the poems in Mortal Remains were, accordingly, "too politically incorrect" (46), they remain in keeping with Lane's earlier-consecrated aesthetic, and thus have been officially subsumed into a field whose institutions pride themselves on the breadth of aesthetic styles and themes they permit and facilitate as the guardians of a democratic and cultural nation. Tregebov, for one, understands that Lane's violent, cruel, and misogynistic themes emerge from a "very conscious political and aesthetic motive of placing himself outside bourgeois gentility" (65), but she does not acknowledge that Lane had already become a part of that gentility, at least in a cultural sense, by virtue of his increasing appropriation by, and integration into the apparatuses of the State.

Lane's stronger readers have been critical of his active portrayal of the trouble- making rogue when he has, like Scott was in his day, "turned into a commissioned rogue, a recognized voice of liberal conscience whose idiom may be extreme at times, but which is nevertheless an argot neither unfamiliar nor unacceptable to the board of granting governors" (McCarthy 53). Dermot McCarthy, for one, saw Lane's recuperation from literary rebel to literary role model occurring even before his initial consecration: "His winning of the Governor General's Award for Poems: New and Selected (1978) didn't inaugurate Lane into the literary establishment, it was rather a formal recognition of his already being there. The persona of the outlaw-outsider would now be quite untenable, except as the most obvious of shams, which it had always verged on being anyway" (73).

The poems in Mortal Remains dedicated to CanLit stalwarts Phyllis Webb ("The Path" 61) and Leonard Cohen ("Orpheus" 77), join his earlier similarly-dedicated verses (to members of the Canadian literati like Birney, Irving Layton, Pat Lowther, Atwood, P.K. Page,

Kroetsch, John Newlove, and even Northrop Frye) in affirming just such a claim. Lane himself is not unaware of this gradual acquiescence to the advances of national institutions onto his profile and poetry. In an interview from 1981 he suggests that "[p]art of me didn't want to accept the Governor General's Award, because to some degree it was antithetical to what I stood for. But I thought I could do more with this kind of formal recognition than I 211 could do from outside" (qtd. in McCarthy 73). While Mortal Remains may seem to constitute a challenge to the gentility and innocence of CanLit and the 1991 shortlist, it remains a publicly sanctioned one many times over. The book's CanLit credibility — its regionalism, its plain speech, its dedicatory searches for validation and conversation, if not community — would seem to qualify it for a consecration that, like Scott's 1981 win, would not challenge the parameters of CanLit, but consolidate them.

Don Domanski is a poet who has, like Lane and McKay both, stayed true to his unique and distinctive poetic aesthetic since the beginnings of his publishing career. In an interview with S.D. Johnson, Domanski lists a string of poetic influences eerily similar to those of Lane (Domanski, "The Wisdom" 252, Lane, "A Brooding" 70). He emphasizes, like McKay, that "[i]f there's one thing the poet has to learn, one ability central to poetry, it's the metaphor" (Domanski, "The Wisdom" 252). Unlike these poets, however, he is "not a poet interested in the realistic details of place" (Crozier, "For the Sake" 37). In fact, even a cursory consideration of Domanski's oeuvre demonstrates his active attempts to "avoid vernacular speech and specific contemporary or historical references" (Bartlett, "From the

Basement" 123) which might not put Domanski in good standing on the 1991 shortlist as a poet hoping to be recognized by an institutional literature. In terms of his cultural persona and cultural capital, Domanski also seems to be at somewhat of a disadvantage on the 1991 shortlist. While he had accrued a significant literary reputation by 1991 (particularly for his widely and well-reviewed 1986 collection Hammer stroke), that reputation placed him on the margins of Canadian literature even as it began the process of national recuperation that would come to fruition with Domanski's receipt of the GG in 2007 for All Our Wonder Unavenged. Still, Brian Bartlett calls Domanski a writer who is explicitly "[d]etached from the ebb and flow of literary fashion" ("From the Basement" 113) in both national and general contexts — a fact that Domanski himself recognizes as a matter of course, as he sees himself as "writing from a different experience than most poets in Canada" which results in the "work [being] often misunderstood or not understood at all" because "it's coming from a place that's not held in common with many other poets in this country"

("The Wisdom" 250). The Cape Breton-rooted poet remains, despite his gradual recuperation by the nation's institutions to which Wolf-Ladder greatly contributed, a terminal outsider in spite of his successes.

Wolf-Ladder, edited for the press by Christopher Dewdney, is "not poetry of the everyday, but poetry of nightmare and dream" (Morrissey 45); in "The Sleepers," the speaker asserts "I'm always with/ those who are sleeping" (93), and the same must be said of Domanski's aesthetics as a whole. Throughout his work it is evident that, as he suggests in an interview with John Oughton, "I'm trying to walk a line between conscious and unconscious. I think that's where we live" ("Blank Paper" 1), and as a result, his poems that are spoken, he claims, by "the earth, life" ("Blank Paper" 3), tend to navigate liminal physical and psychological geographies. Several find their roots on

"the edge of a forest/ where the city becomes so thin and pale/ it washes out among the blades of grass" ("That Giant Silver Ball" 40) or "along the edge of the world" ("In

Another Life" 56) where speaker and reader alike might slip back and forth between conscious and unconscious at any moment. Wolf-Ladder contains dense and condensed poetry that relies upon the layering of images and a "sophisticated musicality" (Tregebov

67) that often privilege sonority, repetition, and associativeness over traditional or logical 213 meaning, and which delights in catachreses like "an axe is a piece of wood/ with a scream fastened to one end" and "what is the human soul/ but a claw pointing back/ to the forest"

("A Few of His Proverbs" 36). Another of Domanski's defining characteristics is his penchant for what Brian Bartlett calls "gateway images" ("From the Basement" 119) that sometimes outright deny logic altogether, and which often mark severe shifts in a poem's content and/or form. The poem "Feathered Windows" provides a good example of just such an image which pulls the poem out of the stream of 'owlness' and begins riffing on a single metaphor to the extent that the metaphor becomes the focus of the poem:

an owl flies overhead his wings make the sound of doors slamming behind him one by one the doors of a great house filled with morning light feathered windows black talons holding the drapery and bedding firmly in place (15)

Domanski's technique of flooding a poem with seemingly incongruent or impossible images has led several critics to deem him a surrealist poet (Crozier, "For the Sake" 37,

Morrissey 45). With stanzas that read "you're in a darkened room/ on one wall there's a muddy pond/ on another the soft flesh/ of an old woman/ on the third a wind/ and on the last wall/ there's a long road/ hanging/ from a meat hook ("Three Possible Rituals for

Invisibility" 89) the assignation seems understandable. Yet Domanski's most thorough critic, Bartlett, instead sees poems like these more readily as "awkward parodies of surrealism" and suggests that "Domanski isn't so much a surrealist as a master of densely multiplying metaphors" ("From the Basement" 114) like that of "Feathered Windows." The piling-on of images and the strange multiplicity of metaphor leads not to a resulting 214 absurdity so much as to an experience of multiple exotic and unforeseen possibilities rooted in the poet's "great faith in the failure of language" (Domanski, "The Wisdom" 254) rather than in its successes in conveying or controlling absolute meaning or its absolute lack.

Despite Domanski's stated foreignness to the dominant Canadian poetic idiom, there remains much of CanLit in the poems of Wolf-Ladder which might make it at least a vaguely recognizable candidate for consecration. Most notably, the collection "provides a challenge to the urban dweller, a necessary leap of sympathy from the social and political to the natural" (Tregebov 67). The "transitional point" of the titular wolf provides, for

Domanski, a living link between the primitiveness of both humanity and wilderness

("Blank Paper" 1) that implicates one in the other. For his part, Dewdney 'goes Canadian' in his blurb on the book's back cover by suggesting that "[t]here is a singular delicate magic which resides in the landscape of Nova Scotia. It's as if the peninsula were invested with a phenomenological silence, a lucid suspension that nourishes the lyrical moment.

Don Domanski is the poet of that moment" (n.p.), although there is little geographical specificity in the poems themselves. Still, the collection's opening lines set a recognizably

'Canadian' stage: "the frozen road the scalded pines/ wind in the hills/ stars balancing everywhere on stilts" ("Looking for a Destination" 12). The poem "The Hitchhiker," additionally, follows "a sad man" as he retreats from the city into a storied and provisional natural world:

and it was a clear night so far from the city that he could see the tangle of stars above the firtrees and the tangle of stars was a climbing ghost so old that it creaked a little in the darkness (13).

More than the mere vision facilitated by such distance from the city here, there is an active disparagement of urbanity and the demonization of the city in these poems that can be traced back most obviously to Archibald Lampman's "The City of the End of Things." In

Wolf-Ladder, the city is where the titular "Angels of Death" find work (49) when they stop harassing the rural speaker, and it comes to represent the act of rationally and cerebrally ordering the naturally chaotic to which Lane's poetry aspires when the speaker tells his lover "you take off your clothes and lie in bed/ placing the city under your pillow/ the countryside between your legs" ("Poem at Bedtime" 60). The sexualization of the rural over the cerebral and covered-up city that disappears under a pillow is in keeping, I think, with the general romanticization of nature as a place of purity, naturalness, and redemption that has dominated CanLit since its institutional inception.

In nearly direct opposition to a poetry like Lane's or McKay's which struggles to explore, explain, or render a given theme, object, or idea, Domanski's writing in Wolf-

Ladder relies upon its referential ambiguity and its "wild associativeness" (Bartlett, "From the Basement" 113) in order to create an open process of becoming rather than a closed meditation on a thing/place. To Domanski, poems are always experiences, 'becomings,' and not messages or proscribed insights, and "the only thing 'authentic'" in a poem "is that becoming" ("The Wisdom" 251) which allows readers to perform their own interpretations and experiences. Domanski himself has declared: "I have no desire to push toward an explanation, to delineate beyond the experience itself ("The Wisdom" 247), so in a rather un-'Canadian' turn that in fact resists appropriative readings like the one I perform above, 216

Domanski's book is content to elide definitive placement or essentializing statement by encouraging its readers to attend to "something beyond the meaning" (Domanski, "Blank

Paper" 3) of poem or language. The dangers of the functionality of language itself are even directly parodied in poems like "Dangerous Words" in which the second-person subject tracks down trespassing words that, we quickly realize, have actually lured him into a dark and violent place where beauty is limited and destroyed, not fostered: "you follow them into the woods/ you find three words building a fire/ one word skinning a rabbit/ and another word far off in the shadows/ pissing on a violet" (78). Admitting, scandalously, that

"[m]uch of what happens in a poem is a matter of chance.. .It's a matter of getting to elsewhere, which has nothing at all to do with goals or destinations. It has to do with letting go, with the free-fall of images" ("The Wisdom" 248), Domanski's poems might gesture in some way towards realism or reliability, but they almost always trouble it in the end. The closing lines of "An Evening in Cape Breton," for example, turn the descriptive or sociological expectations of the title on its head while engaging the incantatory layering of disjointed or nonsensical images:

there was the rustling of directions the coughing of crows the little convulsion that lifts the heart the hauntings of hair grown over a wall the stagger of blood across a word the love the kiss the milk the nail in the foot the baby in the matchbox the terrible-terrible all night long (19)

What Domanski's work risks is alienating more closed or unsympathetic readers like

Morrissey, who dubs the collection too repetitive, and complains, (in a statement that might say more about the reviewer than the book) that Wolf-Ladder excludes the reader, and does 217 not "communicat[e] anything substantial" (45). In its "distance from the ordinary, the concrete," Domanski's technique has "the potential to create so tight a surface to the poems that the reader's mind skims rather than penetrates" (Tregebov 67), but this is precisely the kind of experience that the poet welcomes as 'experience.' Unlike most of the poetry of the sanctioned CanLit nation, Wolf-Ladder "longs for the paradox and the oxymoron, for the irrational that takes it to a new level of inarticulateness" (Domanski, "The Wisdom" 254).

Still, Domanski has a place on the 1991 shortlist, and, with his later GG win in 2007, the process of his recuperation into the Canadian mainstream to which his poetry had previously been in-relation-to was completed. Tregebov wistfully suggests that "if Don

Domanski didn't exist, Canadian poetry would have to invent him" because, lacking an

Alden Nowlan since 1983, "no literature should be without its shaggy mythopoetic, bardic voice" (67). She thus overlooks the possibility that, in its recognition of Wolf-Ladder and

All Our Wonder Unavenged as CanLit, the GG Awards did in fact invent him by laying claims to a poetry that itself would otherwise resist such appropriation.

*

The poet who would go on to develop the most international profile of those on the

1991 shortlist, Anne Michaels, would do so not through poetry, but through her phenomenally successful 1996 novel Fugitive Pieces. Still, in his study From Cohen to

Carson: The Poet's Novel in Canada, Ian Rae argues that, along with her earlier book of verse, the shortlisted Miner's Pond set the stage, if not the poetics, for Michaels' triumph in prose: "Although no one poem in The Weight of Oranges (1986) or Miner's Pond suggests a template for Fugitive Pieces, her reader witnesses Michaels stretch her short lyric forms into extended sequences, and nearly every sequence in the early books develops a theme 218

(geology, piano lessons, the redeeming power of memory, the survivor's impulse to flee) which she weaves into her novel" (277). Michaels' internationalism, like that of Michael

Ondaatje's later work, has created difficulty for nationalist critics and the institutions of

CanLit that desire, simultaneously, to consolidate a distinctly Canadian poetic idiom, yet to distribute the products of CanPo to international readers as a token of national cultural maturity. Michaels' poetry collection The Weight of Oranges was generally well-received by critics, though it was ignored by national prize-granting bodies despite winning the international 1986 Commonwealth Prize. Miner's Pond, on the other hand, was recognized by both the GGs and the Canadian Authors Association as a meritoriously Canadian book of poems upon its release in 1991. Curiously, though, the newer collection contains very little verse that might be considered consecratable given the oft-enforced parameters of

CanLit; it is a book of great international, historical, and cultural scope that appeals to a community of global citizens more than to citizens of any particular nation, culture, or creed.

Michaels' writing is universally accessible, and her poetics in Miner's Pond display what Kimberly Verwaayen calls a "ceaseless commitment both lyrically to its art.. .and socially to its community of readers" (82). The difference between Miner's Pond and books like Night Field or Mortal Remains is that its community of readers is never curtailed by local or regional specificity or sociopolitically-determined content designed to appeal to a particular citizenry. If anything, as Ondaatje himself blurbs on the book's back cover, the poems of Miner's Pond "represent the human being entire" (n.p.), but specifically, the human being schooled on the European cultures of the Western world entire, not just a 219 geographically or culturally specific space. The general space that Miner's Pond inhabits is, instead, that of the post-World War II cultural citizen.

Verwaayen has famously deemed Miner's Pond to be a "post-holocaust testament to memory" by arguing that it "lyrically commemorates the victimized voices of historically persecuted poets, painters, photographers, physicists, and philosophers by concommitently interweaving historical 'fact' with personal detail and intimate particulars" (69). Long poems like "Stone" (98-105) — an extended monologue by a lover of the painter

Modigliani — typify the book in that they re-imagine an artist who belongs to Western culture more than to any national tradition, and in that they "border[] on prose" (Morrissey

46) by relying upon the kind of phrase lines that Lane simultaneously derides and uses

(leading, here, to "little aesthetic satisfaction" and a collection of "poems that too often become prose" [Morrissey 46]). Like Michaels' other work, the notion of counter-memory is an integral one for subjects and readers. In something akin to historiographic metafiction,

Michaels' poetry aspires to re-remember (or re/member as Verwaayen has it [69]) the narrative of histories that have been presented to us as definitive and factual, but that have, in their respective tellings, drowned out the voices of those who were not able to speak or to have their speaking heard. The speaker of "What the Light Teaches" asserts that

"[l]anguage is how ghosts enter the world/.../ Language remembers" (113), and so, Miner's

Pond presents the language of master-narrative-resistant memory in the voices of the lovers of famous painters, the witnesses to the Stalinist persecution of poets like Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova in "What the Light Teaches" (109-120), or the religious and intellectual persecution faced by figures like Johannes Kepler. In "A Lesson From the

Earth," which appropriates the voice of Kepler himself, the astronomer describes the burning-at-the-stake of the philosopher Girodano Bruno in 1600 for his resistance (which

Kepler shared) to Catholicism:

In Rome's Piazza dei Fiori they burned Bruno, for believing in infinity. We must learn at least this lesson from the earth, that the greater must make room for the small, just as the earth attracts even the smallest stone. Just as the entire planetary system rests on the plainest pattern. (70)

Other poems like "Blue Vigour" (92-94) appropriate the voices of artists and thinkers like

Karen Blixen (aka Isak Dinesen), a Danish writer who emigrated to Kenya to run a farm in the early twentieth century, and enforce a model of citizenship that is universal, rootless, and essentially humanist by employing implicating pronouns (see Verwaayen 74) that unites readers, subjects, generations, and geographies ("Memory is cumulative selection./

It's an undersea cable connecting one continent/ to another,/ electric in the black brine of distance" ["Miner's Pond" 59]) in one large familial construction that ignores national and cultural difference in favour of an idealistic collectivity of humanity.

Still, Verwaayen has argued that the poems that frame the collection, "Miner's

Pond" (53-60) and "What the Light Teaches," are "clearly commemorative celebrations of the local and the personal" (71) by the life-long Torontonian. The former poem details the speaker's youth in and around southern Ontario and offers the only Canadian geographical point of reference (aside from Toronto street names) when the speaker's agitated father leaves her and her brothers at the St. Mary's quarry during a 1962 road trip. Still, though, the experience leads the speaker into the broader understanding of both time and geography that comes to dominate the rest of the collection when she notes that "[ilt was fifteen 221 minutes, maybe less,/ and as punishment, useless./ But the afternoon of the quarry lives on,/ a geological glimpse;/ my first grasp of time,/ not continuous present" (56). "Miner's Pond" does, at times, approximate the mode of the Canadian pastoral, but there exists, always, an underlying sense of movement away from the stasis of such namings: "Windows freeze over like shallow ponds,/ hexagonally blooming./ The last syrup of light boils out from under the lid/ of clouds; sky the colour of tarnish./ Like paperweights, cows hold down the horizon.. .At Miner's Pond we use the past/ to pull ourselves forward; rowing" (54). In fact, the only other 'Canadian' historical reference in the poem is found in the image of Jacques

Cartier kidnapping Stadacona's sons and bringing them back to France (57) in a transcontinental movement that signifies both the permeability of geographical distinctions and the intimate (if forced) interconnection of the new world with the old. Similarly, "What the Light Teaches" begins with the makings of an elegiac Canadian pastoral where

"[b]eyond the closed window, soundless pines — /aheavy green brocade; and the glowing, stiff/ brushcut of the corn" (110). The subjects in the poem, though, continue to drink their

"Russian tea" (110) and think of poets like Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and Marina

Tsvetaeva. The speaker realizes, through this collision of cultures and generations, that

Everywhere the past juts into the present; mountains burst from one era to another, or crumple up millennia, time joining at its ends. We also pleat time. Remembering, we learn to forget (111-112) and most often, what is remembered is not the soundless pines or the brushcut of a corn field, but the implicitly Eurocentric cultural cosmopolitanism of "young Akhmatova,/ under a black umbrella with Modigliani,/ reading Verlaine in the Luxembourg" (118). In one of the only other geographies described in the book that might pass for Canadian, the prairies of "Anniversary," with their "grain elevators leaning against the horizon" are only qualified by their comparison to elsewhere, as they become "like the heads on Easter Island;/ under stars like ibises/ swooping through mangroves" (84). Indeed, most of Miner's Pond demonstrates not only a foreignness to the voices and places of sanctioned CanLit, but an active movement through and across cultures, continents, and nations — a truly 'trans' transnationalism like that of "Pillar of Fire" (88-91) which literally spans the globe as it follows a sailor from Belfast to Hong Kong to Indonesia to Krakatoa, or, culturally,

"Modersohn—Becker" (74-82) which allows German painter Paula Becker to navigate the life and work of her influences like Rilke, Tolstoy, Rodin, Cezanne, and Dostoevsky. There even seems to be, at times, a resistance to any kind of fixity and homeplace, as in

"Sublimation" which finds its speaker accusing her sibling of evading home ("I know that home/ is the one place you won't come" [64]) while city-hopping herself— "Paris, Los

Angeles, New York" (65). When the siblings finally do reunite, it is described as such:

"Like loons we travel underwater/ great distances, to surface next to each other./ We burst up from water to air/ to drift beside the serrated horizon of firs" (67). The homeplace in

Miner's Pond, even the suggestively Laurentian 'Canadian' homeplace, is one that is looked upon with little sentimentality or belonging; it is rarely (re)visited.

Janice Kulyk Keefer blurbs that within the pages of The Weight of Oranges and

Miner's Pond can be found "some of the finest poetry our country and our age can claim"

(n.p.), but it is precisely the implication of her phrasing that sets Michaels apart from the other poets on the 1991 shortlist. Miner's Pond is an explicitly and actively international book that, if it is to be considered Canadian, must dip into assumptions based on minutia and the poet's biography. The book must be extra-textually claimed as Canadian if it is to be considered as such, as it demonstrates little in common with the sanctioned poetics of specificity and geography of CanLit. Tregebov goes so far as to opine that "without the notes at the end of the book a number of the poems would be difficult to access for readers

(such as myself) less well informed than the author" (68), implying that the poems themselves depend upon a specific amount and kind of cultural capital, and that said capital is not possessed by a fellow Canadian poet living and working (at the time) in the same

Canadian city as Michaels. Whether or not the GG shortlisting can be seen as an institutional attempt to lay claim to Michaels' book or not, the fact remains that the book resists any kind of cultural or national designation. Like the speaker in "Stone," as 'CanLit' as Michaels may have become since Fugitive Pieces, Miner's Pond "belong[s] nowhere, half here,/ half there" (103) by purporting to belong everywhere and to everyone.

Rapturous Chronicles by Judith Fitzgerald is, I think, the least predictable and consecratable book on the 1991 shortlist, and certainly not because it is the briefest; it is also the most dense, allusive, and inaccessible book to be considered. Fitzgerald's postmodern feminist poetics produce a poetry that eschews finality and essentialism by re/working the lyric into a more post-structural reflection of female mourning and subjectivity. Fitzgerald's inclusion on the shortlist is not unprecedented from the point of view of her gendered poetic idiom. Erin Moure, after all, had won the 1988 GG for her collection Furious, while Dionne Brand's No Language is Neutral had made the shortlist alongside Lane's Winter and Margaret Avison's winning No Time in 1990. Also, Fitzgerald holds the distinction of being, it seems, highly consecratable from the perspective of provincial and federal granting councils; she was, officially, Canada's most successful 224 individual cultural grant-getter from 1991 to 2001 during which time she was awarded over

$150,000 from various funding agencies (Welch A3). Otherwise, Fitzgerald has maintained a low profile compared to McKay, Lane, and Michaels, and aside from stints as writer-in- residence at the University of Windsor, Laurentian University, Algoma University College, and the Hamilton Public Library, and her contributions to the Globe and Mail, she has remained relatively private and unheeded with the exception of some review articles, some personal friendships with poets like Leonard Cohen and Irving Layton, and her denigration by David Solway (for daring to call her "blowzy, episodic wanderings" poetry [147]) alongside his dismissal of major poets like Purdy, Carson, and Ondaatje. Like Domanski,

Fitzgerald's work is complex, layered, multifaceted, and musical. Unlike Wolf-Ladder, though, Rapturous Chronicles is comprised of long prose-poems that meditate on language, subjectivity, gender, and desire through an explicitly post-structural lens. The book's focus on itself as poetry over and above even its stated elegiac project makes it a text to which there are several entrances and exits, but it also distances itself from much readerly engagement and places the work of interpretation and meaning in the hands of its audience

— a feature that distinguishes it from other nominated books but that also alienates it from them and from any significant degree of recognizability as CanLit.

Aside from being an exercise in textual play and the erotics of absence, Rapturous

Chronicles is also an extended elegy for a lover and friend who has committed suicide, and thus becomes a meditation on desire and mourning. As a book-length work, it offers the narrative of an "[u]rban hermit nursing a badly broken heart" ("Arc of Evening" 48) that interrogates the "[sjynonymous combustion of self and other" ("Once/In a Blue Moon" 19) through the trajectory of a sexual, spiritual, and literary friendship that ends in the lover's 225 suicide. M. Travis Lane, then, sees the book as an articulation of "the poetics of depression" ("Beyond" 113). In her review of Rapturous Chronicles, she lauds Fitzgerald's

"technique of layered and resonating lyric" ("Beyond" 110) but also unintentionally highlights the book's incongruity with a Canadian poetic that seeks to name, render, or represent a essential specificity of time or place; Fitzgerald remains more concerned, somewhat like Domanski, with what Lane sees as "words treated as objects without much regard to their denotations" ("Beyond" 110). I would argue, however, that Rapturous

Chronicles is rather specifically concerned with the possibilities of denotation that emanate from the words employed in any act of representation or mourning. In the poem "Crescent

Nights," for example, Fitzgerald provides a reading key when she associatively riffs: "Son,/ song, sanguine womb, wom/b/an [re : verse]; celebrate the fact/ in the feminine" (36, poet's emphasis). The passage might more readily conclude 'celebrate the fact in the ecriture feminine,.' for the book draws its theoretical purview most directly from the school of

French feminism often articulated by Helene Cixous' positing of a gender-specific way of writing that would come to inform the work of theorists like Luce Irigaray and Julia

Kristeva, and poets like Moure, Fitzgerald, and Nicole Brossard. Accordingly, Fitzgerald's book here is full of deliberate inarticulateness brought on by the failures of language to represent female mourning; additionally, despite its narrative arc, it proposes a cyclical and circular method of reading and writing by which the book refuses closure, and thus reflects the incurable absence of a lost lover. The first text in Rapturous Chronicles plays upon the alphabet, offering 26 lines of nonsensical but alliterative verse as an introduction to the book: "alibi alpha apple atlantic azalea/ barrazza baseball bilabial bravo broken/ camera chaos civilization completion content cross" ("Note & Key" 7) etc., while the last poem, 226

"Zeliotropic," urges the reader to begin again by "[t]ak[ing] the A-to-Zed train to the end of the line and back" (67). The constant pop-cultural and musical allusions and references that run through the text, as well as a single lyrical descant that runs continuously across the bottom of the collection's pages, enforce a multi-vocal, yet unified work in which contradictory multitudes can exist; Lane argues, then, that, as ecriture feminine, the

"polyphonic layeredness of Fitzgerald's text portrays the way we normally exist, with out

[sic] feelings, memories, associations, perceptions, and concerns cluttering and connecting in nonlinear process" ("Beyond" 112).

The book's CanLit cred is certainly not hidden, but, like that of Domanski it is obfuscated by a more keenly focused attention to language and its imminent failures.

Fitzgerald's departed lover and friend is identified as Canadian novelist Juan Butler — a writer who remains on the very edges of institutional culture because of his political and aesthetic radicality. Fitzgerald also makes regular reference to the speaker's upbringing in

Toronto's impoverished Cabbagetown neighbourhood, ("My language, from/ newspapers to Cabbagetown mangle, makes me the woman I am" ["Woman, Language Made Me" 13]), while finding refuge as a child at the iconic bookstore THIS AIN'T THE ROSED ALE

LIBRARY ("Woman, Language Made Me" 12). The speaker's surroundings also speak to a definitively Canadian setting for her loss, but one from which she remains distanced and alienated, as in "Moon, a Lantern, and a Collar" when, on a "passive-verb night in the middle of [her] life" she observes, "[s]itting/ in the Queen's Dairy on St. Clair Avenue

West.. .Past Last Call with two bottles of Molson's Golden before him.. .Native of these parts" before he becomes an "invisible drunk" and "recedes" (26). Also like Domanski,

Fitzgerald demonstrates a connection to avant-garde writer Christopher Dewdney by alluding to his 1986 GG-shorthsted Radiant Inventory in the title of her own "Radiant

Intervention" (65). If her pedigree, then, is postmodern and poststructural, it is also a specifically located one.

More even than mourning perhaps, Rapturous Chronicles is a book about the relationship between word and world. In the book's most notable poem, "Woman,

Language Made Me," Fitzgerald's speaker actually constructs herself through language, which she sees as redemptive: "I learn myself into existence by reading words/ in newspapers.. .1 believe in the power of language, of names, of etymology, of origin. Others believe in the power of AA" (11). The 'power' Fitzgerald believes in, though, is not a neutral one. It is, in fact, one that needs to be continually emphasized so as to not become naturalized and relied upon for accurate representation:

Women and Language. I excise the "&" or "and." Ampersand, connective tissue of re/written history. I re/write history. Nitpicker? Probably. I re/lease language; my one & only human refuge, statelessness of being. Impenetrable. Language made me. No complaints. Ecologic body sound gyno/sense, neither violated nor dis/graced. ( Amazing Dis/grace : I once was found, but now I'm learning.) (15, poet's emphases)

Despite her "no complaints," the speaker still must mis/use language by playing with it and exploiting its slippages, in much the same way that it has exploited and mis/used her in her relationship with the lost lover who she attempted to speak with as one, though his language denied it: "I renamed to either, he opted for or" ("Full Moon" 22, poet's emphases). Still, though, Fitzgerald's speakers "seek the unseekable,/ the unspeakable, the forbidden page containing pure signs and symbols,/ keys and coda, heart and healing"

("East of West Crescent" 24) as they try to come to terms with the intangible and 228 ungraspable emotional turmoil that the disruptive poetics of Rapturous Chronicles embodies in following the slippage of the lover away from (and into) finality:

"When he took his life/ to the edge of morning, I went with. Angles and planes of language/ collide in the skin of death, in the sin of love" ("Waning Reflexive" 32).

In the context of the 1991 shortlist, Rapturous Chronicles risks alienating readers who are either uninterested in, or who do not possess the requisite cultural capital upon which an engaged reading of the book depends. Morrissey, for example, argues that, while pleasantly clever and occasionally lyrical, Fitzgerald's "apparently radical approach to language doesn't always succeed" because it "places language before communication, and political revision before emotional and spiritual insight" (46). The book is also, I think, a self-indulgent coming-out party for the speaker at times ("it takes me almost thirty-five years to/ believe, to trust, to celebrate, to utter the most difficult phrase in my/ language : I am a writer" ["Woman, Language Made Me" 14]), even though most of the time it tries to navigate the subject's relationship to language in a period of unwordable mourning; a project she refers to as "[t]his business of going on. gerunds and all" ("Absconding

Gibbous Night" 50). Instead of merely describing absence and mourning in order to achieve some sort of recognizable 'spiritual insight,' Rapturous Chronicles actually enacts it by undercutting the currency of language through which traditional elegies have performed their mourning; the book urges its readers to break down "[w]ord, to unit, to phoneme, to sound, to source and source squared./ To take the word, to de-complicate it, to break it open and look inside" ("Woman, Language Made Me" 15). But such a writerly engagement with text demands, despite the recuperation of so much avant-garde and post- structural practice into the sanctioned nation, a renewed relationship to text, reading, and 229 the structure of mourning itself that would implicate readers in the processes of literature instead of merely informing them of its products. By undermining the fallacy of the poet as a Romantic genius ("Remember the typewriter? Of all things, inanimate. So naive, such/ cheap romanticism" ["Waning Reflexive" 31]), Rapturous Chronicles makes its actual mourning accessible to a readership by implicating them in it. Such a poetics undermines, at its core, the very notion of texts as fixed, fixable, and categorizable entities along cultural, historical, or national lines. Aside from appealing to a highly restricted readership, then, Rapturous Chronicles also sounds a death knell (however muted) for literature as anything other than Teflon text, resisting political, ideological or sociological appropriation at every turn.

When considering the jury for the 1991 award, it might rather have seemed that

Rapturous Chronicles would have found a champion in Dionne Brand, whose own feminist poetics of "the shaping forces of history and language.. .and woman-centred experience"

(Susan Gingell in New, Encyclopedia 149) in No Language is Neutral strike a similar chord of dissonance and dissent. Otherwise, one might have assumed that Lane's book would have curried significant favour with Sean Virgo because of the juror's long-standing association with Exile Editions (Stefan Haag in New, Encyclopedia 1170), the publisher of

Mortal Remains. It is, however, the relatively inaudible (akin to the decibel-level of birdsong) fallout from the most egregious connection between jury chair Bringhurst and the winning McKay that remains a great point of interest to me. Like the relationship between

Pier Giorgio DiCicco and Jacob Scheier in 2008, Bringhurst's support of McKay is credited, literally, on the back of the book as a blurb, albeit one pulled from a review of one 230 of McKay's earlier books. Even without the textual evidence of a connection between the two poets on Night Field as a product, the long professional and personal association between the two poets has been well documented to the extent that, in his essay on

McKay's poetry, Dragland begins with an epigraph from Bringhurst, and proceeds to refer to the tightly knit group of McKay, Bringhurst, Jan Zwicky, Tim Lilburn, and Dennis Lee as a distinctive "community" (881) of like-minded philosophical ecopoets. This group have published, collaboratively, two books of procedural essays on poetics edited by Lilburn —

Poetry and Knowing (1995) and Thinking and Singing: Poetry and the Practice of

Philosophy (2002) — while Bringhurst is listed as a friend and collaborator in McKay's biography in Don McKay: Essays on His Works (Bartlett 196), while McKay is thanked in the acknowledgments to Bringhurst's The Calling: Selected Poems, 1970-1995 (238). They are, suffice it to say, friends and collaborators and have been for quite some time.

Bringhurst's reviewing of McKay's earlier book Birding, or Desire, in a 1983 issue of Books in Canada is not, in and of itself, scandalous; Canadian literature, and Canadian poetry especially remains a small enough community that anyone who does any significant amount of writing or reviewing is bound to cross paths in some capacity with a colleague or associate in such a manner. What is remarkable about the review, and what bears further consideration, is the national grandiosity with which Bringhurst heralds McKay's achievement and poetic merit. Using the model of Arnold who criticized Wordworth's poetry because it did not know enough (meaning that it prioritized a middlebrow accessibility over technicality, depth and erudition), Bringhurst (sounding very much like

Solway) suggests that "[m]uch Canadian poetry of the present day also does not know enough, and shows no wish to know. Its practitioners are in great numbers content to play . 231 in the fenced garden of language, or are busy (more understandably, I confess) with merely human and political themes" which has resulted in a national "poetry of rootlessness." But, he assures us, "Don McKay's poetry knows a great deal... His is a kind of poetry in which a poet, a literature, and even a country can mature. This country for instance, and this literature" (qtd. in "The Antithesis" 34). Michael Ondaatje has argued that, with regard to awards, "the one thing we have to admit about juries is that they can often choose the wrong books. If we all had more patience, what should happen is that we wait ten years and then put forward a shortlist. No local obsessions, no owing of favours, no considerations for past slightings, no judgments based on bad behaviour or someone's saintly aspect" (in

Ross, Prize Writing 90). It is with no small degree of feigned innocence then, that in revising his 1983 review for publication in 1999's Don McKay: Essays on His Works,

Bringhurst 'observes' that McKay's "later books have won some awards and earned him well-deserved attention. Birding, which prize committees and publicists ignored, has remained for me a touchstone: both a symbol and an example of what is best in colonial

Canadian literature" ("The Antithesis" 29). The possibility that McKay's consecration — to which Bringhurst here stakes no claim, nor discloses any responsibility for — was itself an act of reparation for past slightings then becomes yet an undeniable aporia within the private politics and collective machinations of the 1991 jury.

We must also consider the possibility that Bringhurst would have seen, in McKay, the merit of the kind of poetry that he himself writes and publishes. Christian Bok has remarked of "the fundamental psychology of the process" as a juror indicates that "for most people on a jury, a vote for the winner is actually a kind of vote for yourself. You are hoping, in a certain sense, to see yourself either reflected or embodied in the winner" ("The 232

Politics" 118). So the collaborations between the two poets (which imply, to begin with, a significant degree of like-mindedness) aside, it is telling to recall that Bringhurst has made his reputation as a "searchingly metaphysical" poet "of earth and air," who remains "deeply committed to his art as a mode of knowing that is capable of integrating the insights of other modes, from walking to physics" (Iain Higgins in New, Encyclopedia 152-153).

McKay's hiking poems, then, and those in which he interrogates the phenomenological impulses of human language in relation to the natural world, seem an aesthetic match to the juror's interests. Additionally, Bringhurst's "increasingly conscious musical poetics" (Iain

Higgins in New, Encyclopedia 153) might also be assumed to have found a match in

McKay's musical work. Night Field is infused, alongside birdsong, with actual song.

Specifically, in addition to the tone of McKay's "moody, jazzy poems" (Tregebov 66) here, several pieces like "The Wolf," (19) "Choosing the Bow" (20) and "Recipe for

Divertimento in D, K:136" (65) specifically engage the form, content, and vocabulary of music in their unravellings.

Another potentially influential issue that the 1991 jury necessarily had to deal with in the work of Domanski and Fitzgerald specifically, is that of accessibility. The degree to which the jury of poetry specialists might have considered a layman readership is, of course, impossible to determine with any accuracy, but one wonders what role the spectre of the institution might have played in such deliberations. Morrissey, in praising Lane's exemplary use of what Sentes and Solway deride as the "poetics of common sense" and the

"Standard Average Canadian" (Sentes 10, Solway 93), doth protest too much in marveling that "Lane's work does not exclude the reader with obscure imagery; it is not consumed with the diversion of intellectualizing existence, and therefore denying experience; it does 233 not indulge in obscure language" (46-47). McKay's poetry in Night Field, on the other hand, is deemed to be "middle of the road music, that genre of music that is accessible and avoids at all costs any possibility of disturbing the listener, or in this case the reader"

(Morrissey 46). By accusing McKay of playing it safe, though, Morrissey privileges Lane's edgy subject matter over McKay's significantly more musical and eclectic vocabulary.

Both poets remain accessible, however Mortal Remains is the only book which strains so to be, perhaps even at the expense of what it is able to add to the ongoing conversation of

Canadian poetry — a conversation that Michaels' book does not display much desire to enter in the first place.

Despite the terse and unorthodox poems of Wolf-Ladder, Domanski's inclusion on the 1991 shortlist may have proven to be a large step towards his 2007 consecration by a

GG jury that included Dewdney. Has it taken fifteen years for Domanski's poetics to become palatable as CanLit? The comparative radicality of contemporary avant-garde poetry makes Domanski's poetry seem quite normalized within the criticism and discussion that has cropped up around it since its shortlisting.

Still, Domanski's 1991 book is one that S.D. Johnson suggests places him squarely at odds with the "Canadian literati" which privileges realism and the poetry of the "everyday" and that refuses to understand that, as Domanski argues, the "everyday" is itself a naturalized construction required by power-wielding institutions like the nation-state in order to stabilize a market of comfortable consumers:

I don't think it's the poet's job to keep that myth alive.. .There is a strong leaning towards the accessible poem, the quick read, not just in Canada but across the English-speaking world. There's a real laziness to explore language, to take chances, to leap across meaning and discover new conveyances to deepen our ties with the world. I often worry that it's becoming the age of the McPoem, the McBook. I write away from all that, determined to keep the clown from my door. ("The Wisdom" 249)

Similarly, Rapturous Chronicles is, to Morrissey, "wordy, vague, and abstruse" (46).

M.Travis Lane, on the other hand, admits that Fitzgerald's poems are "not easy" ("Beyond"

115), but also that "the excellence of such writing cannot be 'performed' to a naive audience, which prefers 'accessible' anecdote or the generalizations of protest. Too many of us, whether out of fear of being called an elitist, or as a result of sociable exigency, or, even, out of the desire to avoid the shock of art, praise over-generously every poem that is easily understood and not obviously bad" ("Beyond" 115). It is likely, then, that the jury thought that it might be, to a non-specialized readership, "[t]oo difficult/ to bear the art we ex/tr/act" (Fitzgerald "Waning Reflexive" 31) from Dewdney-infused books like Rapturous

Chronicles or Wolf-Ladder.

McKay's consecration seems, also, in some ways, well, natural. Ken Babstock, in his conversation with McKay, cannot think of a single McKay poem that is set outside of

Canada ("The Appropriate Gesture" 53), even if critics like Coles are quick to point out several of his "not-all-that-fresh idea[s]" ("A Gift" 57). As a "mildly reconstructed

Romantic" ("The Appropriate Gesture" 61), he is a poet who, in Night Field, consolidates the CanLit nation with his "moosey-faced" poems inspired by walking through Canada's natural landscapes ("The Appropriate Gesture" 56). Again in his review of Birding, or

Desire, Bringhurst himself forges a link between the critical and popular CanLit idioms of the past, and the future that McKay's work proposes by arguing that, in 1983, "the basic force of Canadian culture remains as Northrop Frye twenty years ago described it: 'the conquest of nature by a mind that does not love it'" ("The Antithesis" 34) but that McKay's new nature poetics are in fact rooted in the very love that earlier poets had been so naively and fearfully lacking. MacKay's may not the Atwoodian "survivor's/ sidelong glance"

("Regionalism" 46), but it originates from a remarkably recognizable physical and sociological place that the institutions of CanLit have delineated through their funding and consecrating practices. Night Field offers an appropriately restricted shift away from the

Frygian construction of CanLit that manages to propose "a resistance to acts of appropriation, colonization, naming, and foreknowing" (Mark Cochrane in New,

Encyclopedia 730) that have come to light as being unjust or unethical under the guise of an increasingly attentive politics of postcoloniality, ecocriticism, and ecopoetics. Night

Field is a collection that screams: "We are not/ a simple people and we fear/ the same simplicities we crave./ No one wants to be a terminal/ Canadian" ("Meditation on Snow

Clouds Approaching the University from the North-West" 60), but that remains, at its core, steeped in the traditions and geographies of CanLit. If poetry, for McKay, is the

"reanimation of a tool" ("The Shell" 52) in its evolved relationship to metaphor and language, then his consecration with the 1991 GG proffers a reanimation of CanLit by its institutions; a move that simultaneously offers the comfort and reassurance of a consolidation of the definitive concerns and canons of the field, while still proposing a prefigurative evolution and maturation away from the models and modes of the past. Not necessarily the Don of a new era, but of an existing era don(e) differently. 236

Chapter 4

The 'CanLit' Problem: Globalization, Transnationalism, and the Ethical Turn

I have argued that the Canada Council uses the GG Awards as an official legitimation of the parameters that it itself sets through its processes of granting and subsidizing a particular conception of national literature. The GG Awards work to both recognize the parameters of excellence and accomplishment in CanLit while offering, on behalf of the institution, the possibility of evolution and dissent from the established conceptions of what the national literature looks like. But what does it look like? As I discussed in Chapter 3, the moment that the Literary History of Canada appeared also marked the moment at which the Council was forced to loosen its reins over the awards and grants in order to accommodate an increasingly activist government. If it is true that the

History and the significant critical work that it spawned (which would come to form the corpus of CanCrit over the next thirty years) became the benchmark against which

Canadian literary writing was to be measured, the GGs might be said to have loosely followed suit in legitimating the ideological biases of the History's critical and creative purview. Brydon poses a question as a subtitle in her recent contribution to the

Trans.Can.Lit publication: "Is Canadian Literature an Institution?" ("Metamorphoses" 3).

The question may be answered in the affirmative in several different, complementary, and antagonistic ways, all of which rely (or have relied) on the actual institution behind CanLit: the Council. What follows here, then, is a brief modern history of how CanLit, and specifically Canadian poetry, have been constructed and construed through the apparatuses of criticism and the educational institution. This brief history is intended to complement the

Case Studies that interrupt these chapters, though it understands, tacitly, that single 237 narratives of literary (and specifically poetic) history through the twentieth century in

Canada are either definitively impossible or they guarantee incoherence despite their desire for linear unity (see York, "English-Canadian Poetry, 1920-1960" and Bradley). If the

GGs, as a construction and institution by and of CanLit, and specifically, in the Case

Studies, CanPo, serve as veritable barometers of taste within the field, the relationships that winning and shortlisted works might share with the CanLit tradition as it has been invented must offer us various readings on the ebb and flow of taste as it engages in dialogue with the pre-established parameters of the tradition.

Surrendering or Revolting: Patterning Isolation and Surviving the 'Butterfly on Rock'

Literary History of Canada

In 2003 Imre Szeman noted that, for all our claims that writing in Canada has aspired to national unity and validation, "[t]here is nowhere in Canadian fiction after World

War II a national literature that aspires to write the nation into existence" (Zones 162, his emphasis). The national impetus, rather, is more accurately located in the body of literary criticism that I have been addressing throughout this thesis. I have suggested that the term

'CanLit' denotes a particular kind of institutionalized literary culture which is made up of a variety of cultural forces encompassing not just texts, but the way that texts are talked about, categorized, and disseminated as "Canadian" "literature." If we agree that the dominance of thematic criticism which helped to define and consolidate CanLit in the latter half of the twentieth century "propagated a false cultural unity" (Rosenthal 300) and fostered a kind of literary determinism for texts produced and consumed here, the spaces that literature itself might otherwise lead us to seem ripe for the revisitations that critics have been recently performing under the banner of transnationalism. For the sake of my argument here though I will continue to trace the evolution of CanLit as it has been employed and enacted as an institution (meaning as both texts and contexts) in the hopes of uncovering the possibilities that such approaches have precluded, and which are proving to be increasingly incongruent with the ubiquity of cultural and economic globalization. It has, after all, been responsible for the third "beginning" of literature that Mount delineates as the institutional consecration of a literature's "recognizable characteristics that help to promote it (the artistic equivalent of branding) and that allow others to join by successfully reproducing those characteristics" (13). The GGs, as my Case Studies have aimed to elucidate, perform precisely this institutional role.

While more thorough discussions of what constitutes or characterizes CanLit are available in abundance in the critical field, it might be useful to re-construct CanLit as it has been configured since the dawn of the Council. In its concision, however, Davey's single paragraph from Post-National Arguments does a fine — if necessarily reductive — job of tracing the general shapes of CanLit as it has evolved in the years following

Canada's centennial in 1967:

[D]uring these decades, within the teaching of 'Canadian literature,' a direct link had been assumed between anglophone-Canadian writing and nationalism. Anglophone-Canadian literature in this view was a national literature; it evolved from the colonial to the modern (Woodcock), from the Victorian to the Postmodern (Kroetsch), from the romantic to the high modern (Keith), from the colonial to a place among the postcolonial (New). It had developed national mythologies like 'two solitudes' or 'survival,' national images like Atwood's 'ice maidens,' beleagured [sic] farmhouses, gothic mothers, Moss's signs of isolation, Sutherland's Presbyterians and Jansenists, and more recently, in Linda Hutcheon's work, national modes of irony and historical metafiction. Throughout the period there had been dissenters from the notion of a national canon, complaints that the canons deployed were too Frygian (Mandel), were an instrument of Ontario imperialism, were unresponsive to anything but realism (Lecker), or insensitive to regional priorities, but the national construction had endured both in historically configured textbooks and historically taught college surveys. (6) 239

Similarly, Metcalf sums up the major concerns of CanLit in a brief, cranky passage from

What Is a Canadian Literature?: "The pros and cons of a Canadian literature have been dancing the same ritual dance for close to a hundred years: parochial against universal, nationalist against internationalist, sturdy Modernist Canadian against smarmy cosmopolitan with brilliantined hair. It is all rather tedious. And none of it, of course, has much to do with literature. In all these debates, the real subject is the politics of Canadian sovereignty" (9). All of this concern for the nation, inasmuch as it had always been a concern for writers calling Canada home, must be said to have come to a head in George

Grant's seminal and then-ubiquitous Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian

Nationalism in 1965. Grant, who Andrew Potter calls "the father of English-speaking

Canadian nationalism" wrote Lament — "the sun under which a generation of Canadian nationalists warm themselves" (Potter ix) — as a national death knell in the face of what he called "the impossibility of Canada" in the face of the ever-encroaching "homogenized culture of the American Empire" (Grant 67, 7). Ironically though, as Sherrill Grace notes,

"the cultural life of Canada was nonetheless poised to blossom as it had never done before"

(286), largely on the back of the Literary History of Canada and the nation's impending centennial celebrations. Grant's essay appealed, in fact, directly to what Kertzer would come to call the 'worrying' of the nation that would largely sustain the Canadian creative and critical apparatuses for the coming decades; in works like Atwood's Surfacing and

Dennis Lee's Civil Elegies (to say nothing of Survival and "Cadence, Country, Silence:

Writing in Colonial Space" [1973]), Grant's concerns receive palpable literary embodiment. Grant's spectre is still evident today in much of George Elliott Clarke's work 240 on Canada and Canadian identity, and in the work of critics like Lecker who articulated his assertion in 1990 that "the dream of national unity remains the driving force behind the literary and critical values we seek out and support. This force is not rational or empirical.. .It is a matter of faith" ("Response" 683).

If some degree of national awareness, if not nationalism itself, is still one of the earmarks of CanLit, then engagement with the themes and concerns related to or stemming from the national impetus should be visible in a prizeable work of CanLit. But these markings do not necessarily need to be politically concerned in a specific way. Kertzer traces a brief history of the challenges to the national ideal that have, of course, become a part of the national literary character by appropriation and state-support: "there have always been challenges to the nationalist ideology, first made in the name of regionalism, modernism, or cosmopolitanism, now made in the name of feminism, ethnicity, postmodernism, or post-colonialism. Earlier literary historians, who were anxious that

English Canada find its literary voice, listened for what is most authentic in that voice: the call of the wild, the colonial compromise, the ironic tone" (22). Kertzer goes as far as to suggest that, if a national literary idiom does in fact exist, it might be found in the very uncertainty that these discussions themselves incite in literature and literary circles:

"worrying characterizes much English-Canadian writing, which takes pleasure in strategic uncertainty (Where is here?), as it situates itself at the fateful place where three roads meet: national + literary + history" (35). It is unsurprising that the two intertwined components of the nation — history and culture — complete Kertzer's trifecta, for they have been at the heart of most significant thinking on CanLit in all of the above theorizations and recantations mentioned above; as he puts it, "our vexed desire for a national literature has made us obsessed with history and myth, which we produce in abundance because they offer two major discourses for interpreting national identity" (55).

Aside from the question of defining, delimiting, or otherwise identifying the nation and its constituents, CanLit has been concerned with further characterizing a recognizable

Canadianite in its letters. Second only — if it is indeed even second:— to the importance of Literary History of Canada in this regard has been Survival (1970) which began to posit a content-based formula of CanLit recognition by proposing that there was in fact a "a national habit of mind" (Atwood 13) that was articulating itself in our significant writing.

W.H. New is quick to highlight the collision of cultural and economic fields occurring at the site of this book when he notes that Survival "was originally conceived as an advertising campaign for books published by House of Anansi Press. Atwood's book satisfied both a hunger for cultural celebration and the illusion of a clear definition of

Canadian identity" ('"Read Canadian'" 483). As Meredith Quartermain notes, "Survival is also a plea for the survival of Canadian culture. Can Lit, [Atwood] thought, was a geography of the mind we desperately needed" (par.2). With its suggestion that what characterized Canadian literature as such was its thematic emphasis on victimhood and struggle against an uncaring and brutal environment, Atwood's book compounded (and yet reduced) much of Frye's thinking about Canadian writing and became the critical publication against which all others would measure themselves; creative writing was held up against the Atwoodian models to see where, how, or if it could be made to fit, while

Canadian criticism often aimed to rework, refute, and re-imagine Survival's thesis in hopes of both reinforcing the tradition laid out therein, and suggesting a kind of national cultural maturity by having the audacity to tweak and manipulate Atwood's hypothesis. Regardless of these tweakings, and with relatively few exceptions, Survival's emphasis on landscape further established CanLit's public and self-conscious identity both at home and abroad.

More recent critical turns have brought with them, of course, the common realization that such definitiveness with regard to national literature, character, or reading was indeed

"suffused with radical innocence" (Metcalf, What Is 10), but the fact that Survival was republished as recently as 1996 with no amendments to the book's thesis (see Quartermain par.2) suggests the degree to which Survival has itself survived as a master-narrative.

D.G. Jones' important study Butterfly on Rock (and, to a lesser extent, John Moss's

Patterns of Isolation) also offered variations on the Frygian theme of negotiating identity through landscape and thematic pattern, although unlike Survival, it "suggested exiled, irresolute Canadian voices, like Old Testament prophets, were harbingers of greater consciousness of something beyond western culture's Utopian attack on death, darkness, and evil.. .Canadian writers, Jones said, saw life as essentially sacrificial; they were telling us to embrace suffering and death as human conditions that ground our greatest insights"

(Quartermain par.3). Alongside Robin Mathews' virulently nationalistic Canadian

Literature: Surrender or Revolution which posited that "real Canadian writing, writing in the true, the non-Atwoodian tradition, celebrates collectivity and community" (Metcalf,

Freedom 109, his emphasis), this corpus of criticism came to be the primary foundation upon which the modern discipline has been built, even if that building has been corrective or reconstructive. What all of these (mostly thematic) studies accomplished was to transform an abstraction into something concretely marketable; to offer Canadians a standard by which to measure and identify themselves culturally, and to offer the rest of the world a sense of paradoxical cultural distinction to Canadian writing by suggesting that, like other national literatures, CanLit could be recognized alongside international literature by its recognizably unique traits, trends, and themes. Those traits — the "sociograms" of

English-Canadian literature that Kertzer identifies as "the garrison, bush garden, baseland, and hinterland" (172) — contributed to what was then trumpeted as the distinctiveness of

CanLit (a kind of "spirit of the soil" [Mount 16]) which was "generally found to be a function of a unique environment" (Blodgett 97) and thus, as Raymond Knister once put it, the "expression of an indigenous mode of life and thought" (qtd. in Breitbach 157). In many ways this obsession with a sociology of landscape is unsurprising for the mere facts of Canada's still-recent settlement and colonization. Inasmuch as all cultural sites are unique, there have never been cultural sites of collision quite like those which occurred, in their differing ways, in the places and spaces that have become Canada. If, as Habermas insists, the first step after administration in the establishment of a nation-state is

"maintaining sovereignty over a determinate geographical territory" (Habermas 62), that sovereignty (an issue about which certain parts of the country certainly know more than others) must be established militarily, politically, and culturally. "Because a state's territory will encompass the sphere of validity for a state-sanctioned legal order, membership in a state must be defined territorially" (Habermas 63), and thus the territories must become intimately a part of the cultural imagination. If what Frye noted in 1965 in his updating of

Donald Creighton's 'Laurentian thesis' held within it even a grain of truth, Canadian writing was bound to both emerge from, and settle within, the wilderness of its borders.

In these contexts, then, asking the question "What does a work of CanLit look like?" is akin to asking "What does a Canadian look like?" Countless others have tried to answer this essentially unanswerable question, and most of them have ended up relying or 244 alluding to stereotype and essentialisms. Solway, as a lark, proposes his own sketch of what

— according to the identity forged through the CanLit he so desperately despises — a

Canadian must look like: "If the stereotype 'Canadian' is anything, he is a largely undifferentiated creature, historically in transit, stridently infatuated by the idea of landscape per se, busy assembling a ramshackle identity from mute, refractory materials, and turning his apparent humility before place and time into a subtle form of self-idolatry"

(27). If it is true that Canadian poetry in particular has been largely typified by a joint fascination with history and geography (and how the latter has shaped the former), then we might assume that the Canadian poet is recognizable for what Jones calls (in his gendered language), his Canadian bias; in a 1984 article entitled "Canadian Poetry: Roots and New

Directions," he describes this bias as "horizontal and metonymical" and suggests that the truly Canadian poet "orients himself in space, in relation to an immediate environment, which may mediate some more ultimate or divine reality but which remains for the

English-Canadian primary" (255). He goes on to expound that "[t]here is hardly a Canadian poet who does not anchor his poem in a precise historical space, and who does not insist on his prerogative to be as narrative, descriptive, and discursive as he likes" (256). Well in-line with Blodgett's identification of "[t]he anglophone predilection for space" (14) which is to be, in Canadian writing, "either overcome or redesigned and given voice" (15), this generalization is nonetheless itself rooted in both canonical historical examples which

Jones traces back nearly two-hundred years. For Jones, as for Frye and his garrison mentality, "[t]he sensibility of Canadian poetry seems rooted in the eighteenth century, particularly in the works of Burns and Goldsmith" ("Canadian Poetry" 256) because it aspires to the formation and maintenance of organic communities in the midst of a 245 threatening space, and thus demonstrates a virulent localism, an eye for westward expansion, and a general resistance to modernity: recognizably Canadian poetry, accordingly, embodies "the pastoral dream of an organic society" ("Canadian Poetry" 258).

So, Canadian poetry is identifiable as such in its striving towards community and belonging therein, but also in its resistance to anything that then threatened to disrupt whatever hard- earned community already existed. Even the poetry of Isabella Valancy Crawford and

Alexander McLachlan, argues Jones, warns against "the growing commercial and capitalistic spirit of the later nineteenth century" which "posed a clear threat to their vision of a more intimate and organic community" ("Canadian Poetry" 259).

Re .'approaching CanLit

Given that Jones' article (from whence these arguments emerge) is itself now dated, it is important to note that an updating of Jones' approach might not produce strikingly different results today; based on the historical breadth of the literature addressed in Jones' article, we must note that it aspires, as so much literary history does, to a vision of unity (if not essentialism) that has proven, under the guise of postmodern thought, to be both problematic and irrational. Still, Jones paints the significant history of Canadian poetry with a single wide brush in arguing that, from Archibald Lampman's "The City of the End of Things" to Earle Birney's The Damnation of Vancouver to Lee's Civil Elegies, "over a century and a half Canadian poetry comes full circle back to "The Deserted Village," in form, in tone, in theme" ("Canadian Poetry" 262). He goes on to include the poet who would come to most visibly represent the feminist avant-garde in more recent Canadian verse when he concludes that "for the most part, from Lampman to Erin Moure, the material syntax of civil society becomes demonic" ("Canadian Poetry" 260) while the 246 comfort of belonging in some version of community remains the artistic, if not sociological, goal of Canadian poetry writ large.

Moure is not the only poet who is reductively corralled by Jones' attempt at definition of the Canadian poetic fabric. Although he discusses, with significant trepidation, how then-radical poets like Michael Ondaatje, bill bissett, Frank Davey, Fred Wah, Daphne

Marlatt, and Steve McCaffery had been influenced by the phenomenology of Maurice

Merleau-Ponty and "the philosophy of process" ("Canadian Poetry" 254), he finds a way to return books as 'un-Canadian' as The Ledger, Steveston, and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid to the Canadian realm by reading their ambitions as the search for the intimate fabric of community. For Jones, this 'new' Canadian poetry still holds within its themes and structures, the national bias even if

it has become less naive, more complex and ironic, in pursuing this bias. Under the pressure, partly of historical events, partly of a more metaphorical poetic, it has been forced to recognize that the vision of community as an articulation of space in a material and civil order may take a negative as well as a positive form, imperial or impersonal as well as domestic and personal, an order of power as well as an order of love — and that metonymy may more easily figure the former. It has been pressured to recognize that these two possibilities represent archetypal poles in any poetic vision, and that metaphor and myth may be necessary to any full or adequate expression of its vision, especially the expression of the positive vision of an organic community, an order of love. ("Canadian Poetry" 275)

Under Jones' critical eye, even the protagonist of Ondaatje's masterpiece (despite the book being "formally and thematically ambiguous" ["Canadian Poetry" 268]), ultimately strives for "a different order, organic and personal, in his own body, in the animal world, in the community of his friends" ("Canadian Poetry" 269-70) and is thus, certifiably, Canadian.

While he eventually suggests that "recent Canadian poetry has swung back sharply towards the more prosaic, metonymical norm" ("Canadian Poetry" 268), Jones' attempts to unify a tradition at nearly all costs reflect the general assumptions "that held sway in departments of English in the 1950s" (Blodgett 276), and it highlights (as I discuss more thoroughly below) the role of critical writing in uncovering and imposing specific sociograms in specific texts onto a general body of creative writing as natural or essentially constitutive markers of authenticity. Just as Michael Barnholden surmises that the 1960s lasted, in

Canada, until 1975, the feverish Cold War drive towards uncovering (read: creating) a distinctive broad national literary character seems to have lasted, through major critics like

Jones and the other small-Fryes (and despite the work of critics like Davey and Godard), well into the 1980s.

With the move in the 1980s and 1990s to a more postcolonial framework for

Canadian literature came a corresponding shift in critical concerns uncovered in the texts themselves. The general move towards multiculturalism and postcolonialism (see Bradley

367), however, did not entail a significant shift away from the questions that had been circulating in and around CanLit since its beginnings. "Where is here?" became (inasmuch as it already was) "Who are we?" and the desire for the settling of a homeplace and the establishment of a community more or less geared its focus towards ethnicity, heritage/history, and sexual identity. In her 1975 editorial for the very first issue of CV2,

Dorothy Livesay joins these seemingly separate initiatives (the Frygian and the multicultural) when she exalts that "[pjoetry is being nurtured in the outports as in the cities.. .the response to poetry across Canada today is the response of a people longing for warmth and succour, a sense of community" and simultaneously insists that "[Canadian poetry] must spring from all ethnic (and immigrant) sources, whose roots will nourish us"

("A Putting Down" 2). But this reading of the national state of poetry is also, naturally, nationalist. It exposes, in its push towards a certain kind of community (a recognizably and uniquely Canadian one), the underpinnings of the "Where is Here?" conundrum. The cultural and social politics of such an unintentional and well-intended amalgamation are easily overlooked in Livesay's declarations as they subsume all identities into that of the

Canadian. Davey reminds us that "[a]ll nationalist readings of Canadian literature are in a general sense 'political.' All attempt to construct links between the literary text and the cultural one, to show the literary as contributing in some way to the formation of the cultural" {Post-National 16-17).

So if there is no way out of the politics of literature, and if the Frygian model proposed for so long to name where "here" was, Brydon's article in the special 2001 issue of ECW dedicated to answering the question "Where Is Here Now?" proposes a shift in thinking while indirectly acknowledging the dominance that Frye's original question had exerted over the field. "It's Time for a new Set of Questions" begins by suggesting that

"[t]he question has never been 'Where is here?' Not really. The question has always been

'What are we doing here'? And that question inevitably breeds others, each of which takes us further away from geographical fallacies, mating loons, and nostalgia for lost Edens and their governing great codes" (14). Instead, Brydon suggests that, well, it's time for a new set of questions, because "[w]here Canadians are at is up a dead end, led astray by Frye's clever red herring" (14). The main question that she then proposes to replace the Frygian conundrum is this: "How can Canadian critics make what has been erased from literature and from literary history reappear as a matter for our attention?" (20). This is, of course, precisely what the postcolonial shift aspires to even if most postcolonial approaches still rely on the stability or power of the erasing nation-state which they oppose. If indeed, in the new millennium, "the old stones of Canadian history can no longer pretend to serve effectively as a national glue to hold Canadians together" (Brydon, "It's Time" 21), the move away from the wilderness, into the cities, and into transnational and transcultural societies necessitates a challenge to what she deems "the taken-for-grantedness of words such as literary history, national, and Canadian" ("It's Time" 22, her italics).

One of the earmarks of much twentieth-century Canadian poetry has been its attempt to find and/or establish a unique voice for itself that resisted the individualistic

Whitmanian bravado of popular American poetry, or the erudite and elitist colonial inaccessibility of mainstream British verse. As a result, the search in Canadian poetry largely became one for Canadian authenticity; the discovery of a voice that reflected the difference of the political and geographical space from when it came and that, in short, convinced itself of itself through a process that Solway calls "the apotheosis of eh" (93).

The 'eh' being deified in this construction was the specifically Canadian mythmaking and social realism being touted as chief poetic concerns throughout the century. Thematically, this trend has established the "curious amalgam of nature-and-sociological description"

(Solway 26) in Canadian verse, as well as a confessional streak, which Solway describes as

"one of the chief hallmarks of our national poetry" (103). The nature + sociology equation, as reductive as it may be, is in keeping with the majority of now-canonical or mainstream

Canadian poetry; it embodies, enhances, and engages Frye's 'Where is here?' in one way or another. Of the Atwoodian "geography of the mind," Kertzer notes that "[i]f there is a

'mind of Canada,' however, it has long been diagnosed as immature, schizophrenic, or ironic, as if the country just cannot make up its mind" (161), and what it cannot decide upon is what, if anything/everything, it is. While it is unfair and flatly untrue that twentieth- 250 century Canadian verse — and specifically that which has been recognized by the GG

Awards — has been more concerned with identity and geography (cultural and actual) than it has with poetics, the search for place, belonging, and identity has remained a primary thematic concern. Critics of this thematic obsession have been quick to equally criticize the style in which much of this celebrated verse has been written. If indeed distinctive content demands its own form, the dominant Canadian poetic idiom that developed throughout the twentieth century has striven to match its material with its realism and its attempt to reflect

— recognizably — the land and its people. Stylistically, then, the "apotheosis of eh" took on what Brian Sentes calls the "poetics of common sense" (10), which has become the central poetic idiom of CanLit through its obsession with a kind of anti-intellectualism, a writing of the local, a writing in the vernacular (plain speech), and an accessing of the

'real.' This strawman-construction of a late-twentieth-century Canadian poetry is built upon the imagined orality and realism of Canadian people; to its admirers it offers an artful reflection of real speech, real life, and real concerns, and it renders the notoriously culturally inferior Canada and its contents into the stuff of poetry; to its detractors, it has abandoned all concern with textual poetics in favour of sociological sketch, and it is derided as "mainly chat with just a hint of self-communing to leaven it marginally for those who require a semblance of complexity" (Solway 90).

Solway has been among CanPo's loudest critics, complaining that the majority of poetry published by Canada's important publishing houses "has become the very antithesis of the art form itself: a loose, flaccid, strolling and inventorizing variety of written speech"

(97, his emphasis) which results in poetry books that are full of what he derides as "loose- lipped anecdotal sludge" (99). The main perpetrator of this perversion, for Solway at least, 251 has been Al Purdy. Purdy has long been lauded as Canada's national poet (and would have surely held the post of Poet Laureate had the position been extant in his lifetime) and is largely seen as the most important figure in twentieth-century Canadian poetry if not the finest of our poets. The fault that Solway finds with Purdy is not as much in his verse

(though he is certainly critical thereof) as in the legacy and example that Purdy bequeathed to Canadian letters; the critic hears Purdy's overpowering voice and concerns in so much contemporary and recent poetry that he goes so far as to dub Sentes' 'poetics of common sense' the thematically and stylistically homogenous poetics of the "Standard Average

Canadian" (Solway 93), consisting of "the homespun cant we find everywhere substituting for memorable poetic diction" (Solway 153). Solway insists that "[o]ver the last generation or so, following Purdy's cheerful and inchoate pied piping, we have been led into the abyss of trivial posturing, linguistic herniation and inconsiderable commentary called contemporary Canadian poetry, a poetry of leafmould, jackpine, aching subtleties and compensating sixpacks that yields at most a highly suspicious authenticity" (97); of Purdy's

"Love at Roblin Lake," for example, Solway finds "a sort of backwards-baseball-cap language, the lackadaisical sublime masquerading as the natively original" (152). As if

Purdy's Group-of-Seven-meets-Les Boys poetics were not enough, suggests Solway, he had the audacity to speak to and inspire a generation of readers-turned-writers who would go on to embrace these poetic foundations and exalt in the mediocrity of mimicry. Solway is not suggesting, of course, that one's poetic themes may not be crude or simple, but that one's poetic articulation of those themes must demonstrate an acceptable level of sophistication and grace that Purdy often shirked as a matter of course. The fact that Solway's poetic models originate primarily in Europe and similarly ancient (read: different and longer- established, not universal or better) literary cultures aside, he is correct in estimating

Purdy's influence on his generation. What he chooses to ignore, however, is that a generation of poets found something worthy of emulating, of considering theirs, of relating to in Purdy's work instead of denigrating it as simplistic, unrefined, or oppressive. His complaint is that Purdy remains "the poet who liberated us into sameness — the poet who, with our earnest collaboration, helped us to establish not our identity but our indenticalness" (100) when it comes to verse. The argument goes, then, that a poem written in Standard Average Canadian must surely, unmistakably, be Canadian, and there must then be a definitive mode of Canadian poetry.

Criticizing Criticizing

Although it is, of course, governmentally funded in much the same way that creative writing is, critical writing originating in the academy has been the undisputed driving force behind the construction of Canadian literature and the dissemination of those constructions to larger constituencies of readers. Hunter traces the government money allocated to the academic side of literary work as it came to foster a dominant mode of "an unreflexive thematics that takes cultural icons as givens" (89); Godard in fact attributes the larger literary notion of Canadian-ness to "an emergent Canadian literature criticism as it was being institutionalized in the academy in the 1970s and, more pressingly, to situat[ing]

[Frye's] theory within its historical moment in Canadian state formation and its 'tactics' of

'governmentality' ...whereby, through cultural regulation and administration, the nation's boundaries were secured and its population constituted as citizens" (241). The institutionalization of Canadian criticism at the particular moment when the concept of the nation itself was being so loudly championed by centennial aftershocks is largely 253 responsible for the enforcement of the static and limiting identity that Canadian writing still struggles with today. If the GG Awards can be said to reflect, promote, and generate this vision of literature (as thematically linkable to a national character), then the entire study of

Canadian literature must be said to be more a study of literature-in-context than literature- as-text. Davey's controversial 1973 polemic Surviving the Paraphrase was the first widely- circulated book to ruffle the feathers of thematic criticism by exposing its ideological and nationalistic biases. Davey's argued that the small-Fryes had a "tendency to paraphrase, reducing literature to an adjunct of cultural studies approached through the mirror metaphor of poor sociology. In this, the guarantor of meaning and truth is the author's experience of the world, not grounded in textuality" (Godard 56). So if reading Canadian literature was in fact reading Canadian writers, then the coherence and place of those writers within the national imaginary was essential. The power of these critics to delimit a Canadian literature

(a CanLit, rather) rooted in thematics like identity, place, belonging, and establishing a tradition through history has only come to the fore with recent troublings of literary studies with postmodernism and poststructuralism.

Hunter notes of the reign of the small-Fryes that "critics such as D.G. Jones or

Atwood produced a contemporary canon that was not only author-based but strongly thematic with a representational bias. Mythologizing, finding coherence, seemed endemic"

(25). The power to canonize is, of course, a privilege (see Guillory, Cultural Capital) afforded to a certain group at any specific moment in cultural history. One can agree, however distasteful it might seem, with Metcalf then, when he notes that, instead of a revolutionary and formative moment in the history and conception of Canadian literature,

Atwood's "Survival could be seen as a rearguard action, a holding action, in a society undergoing extraordinary demographic and social change, a society where the power of middle-class white graduates of Victoria College was going to be massively challenged"

{Freedom 119). Canonizers in both academic and popular fields thus managed to create, for better or worse, a vision of unity and coherence that has more recently proven to be as artificial as any such preposterous and imaginary construction. Hunter concurs, saying of critics that still revel exclusively in the Frygian thematic legacy that they "not only create a literary canon but they also canonize their own critical writing. A set of desirable readings is constructed that is predicated on the consumption of these interpretations, which are inexorably interlocked as they carefully establish their own authority by citing their extremely condensed lineage from other authorial texts" (25). A coherent history can thus be considered a comprehensive one, and if the nation-state requires a stable subject upon which to predicate itself within the cultural imagination, such striving for stability, authority, and a critically substantiated belief in such a measureable thing as CanLit makes good business sense. The era has arrived, though, when we purport to recognize that

"CanLit has been subject to a relentless process of institutionalization. Sometimes subtly sometimes crudely, it has always been employed as an instrument—cultural, intellectual, political, federalist, and capitalist—to advance causes and interests that now complement, now resist, each other" (Kamboureli, Preface vii), and that the problem with CanLit is that it will always be a problem. Its Canadian-ness, if not its literary-ness, must always already be suspicious and self-conscious of how it has been constructed by both readers and writers operating under the thumb of an institutional benefactor that requires a national unity of mind, character, and poetics. For indeed even the most virulently anti-national critics like Solway and Metcalf must admit that their arguments (if not their national reputations) rely on the existence and maintenance of the very essentialisms that they attack as disingenuous.

Kertzer, then, is right in noting that "[s]tudies of the nation as an 'imagined community' might lead the unwary critic to suppose that imaginary forms can be imagined away simply by re-imagining them.. .our imaginations are not entirely our own. They, too, have a cultural and linguistic provenance, which shapes all private imaginings of public spaces" (165). The private fashioning of the public space of CanLit has been, as above, largely built upon the understanding that a canon (or several canons) that can be evaluated, debated, agreed upon, or disregarded, actually exists. To the degree that the GGs have formed their own canon of literature that has been disseminated to a polis in search of a cultural identity, the Canada Council and its agents have come to form an imagined literature that is immediately recognizable to its intended citizenry. Tippett traces this inevitable step in Canada's cultural evolution back to the very establishment of a national arts council by suggesting that "the professional producer, the national organization, and an approach to culture stressing the need to make it 'accessible' would, with the help of the

Canada Council, come to dominate" (xii). Through programmes like the GG Awards, which I have suggested tend to celebrate genres of (and themes in) writing that are recognizably "Canadian," the nation and its character became well enough documented, well enough circulated, and well enough entrenched in the otherwise wanting cultural imaginary, to be misremembered as 'natural' despite their artificiality. Hunter affords more credit to the power of canons than to the power of their producers, but still notes the importance of holding those producers to account as such. That is to say, she sees the importance of always recognizing the subjectivity and human agency at work behind the construction of canons themselves:

Canons establish the common ground necessary to national culture, and within the nation state they are under intense pressure to maintain the stability of ideology. However, as the nation state gives away power to the multinational corporation it is largely transformed into a cultural artefact itself, so its canons take on a more pertinent activity: On the one hand they may become rigidly defining and be tightly linked to the educational program of the nation. On the other hand they may begin to be seen more widely for the limited representations of culture that they are. (18)

If prized literature in Canada remains homogenous to any degree — prized because it does

CanLit well, or in an expected and recognizable fashion — then the basis of those expectations must be seen to emerge from a significantly disseminated and accepted conception of the canon. Given that this canon has been, as I argued in Chapter 3, conceived of, funded, supervised, celebrated, and ultimately generated by an official governmental effort to uncover a distinctive culture, it is no surprise that the thematic critics who George Bowering sees "counting the number of times the maple leaf appears in our poems" (qtd. in Metcalf, What Is 17), have fostered a generation of readers who expect something familiar and of themselves from CanLit. The relatively recent history of

Canadian literature has facilitated, I think, a cultural environment in which readers and writers alike might treat, after Godard, "Canadian" as an allegory for a certain type of writing (181). Is it, then, any surprise that the Canada Council, through the office of the

GG, has solidified this comforting fallacy in its consecrations?

"Canadian" Literary (Funding) Power

Even before the Cold War, the summoning of the Massey-Levesque Commission, and the creation of the Canada Council (and no doubt contributing to their very formations), there existed a widespread concern about the cultural identity of the Canadian nation. In 1944 Edel noted that, in Canada, "the writers do not flourish in a soil that is, as yet, distinctive" (69), but opined that it was not for lack of trying on behalf of literary critics:

It has been said that to be a poet in our world to-day is to invite obscurity, and that to be a Canadian poet is to invite oblivion. This may explain why Canadian critics persistently force upon the Dominions' writers the question of Canadian identity. The writers are invited to weave maple leaves into their prose and to plant pine trees in their verse. They are asked to woo the muse by Fundy's shore or to listen to the distant call of the prairie. The Canadian novel, if there is such a thing, must by their definition be plastered with "local colour". A poem must be a "Canadian" poem, not simply — a poem. The critics seem to feel that the writing of Canadian literature is a painful national duty akin to the laying of a transcontinental railroad or the opening up of new territory. (68)

Edel thus warned against the falsity of forcing and enforcing constructed national cultural prototypes when he urged critics and writers to "[l]et the work seek its own identity" so that

"one day it may be discovered to be Canadian as well" (71). The political and social pressures of Edel's given moment, however, would prove to be too intrusive to allow such an organic development of literary tradition; fears of Americanization and the threats to national independence and safety seemingly posed by the impending Cold War would essentially force the Massey-Levesque Commission into being (see Hjartarson, "Canadian

Culture," and Cavell, "World Famous") and would set the stage for the institutional concretization of CanLit. Ralph Gustafson, in the foreword to the book in which Edel's tract appears, argues against Edel, calling his arguments "at certain points inaccurate" (9) and expressing the increasingly popular (and literal) cultural sentiment of the, coming age that "the writer is the product of the nation in which he exists" (8). The critics against whom Edel was voicing his discontent before long dominate in the form of Frye and the thematic critics of the mid-twentieth century, coming to enforce a dominant canon of Canadian literary criticism that was predicated upon the "the tendency.. .to be.. .homogenizing. For the nationalist, all literary production can be either recuperated as articulating some facet of the national archetype.. .or dismissed as nationally irrelevant"

(Davey, Post-National 15-16, my ellipses). Thus the processes of exclusion embodied in national literary prizing are more clearly understood. If this sense of literary nationalism has been imposed by critics as much as it has been written into the tradition by authors and poets, archetypal works (prize winners), offer exemplary literary models that are appropriated as essentially Canadian and thus natural, when they are in fact, always already willfully artificial and sociopolitically constructed.

It is often, and legitimately, argued that national literatures are by nature also implicated in international literatures because their definitive adjectives invite distinction and comparison amongst themselves. The argument is not new, nor was it when Goethe first articulated it in 1827 as a weltliteratur which foresaw globalism and the weakening of national canons as the primary means of organizing literary texts (see Gorak 54). But even global strategies remain contingent upon the politically and socially stated divisions and differences between populations that are most often theorized as nations themselves. So when Davey much more recently argued that "there is very little 'national' power left in

Canadian literature" {Canadian Literary Power n.p), we must understand him to define

'power' as the ability to enforce a positive and unified model of the nation onto readerships. Understood more generally, however, the power of 'nations' might now be seen to be that of their continued existence as necessary organizational structures under the contemporary political domination of neoliberal capitalism and trade. Nations remain, like dominant canons, the standards against which dissent can be most easily, if superficially mounted and most unsophisticatedly stated. While I discuss this further in my Conclusion, suffice it to say here that the power of the nation in CanLit, both to Edel in 1944 and to many critics today, remains in its presence, its weight, and its legacy, like a Coleridgian albatross slung around the neck of those who would deny the facts of their particular pasts.

So when Davey suggests that "[a] 'Canadian' literature is theorizable as a literature produced at a large number of.. .positions within discourse. It is neither distinct and isolated from the contentions of global discourse nor identical with them; its marks are those of the specific contentions and nexuses of the sites of production" (Post-National 23), the artificiality of the critical and theoretical structures erected between the eras of Edel and

Davey — including the rise of the prize as a nationalist political force — become more evident.

Although Davey's theorizations cited above are predominantly concerned with the contexts of fiction, the case in poetry is similar. Solway complains that "Canada has too little individual self and too much artificial unity. Our poets are most truly Canadian not when they are 'Canadian' but when they are eclectic, seeking tributaries from everywhere to swell the national brook" (30). Sentes, doing his best Metcalf-impersonation, wonders

"[m]ust we rehearse yet again the historical, political, and institutional genesis of the nationalist-critical concept of 'Can'd Lit' whose history extends hardly back to Expo '67?

Canadian poetry, regardless of the exact nature of its relationship to the increasingly ghostly demarcations of the Canadian nation-state, is, at least, a species of English- language poetry, which, at its most vital, has always been a species of international poetry"

(11). In fact, the recent trend towards conceiving CanLit as a transnational literature might in fact be seen as a return to this kind of thinking. This is not to suggest that critical thinking has been misguided or distracted by institutional pushes towards constructing and deconstructing the nation, but that the priorities of an increasingly global population are demanding a more guarded, suspicious, and resistant criticism which probes the appropriative and homogenizing conceptualizations of the past. Winfried Siemerling, who has long been at the critical fore of this trend, offers another brief survey of the evolution of the relationship between the nation and Canadian literatures:

The discussion of the literatures of Canada, of course, has probed conjunctions of literature and 'nation' relentlessly from its beginnings. Among the many examples, think of Edward Hartley Dewart's 1864 belief in the existence of a Canadian literature or Archibald Lampman's 1891 doubts; Octave Cremazie's 1867 lament for having to share the language of Bossuet and Racine or Camille Roy's 1904 considerations of "La nationalization de la literature canadienne"; the cosmopolitan/native disagreements between Smith and Sutherland or the reception of Nelligan and the exotiques/regionalistes controversies; the concerns of Frye, Atwood, and the other thematic critics, or more recent studies like Frank Davey's 1993 Post-National Arguments, with its scrutiny of transnationality in Canadian novels since 1967. Most recent positions recognize the social constructedness of nation and calculate carefully the risks of essence. ("Trans-Scan" 130)

It is my argument that, with the new trends towards transnationality and what Siemerling himself sees as the critical search for "the ends of CanLit" ("Trans-Scan" 130) which uncover the institutional motives behind CanLit's nationalist fervour, new strategies are needed which reflect not so much any national qualification, but literary qualification that takes relationships with nation into account.

In offering, as I have suggested, distinctive literary-historical narratives of formation, development, and evolution, CanLit's relationship to identity remains enigmatic and ambiguous. If indeed, with a series of qualifiers, we can believe that CanLit has

"evolved directly from the Victorian to the Postmodern" (Kroetsch, "A Canadian Issue" 1), then the establishment of a cultural 'nation' that so virulently preoccupied nineteenth- 261 century cultural workers, and the spectre of which persists in CanLit today, is unsurprising.

Even in more apparently postmodern conceptualizations of CanLit like Kroetsch's own

"Disunity as Unity: A Canadian Strategy" (in which he posits that "Canadians cannot agree on what their meta-narrative is" and that "this very falling apart of our story is what holds our story together" [Lovely 21-22]) and "Beyond Nationalism: A Prologue," in Linda

Hutcheon's The Canadian Postmodern, or in Kertzer's Worrying the Nation, are all reliant upon (and always already returning to) an underlying sense of unification and collectivity

(see Godard and Wershler-Henry) that more recent scholarship on transnationality is working to trouble.

Given the facts of colonial history that have been well documented by postcolonial critics, it is with considerable disappointment but little surprise that literary and cultural production in nineteenth-century Canada remained the almost exclusive domain of upper- class settlers and citizens of European decent. Tippett notes that this trend was even reinforced by the formative cultural initiatives of certain governors general who were, at the time, the literal figureheads of cultural value and merit: "As patrons of institutions, organizations, and programs already in place, Canada's viceregal couples were highly selective. Anything with an ethnic component would be likely to find itself ignored" (68).

As the sociopolitical space called Canada continued to grow and diversify, though, so too did its modes and models for cultural production. And although the focus on multicultural creative production was a long time in coming to the fore of Canadian writing, a notable shift away from the unapologetic racism of the nineteenth-century had at least begun midway through the twentieth. Laura Groening has made the case that, contrary to popular belief in a more recent development at the hands of critics like Smaro Kamboureli, 262

Malcolm Ross is owed much of the credit for laying the first major footprints in the field of multicultural literary studies. She argues of Our Sense of Identity and The Impossible Sum of Our Traditions that Ross's "diction of inclusion.. .makes it clear that Canadian literature has been thought of as a multicultural entity at least since 1954" (106, her emphasis). Even so, the discussion of cultural diversity, and of cultural diversity in the arts, was not, by and large, a prevalent one until Trudeau introduced it as a national ideal. Florence Stratton summarizes it as: "Canadian multiculturalism, first introduced as a state policy in 1971 and then enshrined in law in the Multiculturalism Act of 1988. Along with the values of diversity, tolerance, equality, and harmony with which it is associated, multiculturalism has become the centrepiece of Canadian identity, setting forth a narrative of national progress, according to which the nation has left behind the racial and cultural hierarchies and exclusions of the past" (14), however the vagaries of such cultural idealism have been much maligned by recent cultural and literary criticism. Although Jones was, in 1984, awe-inspiringly late in acknowledging what he called a recent "general shift from British to

American models" ("Canadian Poetry" 254) in Canadian verse, we might also assume that he sees this shift in both form and content; by this rhetoric, we might better understand how the American cultural ideal of the melting pot becomes, under the Multiculturalism Act north of the 49th parallel, the Canadian 'mosaic' model of diversity. Livesay, for her part, observed a full ten years before Jones had, the impending sociocultural shift in the polis and how it had begun, already to infuse Canadian poetry with its multiculturalism when she wrote that "[Canadian Poetry] must spring from all ethnic (and immigrant) sources, whose roots will nourish us" ("A Putting Down" 2). This inclusive pronoun suggests that, as with the postmodern critics like Kroetsch, Hutcheon, and Kertzer, the general shift in 263 conceptualizing CanLit is still moving towards an overarching sense of coherence, even if what makes us the same is our difference from one another. Generally, until the very recent move towards transnational criticism, "ethnic minority writers [have not been seen as] part of an effort to make a new nation, but to modify an existing one" (Blodgett 292). Too often, suggests George Elliott Clarke, the adoption of the multicultural ideal has been indicative of a culture yearning to prove its inclusivity and functional multiculturalism, but one that has not negotiated the danger of celebrating 'multicultural' creative products not as art, but as sociological "folklore" ("Mapping" 92). The risk, we might assume, of reading different kinds of texts as CanLit, is that the nation that has been so politically, critically, and creatively hard-won, loses any sense of concrete identifiability as Canadian. If Canadian culture is actually a version of any number of other recognizable cultures, then the distinction of national literature is nullified. Douglas Fetherling admits that if "[i]n the

1960s and 1970s our fear was americanization, today it's globalization," (151). The way that the critical academy has dealt with this perceived threat has been to pull multiculturality under a larger (unified) umbrella of the Canadian mosaic, and to construct that nation as one which has the ability to contain within it, not as part of it, global cultures.

With the rise in attention to multiculturalism has come the development of a postcolonial framework for Canadian literature that has been outlined particularly by influential anthologies like Laura Moss' Is Canada Postcolonial? (2003) and Cynthia

Sugars' Unhomely States (2004) and Home-Work (2004). Even more than a multicultural framework, the postcolonial paradigm allows critics and readers to understand that what we have come to call postcoloniality is evident in Canadian literature from even its earliest examples (see Sugars, "Can the Canadian Speak?" 117) simply by nature of the political 264 and social facts surrounding the 'discovery' and colonization of Canada and the displacement of its original inhabitants. The nation, in short, has always been a contentious, disruptive, oppressive, and opportunistic force in the social, political, and creative lives of its inhabitants. Coupled with the development and recognition of a more culturally diverse population in the mid-twentieth century was the continued urbanization of that nation and those inhabitants. Following the Second World War in particular, the shift from rural to urban in Canada's population became significant, and thus the natural landscape that had offered Canadian literature so much of its distinctiveness became less important to a larger readership. Fetherling hypothesized in 2000 that "the foreign audience now reads Canadian literature for its urbanity or urbanness rather than for its reflection of mock-wilderness, as of old, in the great arc that stretched from the very beginnings to Grey Owl to Farley

Mowat" (160). Still, complains Stephen Henighan, major publishers whom he accuses of fishing for awards continue to resist urban literature (literature in and of the city) as unlikely to find a significant audience, or an awards jury willing to break away from the strictures of CanLit as they have been institutionally erected. In an unspoken agreement with Alex Good's assessment of the "Giller-bait" phenomenon, Henighan suggests that

"[b]y eliding the importance of city life, the novels promoted by our larger publishers propagate a Canada that is white, straight, settled and a few generations behind the Canada most of us live in" (A Report 245). He goes on to argue that much urban writing is certainly being done in Canada, but that the texts that become marketable and prizeable as such are only able to do so because they work actively to project settings and characters that remain free of the actual social, political, and physical geography of Canada that so much previous writing has aspired to. This postmodern movement away from actual geography towards an imaginary and transferable one is attributable to any number of factors, perhaps the most logical of which has to do with marketability and distribution. Davey, however, seems to point to this shift as a conscious political decision on the part of writers who are increasingly decreasing the active role that dominant constructions of the Canadian nation can play in the unraveling and reading of their texts. Even this negation, though, sounds a clear acknowledgement of the power of the nation to distort and shape the telling and hearing of stories. "In many [post-1967] novels neither the text nor its protagonists inhabit any social geography that can be called 'Canada.' They inhabit a post-national space, in which sites are as interchangeable as postcards, in which discourses are transnational, and in which political issues are constructed on non-national (and often ahistorical) ideological grounds" {Post-National 259). Even this move out from under the umbrella of nation-state ideology, however, confirms the relevance of the nation against which writers must produce. Why, then, has this movement away from national specificity become so prevalent?

Aside from the argument that books set anywhere or everywhere have more universal appeal and thus more international marketability, the post-national trend might be seen, in Canada at least, as a resistance to what has become the commodification of multiculturalism itself in Canadian cultural industries. Ashok Mathur puts the problem succinctly in his essay "Transubracination: How Writers of Colour Became CanLit":

[T]he notion of 'writers of colour' came into a national literary consciousness as a marginal notation in the 1980s.. .it is with considerable alarm that we should note the mainstreaming of many of these writers in that they have begun to represent CanLit in many quarters. What began as a brown wafer begging to the tasted has become the body it once opposed. (141, his emphasis)

And a few pages later, by way of explanation: 266

The literary publishing industry, inflected by the associated industries of big-box bookstores and nationalized and globalized literary legitimizers such as the star- system of book prizes and media awards, is most interested in creating a reading public that will bring it maximum revenue. To do this, the industry must manufacture not just a particular kind of taste, but a great equalizing taste. That is, the big titles it puts out have to be successful in the big box stores, the academy, and the media in order to move the number of units required to create maximum profits with minimum costs. Writers of colour, many of whom cut their eyeteeth in the small and niche press scene, are affected in various ways. Certain writers must be pushed to the top, [sic] become household names. In order to do so, they have to provide a particular sensibility to the reading public. (149-150)

We might assume, then that the sensibility Mathur is referring to remains one that demonstrates a positive and harmonious vision of inclusivity within the nation, even if that sense of positivity stems from the mere tokenism of simply being appropriated as CanLit.

The inclusion and consecration of certain texts by 'writers of colour,' to continue with

Mathur's example, both expands popular and official understandings of CanLit as inclusive or multicultural, and exoticizes 'multicultural' texts by pulling them into the pantheon of a literary tradition to which they may otherwise only belong by mere fact of residence or timing. Allow me to be clear here: I am not suggesting that literary awards or other such similar consecrations are operating with such deliberate designs, but that the in-place systems of cultural reproduction (like awards) necessitate such appropriations in order to maintain the appearance of coherence, continuity, and cultural progress and evolution. Even in the work of these writers who are pulled to the top of the distribution and celebrity economies by virtue of marketing or a prize, there must exist a grain of recognition to readerships or juries schooled in CanLit canons; there must exist a continuation of the conversations that have come to form the canons in one way or another, even if (perhaps especially if) that conversation is an oppositional one that will allow the canon and its 267 agents an opportunity to demonstrate their solidity in the form of the cultural maturity required to embrace dissent. Hunter puts it as follows: "Nation state capitalism not only incorporates writing into the institutional discourses of ideology but also establishes a need for a writing critical of and responsive to ideology. This need has directed the work of poetics in the nation state as it has consolidated itself in different places during different periods of the last three centuries, and has become part of what we indicate when we discuss 'the canon'" (17). So if "[i]deology uses the medium of state institutions" like the

GG Awards "to imply that there is a norm, a convention, a natural state" (Hunter 16), then even resistance to and dissent from these natural-artificial states conversant in the language of the tradition and thus offer it the chance to embrace its detractors, as long as their relationship to the imagined norm is in relation to. That is to suggest, then, as Godard does, that "[w]hile both the Canadian State and cultural practices" like the GG Awards "have increasingly celebrated diversity, they have done little to redress historical practices of discrimination. Their discourses, moreover, inhibit any critical examination of historical injustice and so function as a pedagogy of forgetting that makes possible a totalizing national discourse" (264-5). The writers to which Mathur refers, then, must be multicultural in a very particular, prizeable, way that has much in common with what Graham Huggan has derided as the "postcolonial exotic" (37).

Mathur is one of many critics who have presented arguments of this nature in various valuable attempts to disrupt the increasing commodification of the literary arts by market forces. Strategies of thinking and (re)production that tend towards some vision of stable national unity or ideological harmony remain, as Hunter (14) and Godard (237) have argued, necessary to nation-states wishing to participate in and profit from multinational capitalism. Once a stable national subject can be established (along with a stable vision of their national literature), "the result.. .is a commodification of desire and a retarding of responsive change" within both that subjectivity and that literature (Hunter 16, my ellipses); while dissent can exist, the nation must be able to contain it and oversee it from an unthreatened position. Godard has argued this point most thoroughly and eloquently in one of her most widely-read essays; the very fact that 2000's "Notes From the Cultural

Field: Canadian Literature From Identity to Hybridity" has been recently re-published in

Godard's first book (2008) with "Commodity" replacing "Hybridity" in the title suggests an increasingly developed vocabulary with which to address globalization on its own capital-based terms. Even in 2000, however, she realized that "Canadian literature is prized within this global economy since its multicultural diversity is readily exportable in translation. Though ethnicity has become a signifier of marketability, multiculturalism is accepted only in as much as it increases the cultural capital of the dominant culture" (254).

Accordingly, she suggests, cultural markets have been infiltrated and appropriated by financial ones which seek to pursue a program of "diversity as export" (257) which can then be distributed internationally as a marker of Canada's stability, maturity, tolerance, and cultural sophistication. Godard continues: "This new rhetoric manages the extremely diverse and mobile population of Canada through a strategy of dispersal rather than one of binding to territory; celebrating diversity becomes a way of containing it. This rhetoric finds an echo in Canadian literature criticism which increasingly focuses on the places of crossing or thresholds in a process of denaturalizing the relation between literature, language, and territory" (257). The question then becomes one of resistance. Can one resist the commodification and appropriation by forces like literary awards or other official 269 consecrations and still reach larger readerships? Mathur, for one, wonders "[w]hat is to be done to develop strong creative and critical practices from a plethora of literary communities without taking our lead from market forces?...[H]ow do we function in an environment that is so able to co-opt, rebrand, and market?" (150-151), especially when the very rise of identity-movements of the 1980s and 1990s which were designed to "disturb a social fabric that had become complacent in its homogeneity and lack of attention to power relationships" (Mathur 142) have themselves become fetishized as examples of CanLit's open diversity?

The nature of this commodification stems from a refusal on the part of the institutions behind canons and awards to treat globalization as "a process, not an end-state"

(Habermas 65) which can be concretized and exploited. For Brydon, this is attributable to the fact that "[w]hile diaspora and globalization studies celebrate global flows, official

Canadian discourse remains obsessed with social cohesion and integration, centre and margin, seeking to enforce a unified vision" ("Metamorphoses" 12). In this case, that vision maintains that Canada is already a fully 'globalized' nation. This phenomenon of privileging a product over a more genuine process is what ostensibly allows institutions and their agents to construct, distribute, and consecrate totalizing and appropriative versions of nation, literature, and citizenship themselves. The granting of an award, it must then be said, is always the consecration of a product since awards are not overtly or admittedly designed to actually produce anything other than their own existence and authority.

There seems to be no way around this fact — no escape from the power of the award, nor the game of culture in which it operates — unless we view awards as parts of an on-going process that can be alternatively theorized as a literary tradition, a canon, a 270 history, etc. all of which require a criticism which actively and continuously re-opens the fields of cultural production. The facts of institutional reality, though, cannot be denied, and

Canadian literature must be categorized, consecrated, produced and distributed despite the obvious and unjust failings in many of its guiding systems and structures. Recent criticism that focuses on transnational literary practice and production, however, offers a challenge to institutional practices that remain, like the GG Awards, dependent on national stabilities and norms. Of the current trend in conceiving of literature, and Canadian literature

?ran.mationally, it is important to note carefully the prefix: it is essential, I think, that considerations of CanLit "go 'through' Canada in the double sense of both across and beyond, while avoiding any 'trans' that suspends consciousness of, 'passes over' (one meaning of trans-send-ere) or 'departs from' its situated problematics" (Siemerling "Trans-

Scan" 131). That is, to not deny the fact of nation, but to remain suspicious of its machinations as a matter of course through a sustained critical self-consciousness.

One productive way to work towards such a goal is, I think, what Herb Wyile has deemed the 'ethical turn' in recent Canadian creative and critical writing. Wyile sees this turn, as Siemerling does, as a re-turn to questions of ethical relevance and sociopolitical power that were largely seen to have been moved to the backburner with the rise of postmodernism and poststructuralism within the academy. What he proposes instead is "a sustained effort to reframe ethical considerations in the wake of poststructuralist skepticism towards metanarratives, emphasis on the rhetoricity of texts, and highlighting of the seduction of mimesis — the problem, that is, with viewing literature as simply a window onto the world" (821). Wyile further suggests a reconsideration of mimesis as potentially valuable; it originated as a dominant discourse, after all, for legitimate reasons that cannot be seen to be so different today than originally intended. Wyile argues, essentially, that novels called CanLit can be seen to suggest "the continuing ethical relevance of literature after poststructuralism, not because writers, like Shelley's poets, are 'the unacknowledged legislators of the world', but because of how the encounter with these novels involves a more ambivalent, and perhaps ultimately more genuinely and politically fruitful, engagement of our ethical faculties" (823). The ethical turn then, does not depoliticize texts, but rather super-charges their politicization by bringing a self-consciousness to reading practices — by admitting that, while appropriative pronouns are inevitable, the recognition and belief in a community of readership is not homogenizing. It is, as Brydon suggests in "Metamorphoses," the cultivation of the ability to expand what we think of when we use pronouns like "we" and "us." The ethical turn in literature and criticism is a

(re)turn to the pragmatics of being human by acknowledging that different people can hold different positions, that a significant cultural event or development affects the field and its players as a whole, and that citizenship (both cultural and civic) depends upon a fellow citizenry for which all members are partly responsible.

This approach is, of course, not without its problems. First and foremost, it requires relinquishing a degree of subjectivity on the part of critics and readers. Not, of course, an impossible negation of subjectivity, but a self-conscious consideration of it as part of any critical approach to a text that, while perhaps dominant, does not become an entirely appropriative lens through which the text exists. Wyile worries, naturally, that this (re)turn might be seen as a rearguard action that has already been theoretically exposed as fallible and hegemonic: "If this sounds suspiciously like Arnoldian humanism, one of the salutary aspects of the ethical turn in theory and criticism is that, after poststructuralism, critics are much less likely to view literature as simply a container for moral precepts" ( 824). And while moral precepts remain an integral part of this (re)turn, they are not dominant in the way that earlier humanists had conceived them to be. Flawed as this approach may be, it does, however, hold within it the potential to disrupt the unchecked institutionality of

CanLit in various ways — for example, by increasing readers' personal engagement with texts by remaining less inclined to definitive and appropriative (re)production of CanLit recognizability. In terms of awards, this might lead, I think to what I will propose in my

Conclusion as a more democratic, if equally flawed system of recognizing and celebrating works, as it indirectly wrests a degree of power from the hands of institutions by making the institutions themselves overtly self-conscious about their roles in supporting creative production in Canada. Ultimately this (re)turn requires an understanding that "the ethical utility of literary texts may well reside most of all in their lack of amenability to clear judgment (whether that judgment be consensus or disagreement) — that is, in their recurrent ambiguity" (Wyile 831) and in approaching them as choices put to readers instead of political statements offered by writers, publishers, or institutions behind literary production in the first place.

Of the shift toward transnational understandings of CanLit, Mathur observes that

"[i]f the recent past is a palimpsest, partially erased but readable in its remnants, then we cannot help but view the identity movements of the nineties — full of bombast and righteousness as well as acute criticality and political awareness — as historically significant and omnipresent. We have not left the politics of identity behind us, nor constructed an elaborate camouflage to continue working in the same old ways" (149). As I will argue in my Conclusion, if CanLit is to address its institutions in the interest of transparency and disclosure, it must not pass the nation by. Neither must it defer to constructions of nation that have deigned to speak for its constituency as an impossible whole. One worries, of course, that TransCanada is yet another SSHRC-funded phase in the ever-appropriated quest for national essentialism (once again through an anti-essentialism) that will, in due course, become the mainstream tradition against which it currently positions itself. A certain degree of appropriation is inevitable given the institutional realities of the humanities in Canada. Transnational approaches offer, I hope, a return to fluxing relationships with specific nations in order not to negate them and thus confirm their legitimacy, but to envision how they continue to appropriate and wield power, and how they might evolve in order to address globalizing realities of cultural and actual capital. Deconstruction of the nation is always, however, about the nation itself, so perhaps as in the case of canons, an active discussion of their faults and exclusions actually comes to strengthen them. Instead, I think we must propose a manner of thinking and reading that, like the ethical (re)turn, resists binary appropriation not in spite of dominant constructions of nation, but alongside them. CanLit must emerge, through this attention to its institutionality, in order to reassess its relationship with its texts, its agents, and its institutions; to begin again to use theory instead of having theory use it. Case Study — 2001

Re-member History, By George!

Shortlisted Books: Canadian Poetry in English Carson, Anne. Men in the Off Hours. Toronto: Vintage, 2001. Clarke, George Elliott. Execution Poems. Kentville: Gaspereau, 2001. Hall, Phil. Trouble Sleeping. London, ON: Brick, 2000. Kroetsch, Robert. The Hornbooks of Rita K. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 2001. McCaffery, Steve. Seven Pages Missing. Volume I: Selected Texts 1969-1999. Toronto: Coach House, 2000.

Jury Members: Erin Moure, Lisa Robertson, John Steffler

The cast of players in the 2001 GG competition presents a diverse cross-section of contemporary Canadian poetics and personas. At the time of the competition, the shortlisted poets for 2001 (perhaps with the exception of Phil Hall) all had sizeable reputations in the field of CanLit, and had had a body of criticism and consecration erected around their earlier works. None were unknown and unrecognizable to engaged contemporary readers in the field, even if they were known primarily through their public negations. Anne Carson, however, had certainly not been negated — at the time of the release of the shortlist she had already won the inaugural Griffin Prize for the exploratory and experimental Men in the Off Hours, which might have indicated (in accordance with the logic of scandal discussed in Chapter 1 and that of CanLit in Chapter 4) the unlikelyhood of her consecration with the GG. In a seeming inversion of the 1981 contest, the smallest collection of shortlisted poems {Execution Poems, 45 pages) is consecrated over several longer books including a representative 'selected' running more than ten times that length {Seven Pages Missing, 464 pages). The winning text stands alone on the shortlist for many reasons, not the least of which is that it is clearly the most traditionally 275 recognizable as poetry in the English-Canadian tradition. Execution Poems contains, I think, the most visceral, vibrant, and engaging poetry of George Elliott Clarke's career thus far, but it also engages a particular regional and national Canadian historical master- narrative in a way that the other shortlisted connections do not. Inasmuch as poetry is always referring to itself as a text, the poems in Clarke's winning book are the least self- conscious about and concerned with the act and event of poetry of the shortlisted works.

This is not to say that Execution Poems remains unconcerned with itself and the genre in which it is engaged, but that its thrust is that of a more directly referential, socially engaged political poetry of a specifically recognizable Canadian time and space. It is, though, a collection which, given the well-established poetics of the 2001 jury members, also seemed to be among the least likely candidates for consecration. The selection of Execution Poems in 2001 thus raises exactly the kinds of questions that this project in its entirety is proposing to address, as it hints at an institutionally 'national' pathology within the Awards themselves.

Execution Poems is a remarkable winner for several reasons. Perhaps most obviously, it is an extremely graphic book that willfully attempts to disturb its readers through an overarching theme of textual, imagistic, and thematic violence both against and by the institutional nation. Since his rise to recognition in the early 1980s, Clarke's poetry has been demonstrably "polemical/ performative" (Fiorentino par.l) and he has worked to broaden his readers' conceptions of both Canadian poetry and the imagined Canadian nation from whence it is believed to emerge by becoming a visible and audible champion of his own work and its contexts. To say that he has been successful in this regard would itself be an understatement. Alexander MacLeod has observed that Clarke's career thus far "has been a tale of rapid ascent through the hierarchy of academic and artistic celebrity in

Canada" and that, through his manipulation of this celebrity, he has "become a genuine public intellectual" (96-97). The range of Clarke's poetry has mirrored, for all intents and purposes, this meteoric expansion of his visibility as a public figure: from social worker in the Annapolis Valley, to Parliamentary aide in the national House of Commons, to E.J.

Pratt Chair of Canadian Literature at Canada's most renowned research university, to plenary speaker for The Dominion Institute's 2006 Lafontaine-Baldwin Symposium, to a

Trudeau Fellowship Honouree — one of the most lucrative and respected public fellowships in Canada. Clarke's poetry, accordingly, has always been overtly political and public as it is visibly informed by "the sociospatial index of his thought" (MacLeod 110).

If, as I will suggest, McCaffery's poetry can be read as theory, then Clarke's can be read as public sociopolitical commentary that is inevitably often approached, as Leonard Cohen's is, through the extra-textual lens of Clarke's public persona. Although he began as a staunchly regional poet concerned with the geography and people of his native Annapolis

Valley, his work has gradually expanded its scope to address the Maritimes as a larger region (in Execution Poems), to take on the Quebec question (in the libretto Quebecite

[2003]), and even to a magic-realist biography of Pierre Elliott Trudeau in his 2007 libretto

Trudeau: Long March, Shining Path. "With each step he takes," suggests MacLeod,

"Clarke seems to expand his definition of the 'home place' and to extend his geographical range over an ever-broadening cultural space" (103). What has remained constant for

Clarke are his playful, bombastic, and musically-charged poetics, his "ever-present fascination with poetic form" (Fiorentino par. 19), and his life-long project of delineating the space that he has famously dubbed "Africadia" in an attempt to (re)establish a visible historical and social presence for black Canadians, especially those in the Maritimes, and one which converses, boisterously, with the master-narratives of the larger Canadian nation that have otherwise ignored or appropriated it.

In accordance with these ideals, Execution Poems recounts the story of Clarke's real-life cousins George and Rufus Hamilton who were tried, convicted, and executed by hanging for the murder of a Fredericton-area taxi driver in 1949. It employs the well- established CanLit conventions of the documentary-collage (see Manina Jones) in blending both lyric and narrative verse with seemingly historical photographs, letters, songs, and newspaper articles in order to undermine historical master-narratives and re-imagine alternative or previously concealed histories, both literal and literary. The speaker — undeniably a referential persona of the poet — is always present in the collection,

"prefacing] murder for you" ("Negation" 11) in the opening poem, then boldly declaring of his subjects: "They were my cousins, dead a decade before I was born.// My bastard phantasms, my dastard fictions" ("George and Rue: Pure, Virtuous Killers" 12). With the poet as a Virgilian guide, then, Execution Poems aims to re-tell a significant story, a large part of which has been willfully ignored and forgotten by historical master-narratives and official records which remember indeed the severity of the crime and the finality of retribution as a closed fact of regional judicial history that remains puzzlingly outside of that same region's social history. The book suggests that what is forgotten is not the crime itself, but rather the fact that its perpetrators consisted of more than mere statistics. If it is true that the referred-to crime "remains discursively imprinted on the local community" of

Fredericton and that Barker's Point, where the murder took place is still referred to as 278

'Hammertown' (Andrews 115, 116), the second crime with which Execution Poems is concerned is that George and Rue had their social voicelessness as impoverished black men converted from metaphorical to actual by a social and justice system that was, to varying degrees, itself responsible for their silencing.

The abusive and impoverished childhood that the brothers survive is starkly detailed in the collection's early poems, offering a hopeless and brutal social landscape as the context out of which "The Black Acadian Tragedy of 'George and Rue'" (3) will play out.

The 'place' of the poems is always important as Clarke actively infuses his specifically recognizable Canadian region with its own implied mythology and literary credit in poems like "The Hants County Day of the Dead" (22) and "Reading Titus Andronicus in Three

Mile Plains, N.S." (25). The most important geography in the book, though, is that of

Fredericton. Jennifer Andrews has argued that despite the negativity of Execution Poems' contexts, "Clarke's poems assert a presence in Fredericton and New Brunswick that is black and proudly so" (129). In fact, the recognition of this racialized presence in

Fredericton's very founding is what leads Rue to distrust the city which at a quick glance has, and will continue to, erase him from its civic docket:

Rue: Fredericton — fucking — New Brunswick. A decade of Depression, then the Hitler War.

Carrying my bleak, nasty face out of Nova Scotia, alarmed, out of Nova Scotia, alarmed,

drift into Fredtown like so much blackstorm sky — squinting at frigid, ivory, strait-laced streets.

Fredtown was put up by Cadians, Coloureds, and hammers. Laws and lumber get made here.

Bliss Carman got made here. Why should I put up with this hard-drinking, hard-whonng, hardscrabble town? ("Public Enemy" 32)

That Fredericton is "a birthplace of English Canadian poetry" (Andrews 115) thanks in large part to Carman and Roberts is certainly not lost on Clarke. This city where Carman

'got made' (despite its own making by Acadians and blacks) with its ivory, straight-and- narrow streets seems immediately hostile to Rue whose life has been anything but. Still,

Rue remains in Fredericton as if to assert his own validity and belonging as a racialized subject even though it culminates in his demise as a racialized subject. By appropriating it as 'Fredtown' he even exhibits a degree of ownership over the space even if he sees it as the aggressively racist administrative seat from whence his impending execution will originate. Execution Poems can be read as in/as/serting itself into the CanLit imaginary in much the same way.

Rue's nod to an Acadian presence is also telling with regard to the poetics of

Execution Poems as a whole. Clarke's "Africadia" fuses Africa, Acadia, and Virgil's

Arcadia in a symbolic conflation of cultures that Susan Knutson sees as essentially transcultural and palimpsestic, as it emerges from the "polyglot womb" (33) of indigenous,

French, British, and African traditions. As a direct result of this multifaceted cultural layering, Clarke's hallmark language and diction are everywhere present in these poems as if, like Rue, to assert itself as a valid and powerful force to be dealt with in spite of the dominant norms that might threaten to deny its value as poetry. According to Knutson,

"Clarke celebrates the complex cultural multiplicity that brought Africadia into being in the poem 'Haligonian Market Cry,' where food, sexuality, literatures, and languages swirl about in a heady and reproductive mix, an amoral and delicious banquet of promiscuous words and polyglot pleasures" (37): I got hallelujah watermelons! — virginal pears! — virtuous corn! Munit haec et altera vincit! Luscious, fat-ass watermelons! — plump pears! — big-butt corn! Le gusta este jardin? Come-and-get-it-cucumbers! — hot-to-trot, lust-fresh cucumbers! Voulez-vous coucher avec moi? Watermelons! — Go-to-church-and-get-redeemed watermelons! 0 peccatore, in verital Good God cucumbers! — righteous pears! — golden Baptist corn! Die Reue ist dock nur ein leuchter Kauf! 1 got sluttish watermelons! — sinful cucumbers! —jail-bait pears! — Planted by Big-Mouth Chaucer and picked by Evil Shakespeare! (18)

In terms of what we might identify as the 'narrative' of Execution Poems, "Haligonian

Market Cry" serves no purpose aside from cultural contextualization, and yet it remains integral to the collection as a whole for the role it plays in pluralizing Halifax's cultural character, for establishing the sermon-like "blackening" (see Fiorentino) of English as a performative and public "deformation of mastery" (Houston A. Baker Jr. qtd. in Clarke,

Odysseys Home 275) of dominant speech patterns, and for its connected resistance to the

English literary canon.

This appropriative notion of 'deforming' the mastery of a colonially inherited language and tradition is a formative one to Clarke and to Execution Poems. The book's very first poem offers its most articulate example of such homage/resistance, as well as allowing the speaker to enter the narrative in order to address his reader directly:

Le negre negated, meagre, c'est moi: A whiskey-coloured provincial, uncouth Mouth spitting lies, vomit-lyrics, musty, Masticated scripture. Her Majesty's Nasty, Nofaskoshan Negro, I mean To go out shining instead of tarnished, To take apart poetry like a heart. My black face must preface murder for you. ("Negation" 11) 281

The fact that a longer version of this poem, which Zachariah Wells includes in his

Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets (2008), speaks to the argument that "[l]ike Derek Walcott and other politically engaged black poets, Clarke understands that it's better, and more politically effective, to re-colonize the language and forms of Europe than to reject them entirely in favour of 'deconstructed' post-colonial texts" (Wells, Jailbreaks 125).

Accordingly, this poem performs a number of intentional 'deformations' of both the sonnet form1 and of 'poetic language' as it has been popularly construed in the dominant anthologies of poetry in English. The poem also frames those that are to follow by marking its own colonial identity (as both a "provincial" and as "Her Majesty's"), its plurality (in adopting, nonchalantly, French words), and its daring (to dismantle our expectations for poetry). Perhaps most notably though is its introduction of its unique deformation of

'proper' English in asserting its "Nofaskoshan" pedigree over its Nova Scotian one. The brothers' facility with language — particularly Rue's — is a centrally important element of

Execution Poems as it offers the boys varying degrees of agency while still marking their difference from a dominant norm. It is also specifically and identifiably regional version of

"blackened" English that they speak: Geo: "My speech? Pretty ugly. Those who complain?

Wells includes the version of "Negation" that Clarke published in his other 2001 collection, Blue, and which conforms more readily to the traditional sonnet form by running a full 14-lines. I would argue, however, that the poem's sonnet sensibility remains intact in both versions, and that the longer version's volta ("So my black face must preface your finish,/ Deface your religion — unerringly,/ Niggardly, like some film noir blackguard's" [Blue 13]) serves a different function than the "Negation" of Execution Poems' volta ("My black face must preface murder for you" [11]) only in that it contextualizes the shorter poem within the larger structure of Execution Poems as a coherent and self-referential book-length unit. The poem's metrical and rhythmic constraints (which Wells identifies as "classic Clarke" in their "strong-stress rhythm, wordplay, alliteration, and macaronic diction" [Jailbreaks 125]) do not induce notable deviations between the poems' tone and style. Uglier./ My English is like fractured China — broken./1 really speak Coloured, but with a

Three Mile Plains Accent" ("Trial I" 36). This is not to say that the brothers do not have access to said dominant language, but that they willfully distort it in order to resist its colonial authority over them, as exemplified in the trial-poem "Malignant English":

Crown: I warrant you speak almost perfect English.

Rue: Should I utter pitted and cankered English? Bad enough your laws are pitted and cankered.

Crown: Admit that, for a Negro, you speak our English well.

Rue: But, your alabaster marble English isn't mine. I hurl Insolent daggers at it like an assassin assaulting a statue. (38)

Execution Poems is long, still, on CanLit credibility. Early assertions about George and Rue in Execution Poems like: "They sprouted in Newport Station, Hants County, Nova

Scotia,/ in 1925 and 1926" ("George and Rue: Pure, Virtuous Killers" 12) affirm a geographically-specific historical presence for the brothers, while Rue's recognition of the impending (literal and literary) erasure of that presence from provincial and national memories ("We'll be disjecta membra of Loyalist New Brunswick" ["Famous Last" 41]) challenges the willful forgetters to remember. Clarke's goal in Execution Poems, like that of his cantankerous Rue, "is to make narrative more telling" ("Malignant English" 38); that is, to challenge and open the master-narratives in order that the voices of those whom they have silenced and displaced can be heard and re-placed. So that Canada, in a sense, can be re-membered with those whom it has willfully forgotten and erased en route to becoming a coherent and cohesive nation. Most directly, the prose poem "To Viscount Alexander of

Tunis, Governor-General of Canada" (42-43) pulls the regional contexts of Execution

Poems into an explicitly national and colonial framework that both exposes and interrogates the interweaving of language and (injustice in and around the brothers' case.

Presenting itself as an "anonamus" letter penned by a "Citizen of the town of Fredericton

NB" in response to George's own epistolary plea for mercy from the GG, the poem suggests that racism trumps factors of language, social class, and education when it comes to defining a civic sense of belonging among a citizenry. Even the occasionally inarticulate

George appears linguistically masterful compared to this letter-writer who begins "I understand a neggar name Georges Hamilton has ritten to/ you fore merci." The rambling, colloquial, error-riddled epistle (which suggests itself to have been written by a

Francophone citizen) does fill narrative gaps that the poems elide, but it also speaks on behalf of a civic citizenry from which the letter-writer excludes George (and, by extension,

Rue, because "they both/ look a likein this Cryme" [43]): "he had a fear trial and/ was capabull defend and we the peepul of Fredericton feel/ they must hang for the bluddy homaside they did" (43). That this inarticulate, broken-languaged citizen will get his wish

— not for the nation-state's intervention but for its refusal to intervene; to willfully ignore

— speaks profoundly to the book's ultimate thrust and scope.

The poems still aspire, if indirectly, to a kind of Frygian peaceable kingdom.

MacLeod, for example, observes that, even in a collection like Execution Poems, "Clarke's work demonstrates.. .a collective desire for the home place" (111) and that, through his writing "he slowly wills an imaginary Africadia into existence" (112). Maureen Moynagh is even more explicit in suggesting that Clarke's verse demonstrates "the conscious construction of an imagined community" (qtd. in Clarke "Mapping" 71) in much the same way, I think, that the larger Canadian nation has been so construed (institutionally, politically, literarily) since at least the nineteenth century. The difference here is that Clarke's imagined Africadia is conceived of as a coherent nation inextricably within a larger nation of cultural difference and political sameness called Canada. Nowhere is this more evident than in Execution Poems where the Africadian citizen is (literally) executed because of his inability to operate within the confines and rules of that sameness. It is important to note, especially in the context of the 2001 shortlist, that despite his deeply critical interrogation of Execution Poems' society, Clarke is not deconstructive of the nation per se. He is critical of the social, political, and cultural factors that have shaped its institutional rememberings and forgettings, but the ideal harmony that it proposes is never itself addressed as an impossibility. The Hamilton brothers, those "two crooked oaks"

("Original Pain" 15) that grew crooked in the fertile soil of domestic abuse (see "Childhood

I" [16]), may try to assign blame for their crimes to the larger Maritime society that forced them into their lifestyle, but the erection of that particular strawman is never allowed to stand unquestioned. When a frightened, post-hammering Rue offers the following: "Here's how I justify my error:/ The blow that slew Silver came from two centuries back./ It took that much time and agony to turn a white man's whip/ into a black man's hammer" ("The

Killing" 35), George immediately dismisses this as an evasive excuse for the fact that they wanted money. There is never any doubt, George admits, that "[tjhis murder is 100 per cent dirt of our hands" ("The Killing" 34). What is called into question by Execution Poems is not the brothers' guilt, but the wider social contexts of their crime, prosecution and hanging. So even in a collection like Execution Poems that appears on the surface to criticize the nation as a matter of course we find a project of remembering and re­ membering that does not disavow the nation as a capable or ideal organizational structure, 285 but that criticizes its practical historical shortcomings in order to work within it more complicity.

*

Phil Hall's shortlisting for the 2001 GG has proven to be among his most notable accomplishments from a public point of view. Along with his shortlisting for the 2006

Griffin Prize for his book An Oak Hunch, the consideration for such national recognition can be seen as both surprising and predictable given the poetics and persona of a writer who remains, after more than ten books, "wonderfully difficult to categorize" (mclennan,

"Phil Hall's surruraV par.3). Beginning his Canadian publishing career in Vancouver as a

'work poet,' Hall honed both his politics and his poetics through an association with Tom

Wayman, Moure, and the politically-charged Kootenay School of Writing (KSW) in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But Hall's poetry, like that of Moure, would soon become more hermetic and dense as it struggled not only to extrapolate a socialist politics but to embody it through language. Still, his poetry — and Trouble Sleeping especially — tends to wander between poles of broad, populist narratives of accessibility and dense, associative lyrics bordering on the surreal. Trouble Sleeping's back cover goes so far as to dub him "a worker's advocate with the tools of a 'language' poet," but the subtitle of his 1996 book

Hearthedral: A Folk-Hermetic comes closest to establishing an apt adjective for Hall's poetic tendencies. Despite his occasional 'difficulty,' he retains the persona of "gritty blue- collar moralist" of "intense and unusual talents" (Kevin Connolly qtd. in mclennan, "Phil

Hall's surruraV par.22) who exhibits an equally paradoxical relationship with the region and nation by which his poetry is clearly marked. In an interview with rob mclennan, Hall asserts that "[t]he major Ontario voices are important to me: Alice Munro, James Reaney, 286

Al Purdy, Dionne Brand. My friends Erin Moure and Tom Wayman have been influential too" but quickly adds that "[m]uch of Canadian poetry is imitative, so I try mostly to read outside of Canada, absorb the sources" ("12 or 20 Questions" par. 14). Having once gone so far as to declare his desire to leave "this embarrassment of a country" ("12 or 20 Questions" par. 15) because "Canada is dead" (qtd. in beaulieu "Looking outside" par.l), Hall's verse remains clearly rooted in the Ontario countryside, a fact that he attributes, defeatedly, to his resignation to the fact that "I'm stuck here. My voice is stuck here, & that is its dilemma- merit" ("12 or 20 Questions" par. 15). Like Irving Layton, thanks in large part to his recognition (read: shortlistings) by juries for the country's most public poetry prizes, he has become a poet who is nationally recognized for his anti-nationalism. As a further example of Hall's geographical anxiety, An Oak Hunch, which includes an extended poetic "Essay on Purdy" (21-48), has been dubbed "a love poem to rural Ontario" (mclennan, "Phil Hall's surruraF par.38) even though it tempers its love with hermetic threads that are suspicious of notions of belonging and essentialism of place or poetry. Hall is an "experimental poet with a populist heart" (Brick Books qtd. in mclennan, "Phil Hall's surruraF par.43), and like Judith Fitzgerald, he has often been popularly "misunderstood" and left "critically out in the cold" (mclennan, "Phil Hall's surruraF par. 16) by readers and scholars who find his paradoxes either unresolvable or untenable. A recent search reveals, for example, only one refereed article on Hall's poetry in any academic literary journal despite Hall's nearly 40- year career (see Dopp).

In a 1985 poem called "Tillsonburg" (inspired by Stompin' Tom Connors' song of the same name), Hall established a clear stance on the subject of place in his poetry: "I write to cure myself of regionalism, to break free from Ontario's/ plated dolour" (qtd. in mclennan, "Phil Hall's surrurar par. 12). It is with considerable surprise, then, that his long-time readers will approach Trouble Sleeping. Like Execution Poems, this is a collection that is, rather, marked most prominently by its regional identity, thus suggesting that the poet had overcome his earlier "fear of regionalism" (qtd. in beaulieu, "Looking outside" par.6), perhaps even through an engagement with it in books like Trouble

Sleeping. Very simply, as Hall himself puts it, Trouble Sleeping is 'about' "the resignedness of the rural poor on the edge of the/ Canadian shield in the ancient Fifties"

(25). Also like Clarke's book, Hall's embodies an act of difficult and unpleasant remembering of a past that had been, for whatever reason, actively suppressed or only selectively remembered. Formally, the book operates as a single long haibun, described by

Hall as "a Japanese form of interwoven journey-prose and poetry" (5); its narrative prose sections literally recall the personal anecdotes and memories of the speaker's upbringing in the Kawartha region of central Ontario by insisting that the "village" of "Rokeby wasn't an actual village, more the top end of/ Bobcaygeon, a place-to-be-nearly-from" (13). The narrative sewn together by the book's prose poetry is one that recollects the loneliness, alienation, and sexual abuse (58) of the speaker's troubled childhood, and that profiles the strangeness of male relationships between the speaker's father and the men of his acquaintance. Of particular interest is the relationship between the father and his former best friend (both named Cecil), who share a raw brutality and cruelty despite the father being dubbed "the good Cecil" (18) because of his decision to settle in Rokeby and not roam like "the bad Cecil" (17) who had "a face built for a flask of straight vodka/ and for women who had been abused into thinking that crude jokes/ were romantic" (28). Despite being 'set' in the late 1950s, the speaker's childhood is remembered as having taken place 288 in "Oliver Mowat's Orange turn-of-the-century Ontario, my porkchop-/ shaped province, outhouse-shaped country, shape-shifting township" (36) — a time and place populated by

"a generation of men who more or less all looked (or tried/ to look) like Robert Mitchum"

(28) and who drive down sideroads and township lines sharing sips of rye and brandishing a .22 in hopes of shooting a partridge or rabbit for food (14). In many ways this Ontario is a nostalgic and pastoral one, despite the several horrors of rural and familial life that the speaker must overcome, and for all of the sepia-toned recollection, Hall infuses the prose poetry with an imagery of simultaneous serenity and brutality, comfort and discomfort, embodied in descriptions of the speaker's home, with "[gjroundhog stomachs combusting on the lawn./ Wild leeks and morels frying in the kitchen" (61). Indeed, Trouble Sleeping is more a meditation on and troubling of nostalgia than it is mere romanticization — a refusal to forget or to ignore a personal past that is not in keeping with the pastoral ideal of simplified remembering. For the speaker, it is "[n]ot the elms I want back/ but the blue- green lustre/ of the bug that killed them" (7). Arguing, as Hall has, that "[h]eritage & lineage are oppressive antiques" ("12 or 20 Questions" par.5), Trouble Sleeping nonetheless remains complicit in re-collecting a markedly Canadian past in much the same way that Execution Poems is. The book's speaker insists that "[t]here/ are never any new players, no new versions of the past. No child/ survives./1 am a fundamentalist when it comes to my version, this sacred/ text, this recipe for blame as flight-fuel, this remedy for home" (10). The 'home' being remedied is that which mainstream historical (or familial) narratives and dominant discourses of unity and harmony establish as the present days' contexts; like Clarke, Hall's fundamentalism about writing his version of that 'home' necessitates the shattering its artificial harmony. The major difference between the books in 289 this regard, however, is that where Clarke's book pries open the public archive in order to re/un/cover the telling of a public and civic event, Trouble Sleeping is an intensely personal and singular narrative of remembering.

The 'telling' that Trouble Sleeping undertakes, then, is necessarily a fractured and disrupted one. The book's narrative sections are broken up by and interspersed with untitled tightly-wrought associative lyrics that seem to relate, in their disjointedness, only tangentially to the narrative prose that they interrupt. Ruth Panofsky suggests that the collection's readerly prose "provides the necessary detail and a context in which to read the poetry" (par.2). Through this lens, the following passage moves from relative incoherence into a referential, if paratactic, meditation on the process that the book itself is undertaking:

unfullblown asymmetrical ornament-hammered gasket-crumbled

(Father a serial killer of pets Mother a falsie shielding a prone tick)

born joined at the head with myself — monstre sacre hurt into balladeering (take it away boys) — been verified

squat in song beneath the slide-rule bridge — darkness yellow grass a blip gristle (27)

The speaker's youth, in its asymmetricality, has left him unfullblown as an adult (or at least unable to escape his abuse), so instead of recalling a decorative past, he crumbles the seal on just such a pastoral ideal. Being largely ignored by his violent father and his erratic mother, which a reader can only surmise through the narrative prose of the book, left him feeling monstrous and hurt him (like Auden's Yeats whom "mad Ireland hurt.. .into poetry"

81) into recording his story. While a keen reader might arrive at a similar reading without the context of the book's narrative prose, the reading would be, necessarily, a more writerly one. The prose sections, then, push this more writerly lyric into the realm of the readerly by giving it a clear referentiality within the book as a whole. In declaring Trouble Sleeping a

"tour de force" (par.3), Panofsky thus reads the book as a memoir, proposing an even more focalized referentiality by conflating Hall with the speaker of the poems and reading the book as "a remedy for the brutality and pain of his youth" (par. 1). In this way, then, the book might be said to erect its own context through the poetry and can then access the regionalist, confessional, and sociological traditions of CanLit. Also like Execution Poems, the book could be classed as a kind of documentary-collage in its use of unidentified, uncaptioned archival photographs throughout the text. The above verse, for example, faces an ancient-looking family photograph of what we might assume is a mother, father, and daughter — a perhaps asymmetrical family, unfullblown because of its missing son who has removed himself, or been removed, and is trying to re-member himself within and without such familial history.

There is much biographical evidence to support Panofsky's reading of the book as a memoir, although the framing of the book must lead readers to maintain a consciousness about its very recording. The speaker describes himself as a "freak-of-nurture" who "keeps trying his metaphormost" (72) to access and address his painful past, but he remains, consciously, stuck in the present; the majority of the book's looking backwards is conceived of as dream/nightmare-like. Before the dissection of the past begins, the speaker begins by waking from a dream about what seems like a simple cow recalled from his youth. However, upon recognizing his own desire to romanticize the cow (and his past) he attempts to more truly "touch my/ past and instead of one story, normal cow, nourishment

— no, it falls/ apart into wrapped steaks. And the wrapped steaks — crawl. On the/ desk, 291 little putrid written-bits" (8). The scribblings that emerge from this engagement — this blood-and-guts butchering of an imaginarily romantic past — lead him to a reckoning in the form of a postscript to the book's narrative which undermines even its own undermining of the past by refuting that his own version (against the forgetting of others'), while not new, is itself not singularly true:

I was wrong the whole story is not my mother burnt the pogey cheque or woke us all up because she had won the Legion jackpot ($87)

the whole story is not my father always threatening to disappear up lumber trails that lead to a khaki Trenton

I was wrong

narrative won't solve this piecemeal din that is not 'archivally sound' nor democratic

the silence between the versions is where the reverence holds

if I knew more

I'd say less (76-77)

Hall does not say less throughout the 77 pages of Trouble Sleeping precisely because of the past's instability, and its larger archival insignificance to the present. Unlike Clarke, Hall believes that uncovering hidden voices and narratives cannot 'solve' nor assuage the cacophonous present despite the context it might provide. Trouble Sleeping is in this way, then, strangely, a more hopeless book than the ultra-violent Execution Poems, even if a more personal one. Anne Carson is perhaps the most predictable name to be found on this shortlist given the degree of her public visibility in 2001. The profiles of Kroetsch (whose significant and senior cultural footprint in the field makes any of his works consecratable) and Clarke (seemingly omnipresent as the public intellectual dujour) might equally have contributed to their inclusions on the 2001 shortlist, but Carson had already won the inaugural Griffin Prize for Men in the Off Hours (having shared the shortlist with McKay's

Another Gravity and Nine Visits to the Mythworld by Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas and translated from Haida by Bringhurst) in June of 2001 long before the GG shortlist was formulated and announced the following October. While the winning of one award certainly has not guaranteed a book's chances to be shortlisted for another (quite the opposite actually), Carson's most virulent and vicious critic, David Solway, observed that he "wouldn't be at all surprised to find Anne Carson, who is not so much a poet as a prize- reaping machine, nominated for every award known to man or woman" (56, his emphasis).

The Toronto-born Carson has been widely recognized and feted in America and Europe for her academic and creative achievements, garnering both a Guggenheim Fellowship (1998) and a Mac Arthur 'Genius' Fellowship (2000), as well as the lucrative Lannan Literary

Award (1996), and the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry (2001, for The Beauty of the Husband). In

Canada, aside from winning the inaugural Griffin and having a special issue of Canadian

Literature (#176) devoted to her work in 2003, her profile has remained comparatively muted. Perhaps like Michaels', however, her shortlisting might also be said to demonstrate an institutional attempt to reaffirm and reclaim her as a Canadian poet in the face of her 293 spectacular success in international literary communities who might threateningly gesture towards claiming her themselves.

The 167 pages of Men in the Off Hours display what Kevin McNeilly has referred to as Carson's characteristic "extensive blurring of scholarship and fancy, of biography and outright lying" (6). It is a strange and unconventional book that pulls together philosophical, academic, and historical essays, transcriptions of impossible and imaginary conversations, short lyrical epitaphs, and lyrics, all under the banner of poetry. As a collection it privileges the idea of process and presentness — thus her repeated attempts here at writing epitaphs for entities that "can't die" ("Gifts and Questions" 21) like Europe

(19), Evil (29), or "Epitaph: Zion": "Murderous little world once our objects had gazes. Our lives/ Were fragile, the wind/ Could dash them away. Here lies the refugee breather/ Who drank a bowl of elsewhere" (9) — over any notion of completeness and finality to the extent that McNeilly refers to her books as "sites of revision and of correction, and of re­ making" ("Gifts and Questions" 20); Men in the Off Hours repeatedly repeats itself by offering different 'drafts' of single poems that in fact do not share much other than a single line or image. Her poem "Freud (1st draft)" for example, opens "Freud spent the summer of

1876 in Trieste/ researching hermaphroditism in eels./ In the lab of zoologist Karl Klaus// he dissected/ more than a thousand to check whether they had testicles" (20). More than a hundred pages later, Carson presents "Freud (2nd draft)" in which the father of psychoanalysis only makes an appearance near the poem's closing, and only then to embody the way in which thinking about a subject (drafting a poem) is never consistent:

"Ultimate things are pleasure/ said Freud (1914)./ Ultimate things are death/ said Freud

(1937)" (128). Carson might well be describing her own book when she says of Thucydides 294 that "[h]is archaeology reads like a swirling dust of anecdotes and speech and usual pretexts and true causes" ("Ordinary Time: Virginia Woolf and Thucydides on War" 3) in the collection's opening 'essay' about him and Virginia Woolf that is later recapitulated and re- contextualized as a conversation between the two about the imaginary and impossible film they're making in "TV Men: Thucydides in Conversation with Virginia Woolf on the set of

The Peloponnesian War" (115-117).

Carson, in fact, is a poet fascinated with irony, incongruence, and impossibility who frequently probes the gaps in logic which would facilitate the confluence of Classical and modern celebrities, cultures and thought that regularly dominate her poems. The entire "TV

Men" suite (61-118) is the best example of this joyous tendency to couple seemingly foreign contexts and characters. Within it, figures as diverse as Tolstoy (75-86), Artaud

(64-74), and Akhmatova (102-112) become characters or actors in scripts and scenarios suited to a medium they could have never anticipated; the resulting texts then, re-posit these figures in absurd and illogical situations within which the thrust of their respective cultural work is itself re-posited. "TV Men: Sappho," for example, finds the Greek poet on set, worrying about the production's "continuity problems" because "[she] had already invalidated 16 (otherwise good)// takes this morning by changing an earring" (62). The poet of the fragment (whom Carson herself has translated; If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

[2002]) is always discontinuous on account of the absence of much of her original writing

— her concern here for continuity proposes a 'translation' of her poetics into the modern era. Similarly, "TV Men: Antigone" (100-101) demonstrates how editing and selective reading can alter a reader's potential understanding of a historical figure, while the director of "TV Men: Lazarus" mounts a decidedly postmodern and Baudrillardian argument against romanticizing the mythical past as authentic: "No use being historical/ about this planet,/ it is just an imitation./ As Lazarus is an imitation of Christ. As TV is an imitation of/ Lazarus.

As you and I are an imitation of// TV" (89). Solway has largely dismissed Carson's

"discursive and erudite" (Mark Cochrane in New, Encyclopedia 185) poetry as being, thus, allusive and inaccessible to the point of lulling intimidated readers into affirmations of its quality for fear of being exposed as ignorant or uninformed. At the same time, confusingly, he attacks Carson for offering readers a simulacrum of knowledge of the classical world that they have not truly earned through scholarship or reading. His proposal that "Carson may be the recipient of the benefits of an upward displacement assigned by critics who cannot surrender the hermeneutical cachet she confers, thus allowing her to profit from a type of pseudo-promotion the purpose of which is to delude those outside the hierarchical structure" (46) may be outrageous to the point of paranoia and conspiracy-theory-ism, but the thrust behind it remains somewhat valid: Carson is a difficult poet who assumes for herself a culturally savvy and willingly curious reader.

Like McCaffery, Carson is a textual artist who posits poetry not as thought, but as active thinking; the erudition and "Steinian disconnectedness" (Mark Cochrane in New,

Encyclopedia 185) of much of the writing enforces an active reading that resists complacency and fixity. Like Kroetsch, though, Carson's emphasis on process and re­ writing clears a specific space for error, accident, and happenstance that poets have traditionally desired explicitly to contain. For Carson, "mistakenness is valuable" and

"what we are engaged in when we do poetry is error,/ the willful creation of error,/ the deliberate break and complication of mistakes/ out of which may arise/ unexpectedness"

(31-35). In her "Essay on What I Think About Most" which looks, stereotypically, like a poem but professes like an essay, the speaker pursues an Aristotelian thesis about the nature of "[e]rror./ And its emotions," and proceeds methodically in the setting-up of its arguments:

Let's look into this. Lots of people including Aristotle think error an interesting and valuable mental event. In his discussion of metaphor in Rhetoric Aristotle says there are 3 kinds of words. Strange, ordinary, and metaphorical. (30)

Carson's form here creates an immediate irony with that which her title declares, and yet the phrase lines appear as poetry while reading, primarily, as prose. Immediately one can access the nugget of actual criticism in Solway's otherwise over-the-top defamation of

Carson when he argues that she "writes an IKEA-type poetry, fitting together bits and pieces into a mental furniture that appears weirdly functional but is utterly devoid of charm, staying-power and liveability. It is, in effect, a poetry of screws, hinges, dowels, thin linear splines and sharp corners, a line from Akhmatova here, a soupcon of Celan there, little bits of Beckett and Bataille, a dollop of Plato, a generous helping of Keats, all put together according to a blueprint from Sappho" (51). While this particular essay demonstrates no fragmented or desire-ridden Sapphic architecture (its phrase lines are rather appropriately matched to its declarative argumentation), the direct and explicatory narrative of the excerpt indeed lacks much of what is regularly considered to be recognizable poetic rhythm, metre, diction, or textuality. The text's primary error here — the deliberate

'mistakes' of its form, content, and titular generic classification — exalt in unexpectedness and dislodge the expectations of its readers. Carson thus affirms her poetic desire not to elide or undermine her subjects, but to approach them in a new and more potentially intimate light when she argues that "it s always good to put yourself off balance, to be dislodged from the complacency in which you normally go at perceiving the world and saying what you've perceived" because "[y]ou can't think into something you've heard.. .many times.. .unless it's thrown at you from a wrong angle" ("Gifts and Questions"

14, 20).

If it is true, as McNeilly suggests, that Canadian critics have only recently begun to pay significant attention to Carson ("Gifts and Questions" 13), it might be partly due to the fact that Carson's verse is ostensibly unique within the field of CanLit. One struggles, as I have here, to place the "cosmopolitan framework" (McNeilly in "Gifts and Questions" 13) of her work within Canadian contexts and CanLit, and one struggles equally to count her among a specific group or school of poets. Rather like Michaels (and yet aesthetically and tonally unlike Michaels), Carson prefers to ignore the nation-building impetus in Western cultural history and to focus on a rather broader cultural inheritance to which she is entitled.

Her poems are more likely to revolve around the correspondence between Emily Dickinson and Thomas Higginson ("Sumptuous Destitution" 13), or to allude to Beethoven and

Brahms ("Flatman (1st draft)" 22) or Edward Hopper (49-60) than to display any sense of

CanLit sociological or actual geography, or any conception of history that does not begin, end, or depend upon the 49th parallel. Poems like "Father's Old Blue Cardigan" ("Now it hangs on the back of the kitchen chair/ where I always sit, as it did/ on the back of the kitchen chair where he always sat.//1 put it on whenever I come in,/ as he did, stamping/ the snow from his boots" [47]) might at times suggest a recognizably northern clime or a nostalgic turn to personal or publicly 'placed' pasts, but in the case of Men in the Off

Hours, even the definitive gesture of an author bio or note that might thus 'place' the book is excluded. Stretchingly, a reader might accept the poet's invitation to read the lyric "I" as a version of Anne Carson the poet and scholar, but this remains an indirect and ultimately inconsequential association. In "Irony is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as Catherine

Deneuve (2nd draft)" (119-126), the speaker recounts the narrative of a university Classics professor in a city resembling Montreal (marked as such only by its blowing snow and its

"Metro" system [120]) struggling with her desire for a female student, but the place of the poem remains secondary to the postmodern slippages of subjectivity, the "instability of subject positions but also the palimpsestic erasures and reinscriptions occurring within the voice" (McNeilly 6) around which the poem circulates and circles back on its colloquial/psychological refrain, "This is mental." And although Carson may, osmotically, be inspired by "light and rocks and smells and moods and maybe that would add up to a

Canadianness of mentality at some deep level" ("Gifts and Questions" 13), she insists that the nation's only influence on her verse is an unconscious one. In her 'translation' of

Catullus, then, we might find a warning to the expectant CanLit reader of Men in the Off

Hours: "Be careful it's worldsharp" ("Catullus: Carmina" 40).

Carson's concern with ideological frameworks other than that of the nation-state is alive and well. Feminism in particular has found a champion (however reticent) in Carson, thanks in large part to the poet's concern with both thematic and formal feminist aesthetics.

In the straightforward poem "A Station," for example, the poet offers a decidedly (tired) feminist reading of her own reading:

I was reading a life of George Eliot. After marrying Cross she caught laryngitis and three pages later lay in the grave. "The grave was deep and narrow." 299

Why so sad, I hardly knew her. Saddest of all the little dropped comments. Someone passing Highgate: Is the late George Eliot's wife going to be buried? Up the hill and through the rain by a road unknown

to Hampstead and a station. (23)

Elsewhere, as in her academic, end-note-rife essay "Dirt and Desire: Essay on the

Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity" (130-157) which examines the history of social impurity, female hysteria, and "female dirt" (131) and in Ancient Greece, Carson's thematic feminist credibility seems well-bolstered. But it is in her postmodern and post- structural deflation of poetic readerliness that Carson is able, I think, to make her most trenchant political statements on all dynamics of power and poetry. Unlike the above excerpts from "Essay on What I Think About Most" and "A Station," much of Carson's poetry is linguistically 'erroneous.' Carson's speakers stutter. They repeat themselves. They fracture language in order to more readily reflect female subjectivity wrestling with the inherited language and culture not just of English and Modern Europe, but of Ancient

Greece as well. Her poetry, like the epigraph from Hopper that introduces "Hopper:

Confessions," "does not tell an obvious anecdote/ for none is intended" (49). Carson's

'difficulty' is one of erudition and scholarship — one of culturally-engaged reading as thinking — and her willingness to move into and around the voices of historically recognizable characters signals also her desire to interrogate them. As McNeilly puts it,

"Carson may be a thief, stealing identities, but she also recognizes that she can't get away with it, that the poetry consists in the fact of getting caught" (7). The idea of being caught in the middle of something — an idea, a tradition, a place, an identity, an archive — is one that has clearly appealed to Robert Kroetsch for several decades. The poet and writer that Linda Hutcheon once dubbed "Mr. Canadian

Postmodern" (The Canadian Postmodern 160) is at once a surprising and yet a predictable name on the 2001 shortlist for the GGs. Having won a GG in Fiction for his 1969 novel The

Studhorse Man, Kroetsch had long been consecratable. Yet his insistence on textual play, theoretical poetics, and parodic, deconstructive engagement with literary tropes and modes that national literatures have cherished as foundational (the quest narrative, the long poem) has always alienated him from totalizing and unificatory institutions to which his poetics pose an inherent threat. Despite being made a Member of the Royal Society in 1986 and an

Officer of the Order of Canada in 2004, and despite his prolific output in the fields of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and theoretical criticism in and about Canada, it remains true that "his work is not well known... ironically, among the general reading public in Canada"

(Dianne Tiefensee in New, Encyclopedia 594). Kroetsch's writing and teaching career has been remarkable for its breadth; in nearly half a century he has worked and taught extensively in every western Canadian province, held a professorship at SUNY

Binghamton throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and has lectured internationally on poetry,

Canadian literature, and postmodernism throughout his career. He is a writer of diverse interests and creative origins; a writer who studied fiction under Hugh MacLennan at

McGill; who cites Gertrude Stein as a literary hero ("Historicizing" 14) and was greatly inspired by William Carlos Williams' notion of 'local pride' ("Historicizing" 8) despite so famously disavowing the notion of a recognizable period of modernism in Canada ("A

Canadian Issue" 1); who co-founded (with William Spanos) North America's first major journal of postmodern literature, Boundary 2; and who, despite his resistance to the authority of singular myths, has become the world's best known "mythologizer of the

Canadian West" (van Herk, "Robert Kroetsch" par.2). To say, as Aritha van Herk did in

1986, that Kroetsch is a "trickster incarnate" ("Robert Kroetsch" par.l) remains an understatement; his slipperiness — his refusal to allow himself or his texts to be confidently categorized, nailed down, defined, or reduced — has become his only abiding characteristic. The bumbling archivist in The Hornbooks of Rita K, for example, proposes to perform a coherent and conclusive collection of an absent prairie poet's texts in an attempt to recover her (as a) presence; the impossibility of that very task thus becomes the book's focus and results in "a playful, maddening, skeptical, artfully empty fulfilling maze of words and ideas that only Robert Kroetsch could construct" (Vandervlist par.4). His relationship with the unificatory and totalizing critical narratives constructing Canadian literature has thus been a troubled, if ever-loving one.

The Hornbooks of Rita K offers readers a "(non) autobiography, (non) poetry book"

(Bates 11) in which the brackets and absences they denote are just as important as the words they refuse (yet manage) to modify. Dawne McCance has called the book a "text of between" (162) because of its circular project of both writing and deconstructing its writing of both authorship and poetry. The titular Rita Kleinhart (like the initially-related Robert

Kroetsch) is a prairie poet who mysteriously disappeared from Frankfurt's Museum of

Modern Art in 1992, leaving 99 uncollected "unfinished (or unfinishable?) poems"

("[hornbook #99]" 8) as her trace on the world. Her sometimes-lover Raymond then sets about the task of 'finishing' the poems by collecting them into an archive which re- contextualizes the poems and speaks more of Raymond's desire than it does of Rita's. 302

Raymond presents Rita's poems out of their proper numerical sequence and re-orders them in accordance to his own understanding of what she had attempted to achieve with the verse in a parodic structure that necessarily implicates the reader by drawing attention to the subjectivity of their own engagement with The Hornbooks of Rita K. Raymond's bracketed commentary often overtakes the poems, and his opening plea to the reader —"Archivist's

Note: Please allow me." (7) — declares his presence within the text but refuses to identify its textual reach. Additionally, another spectre of Kroetsch's persona — Rita's theory- loving "old friend Robert" ("[hornbook #79]" 58) — is threaded through the book in order to further blur the divisions between reader and writer, and to "subvert the perspectivist illusion of a detached and confinable subject" (McCance 164). "[hornbook #74]" is exemplary of the confluence of subjectivity that such an arrangement forces:

[You write to tell me here that there in Kyoto Robert says this and Robert says that. Your friend Robert, he does love his theories, doesn't he? You tell me that now he realizes that a poem is a fractal. I preferred him way back when he argued, in a fit of blinding lucidity, that a poem is a poem. By the same token he then claimed that you cannot say what you mean, you can only say what you say. Fair enough, I would say.]

Poet, no thyself.

[To comment further and even more succinctly: It strikes me that Rita sees in Japan what she aspires to as a poet. She sees Japan as a way of using everything toward originality rather than a way of working from originality toward everything. She would seem to forget that the Japanese worked from a confusing state of ruin, not from the bright promise of happiness that was (and is, and remains) my offering.] (60)

Raymond's resentful engagement with Rita's concise summation of postmodern poetics here spirals outwards into so many different directions that the poem becomes not a reading 303 of Rita's three words, but a reading of Raymond's reading of those three words. At another point, Raymond marvels at a fragment and wonders, "Did Rita write those exquisite lines, or did I?" ("[hornbook #65]" 21); truly, in The Hornbooks of Rita K, readers themselves become (and become implicated in) what Sue Sorenson calls the mash-up of "the academic, the poet, the prairie bullshit artist, the lover, the preserver of material details of the intimate and familiar" (qtd. in Bates 12).

Poetry itself, as "Robert" suggests, remains the shifting and de-centred centre around which the text might be said to circle. It is variously, contradictorily, inconclusively, described as "excrement, a discharge of the body" ("[hornbook #51]" 44); "the North/

Saskatchewan River" ("[hornbook #95]" 66); "an empty house" ("[hornbook #28]" 68); "a changing of the light" ("[hornbook C]" 84); "an echo of itself, a sound/ we do not hear until it is gone" ("[hornbook H]" 87); "a longing for a possible/reality" ("[the melancholia hornbook]" 95); and as a "vacated crypt" ("[the hollow hornbook]" 101). What remains rather more believable is the disarming truism of The Hornbooks of Rita K that "[t]he poem is always stating its own poetics" ("[hornbook #9]" 70). This is perhaps why, as Susan

Rudy suggests, "if you enter this book expecting to know a poem when you see one, or hear the voice of an author, you will be disappointed" (Butling and Rudy 116). Kroetsch's book actually works towards dismantling its readers' very conceptions of what poetry is and what it might be. The fact that Raymond fails epically at systematizing Rita's hornbooks into some version of coherence and order is precisely what the poetics of The Hornbooks espouse. Kroetsch has noted his distaste for systems ("Insofar as I'm a postcolonial writer, I have a dread of systems, because I've felt victimized by them, or erased" ["Historicizing"

13]) on the basis of their inability to reflect and access the plurality of human and textual existence, so it comes as no surprise that to read The Hornbooks of Rita K is to wade into narrative and lyric chaos that is markedly concerned with itself as a text-in-the-world. In defending his exploratory and seemingly antithetical form of positing poetry in The

Hornbooks, Kroetsch has argued that "[o]ne of the reasons poetry hasn't changed is because it wants to hold onto the power that the tradition has announced," and that

"[pjoetry has failed. It's like the NDP — we all admire its principles, but it's not connecting with the world" ("Different Ways" 135, 129); by including textual evidence of

Raymond's archival mu/me/ddling, Rita's fragments, and the direct influences of "Robert" and his beloved theories as poetry, Kroetsch is able to connect more honestly, more reflectively, to the ways that we actually live as postmodern subjects. In her reading of The

Hornbooks Catherine Bates argues that "our lives include the unordered and the left- behind" and that "the very things we elect to conceal or discard are what constitute our collective biography" (Bates 10, 17). Raymond's jealousy and desire, his failure to make sense of Rita's hornbooks, and Rita's fragmented and unfinished, unpresentable poems, then, more genuinely reflect the processes of living and writing than any polished, edited, and formally religious poem. It is indeed, as McCance suggests, through the re-forming of form in Kroetsch's work that he is able to connect and to find alternate entrances to the world ("Different Ways" 128). In this regard, Kroetsch is better understood as a threat to the unifying idioms of CanLit and the Canadian nation-state. In fact, he has gone so far as to posit: "I am.. .specifically arguing with the Canadian Poetic establishment, which I see as incredibly dull in certain ways" because its tired poets are trapped in "dead forms" and thus "cannot say anything" ("Historicizing" 16, 22), or at least cannot say anything that genuinely and reflectively connects with the postmodern, plural, polyvocal readers of the 305 new millennium. The Hornbooks does indeed try to write a collective biography like the nation-state does, but its constituency is not one of region or nation but of readership, and for Kroetsch, "[w]hat is more precious in our collective biography than/ those very things that we elect to conceal or discard?" ("[hornbook #12]" 13). In this way, and as a direct threat to literary nationalism as it has been popularly construed, The Hornbooks performs a political act of democratizing processes of reading, writing, and literary evaluation (by un- defining "literature") of what poetry is and can be ("Different Ways" 128-129).

This is not to suggest that the book lacks the distinctive sense of place and/or tradition that might make it consecratable as CanLit, but that it eschews them as essentializing or totalizing. Aside from including "[the (apocryphal?) George Bowering hornbook]" (98) and [the (apocryphal?) Doug Barbour hornbook]" (99), Rita live/s/d in a

"ranch in Central Alberta — her house overlooking the coulees and the valley of the Battle

River" ("[hornbook #99]" 8), coincidentally, right where Kroetsch himself grew up; and in a particularly 'Canadian' moment, "[hornbook fragment B, the back home hornbook]" in which Rita might be argued (as Rudy does, 122) to actually return, has Raymond watching hockey on TV where the "Edmonton Oilers/ were playing Ottawa" (103). van Herk has argued for the book's regionalism by suggesting that a reading of The Hornbooks of Rita K is "essential to anyone wishing to understand Alberta writing" ("Wrestling" 1). She goes so far as to argue that "Rita is Alberta writing" ("Wrestling" 5, her emphasis) because of her spectrality and her evasion of being corralled by Raymond, "Robert," or the reader. But this call to a regionalist reading of The Hornbooks is not halted by the argument that regionalism is a subsection of nationalism because such essentialized distinctions are

"impossible to define" and thus the procedural poetics of The Hornbooks are "[s]o different 306 from the declarative trumpets of 'national' writing" (van Herk "Wrestling" 3, 5). Instead of the desired presence of a poet, a poem, or an underlying and identifiable nation, one finds in Kroetsch "not the sought-after needle, but,/.../ the haystack in the field by the lane"

("[hornbook #98]" 105). That is, The Hornbooks of Rita K is directly concerned with itself as poetry more than it is concerned with sounding any definitive ideological note. As

Raymond recalls, "[wjriting, Rita assured me in her absurd way, is not about/ delivering messages" ("[hornbook #22]" 25) — thus, The Hornbooks is an experience of "what words can do...[n]ot what words mean" (van Herk, "Wrestling" 3), which thus complicates any attempt to foist specific political or sociological meaning upon it. Rather, Kroetsch suggests, the gap between language and life forces us into a relationship with describing the world, and poetry, as we experience it: "We turn to speak and confront an absence. Thus we/ become, all of us, poets" ("[hornbook #55]" 53).

*

If Kroetsch's poetics implicitly threaten the totalizing and unifying designs of institutional CanLit, Steve McCaffery's propose an active and direct deconstruction not just of institutions, but of the very idea of 'literature' itself. Although McCaffery had been shortlisted for a Poetry GG in 1992 for Theory of Sediment, his inclusion on this shortlist, for this work, seems remarkable and is likely attributable to the unusually radical and theoretically savvy poets on the 2001 jury. This is not to say, of course, that this first volume of Seven Pages Missing is not worthy of recognition and consecration, but that within the contexts of the field of institutional CanLit, the volume represents the better part of an entire career's worth of work designed explicitly to deconstruct and disavow the very systems upon which its institutions are based. McCaffery is, simply, incongruous with the 307 institutional impetus of CanLit; his poetic practice is seen by Kent Lewis as having emerged "out of the experimental line of Gertrude Stein, absurdists, futurists, surrealits, and dadaists" (in New, Encyclopedia 721), although McCaffery himself might prefer the term

"exploratory" over "experimental" ("An Interview" par. 14) in order to eliminate any potential signification of his texts' potential failures to achieve predetermined goals. His

CanLit reputation has largely been formed around his groundbreaking collaborative work with bpNichol as the Toronto Research Group in the 1970s and 1980s, and as a member of the sound poetry group The Four Horsemen with Nichol, Paul Dutton, and Raphael

Barreto-Rivera. Heavily influenced by European theories of poststructuralism and linguistics, Nichol and McCaffery regularly published and circulated their own newsletters, pamphlets, and chapbooks (and aspired towards a truer gift economy than that which this project has been investigating, see McCaffery, North of Intention 219) of poetry and theory which they treated as indivisible from one another (see "An Interview with Steve

McCaffery"). Similarly, McCaffery's individual work is predicated upon the understanding that "[w]riting, at best, is an untrustworthy representation of a representation" (North of

Intention 146), and that, to an even greater degree than Carson and Kroetsch, poetry is thinking. These assumptions are embodied in Seven Pages Missing by texts like "Poem for

Arthur Cravan" (62-64), a 10-line, 29-word poem riddled with 6 footnotes which span 3 pages and re-read, contradictorily, the language's potential referentiality in vastly different yet seemingly legitimate ways, thus proposing a potentially endless (and useless) quest for a 'correct' reading. Typically, then, McCaffery's poems ensure that readers who read in the way that the tradition has taught them will be "thrown into anxiety by these texts" because of the essentially capitalistic desire "to know the structuring principles" (Byrne and Stewart

7) and to commodify and value the text for the message it communicates.

McCaffery himself calls Seven Pages Missing "too short for a collected but too large for a selected" (13) and yet it is indeed both a 'Selected' and the first half of a

'Collected.' The book is comprised of excerpts from previously published books and chapbooks, while the second volume (2002) collects ephemera and never-before published material. In its extreme diversity it is a text that, like McCaffery's criticism, "can be paraphrased in terms of its unwillingness to be paraphrased" (Bok, "Nor the Fun Tension"

90). It contains concrete and visual poems, short, lyric-like sequences, homolinguistic translations and homages, charts, graphs, and hand-drawn texts presented as poems produced between 1969 and 1999. The book begins with the poet's self-described "early attempts at a post-semiotic poetry" (434) through excerpts from his concrete and visual collections Transitions to the Beast and Broken Mandala. The following poem from

Transitions, for example, "replaces the goal of totality with the free polydynamic drive of parts" (McCaffery, North of Intention 153); it dismantles the materiality of language by transforming it into something else that can be read in any number of different ways.

Consequently, it invokes the text's ability "to produce a vague sense of anxiety in the reader, fueled by the mistaken belief that [it] house[s] some kernel of meaning that [it] desperately wish[es] to communicate, despite nearly impossible odds" (Wershler-Henry qtd. in beaulieu, "Misshapen Chaos" 113): 309

Here indeed we find not exactly what Brian Henderson calls "the detritus of the word" (4), but the detritus of the letter: we might recognize some components of the letter E, but the image refuses to present a 'proper' typographical character — instead, like the reader's search for meaning in the image, the foregrounded figures are stretched yet solid (indeed, the seem to replicate the shape of something down which one might slide, screaming

'eeeeeeeEEE!' as the decibel-level/size grows as it barrels towards the reader; or the tusks of a wrinkly elephant; or a tangle of elongated elastic bands; etc., etc., etc.), while those in the background seem to wilt with exhaustion or slackness. As a literal form of language- based poetry, this text eschews a definitive meaning and returns "to the ground of semantic

This is not to suggest that McCaffery's (or anyone's) poems refuse meaning outright: "the meaning is not absent or deferred but self-embodied as the poem in a way that is not transferrable to 310 production; it chooses a context of productive play for a re-politicization of the word as a scene for common human engagement; it similarly exposes the fetishization of the linguistic sign by ideological constraint that brings the linguistic order disturbingly close to that of the political order" (McCaffery, North of Intention 152). That is, the E that we recognize is still, itself, not actually an E; if we recognize it as such, we can thus attempt, as

I have above, to recuperate it to some form of meaningful reading, and thus possess the text as a communicative and human-serving entity. We witness not an eliding of meaning but an

"expenditure of meanings in the forms of isolated active parts and for the sake of the present moment" (McCaffery, North of Intention 151). As a result, McCaffery would later consider this text to be a failure as a "post-semiotic" text because of its potential

"regression back to verbal meaning as a final product" (435).

Later such attempts from his 1990 book Modern Reading, like this poem from

"Four Versions of Pound's 'In a Station of the Metro'" (379), aspire to heighten traditional readers' anxiety even more by refusing what little stretching recognition it may have offered them in the above poem. In this way, the text's language images more successfully resist recuperation by becoming "pure graphic substance" (McCaffery, Seven Pages

Missing 440) that "cannot be spoken about but only participated within" (McCaffery, North of Intention 150):

another code or rhetoric" (Bernstein qtd. in Byrne and Stewart 13). Following this re-positing and re-placing of meaning (and its goal of stopping up communication), Bok has argued that McCaffery's thinking often goes far beyond that of Roland Barthes' in S/Z (which defetishizes the text but still assumes a transmission theory of language; see Bok, "Nor the Fun Tension") by assuming that "any referential diminishment that still valorizes intentional productivity cannot possibly undermine the capitalist project, but merely simulates it" (Bok, "Nor the Fun Tension" 94). The text might mean, but only to itself, and is thus, rendered unproductive and useless. 311

(379)

Thus, we can read these texts not as poems, but as "language events whose surfaces are often their total depth.. .They are an oasis of emptiness in a world cluttered with reference"

(Henderson 27). Still, though, Ted Byrne has noted that "[t]here's an aspect of puzzle- making in Seven Pages Missing that runs from the mathematical sublime to the 'lowest' forms of word play" (7), yet it is precisely this implication that texts can be definitively

'solved' that McCaffery elsewhere repudiates in favour of the total evasion of communication by way of the "treatment of the material of communication" (beaulieu,

"Misshapen Chaos" 114, my emphasis). The 'low' forms of word play come in many forms and perform many functions, but all of them in fact highlight the sonic, textual, and visual character of language's instability as a controllable tool for communication through the voice, on the page, and as visually 'readable'. As McCaffery argues, "[a]mbiguity floods the sociolect" and thus language's "purpose is to be transgressed and abused at all times by 312 inevitably aberrant usage ("An Interview" par.22). The simple line "through a brick/ threw a window" (182) engages this ambiguity, as does this poem entitled "Feathers and Song

(after a line in La Fontaine)":

"b"ird bi"rd"

bir"d"

"bi"rd

b"i"rd

bi"r"d

"bir"d

b"ir"d (357)

In addressing the impossible puzzles of these poems, the reader's role becomes one of either 'making' sense (and thus writing), or of contextualizing as non-sensical (and thus, still, 'making' sense), thus emphasizing the revolutionary potential of language and text to resist easy appropriation. For McCaffery, this highlights that "the reader is not a subject but a functional role demanded by any text" ("An Interview" par.9).

McCaffery is by no means outside of institutional umbrellas — Seven Pages

Missing as a textual product is proof of the impossible idealism of McCaffery's poetics, and nowhere is this more evident than on the collection's 461st page where the poet thanks the provincial and federal granting councils that provided him with the funding to assemble the book, or in the price marker on the book's back cover, assessing its value at $22.95 CDN.

The many different forms and approaches his poetry takes, however, "defies categorization" because it treats language "as something to be seen rather than understood"

(Lewis in New, Encyclopedia 721). That is, it aspires to undermine and attack the very notion that language can be definitively and effectively controlled by humans in order to mean a singularly specific thing because, as Bok puts it, "the establishment of a hierarchy in which meaning takes precedence over all other elements of textuality simply ignores the medium for the sake of the message, simply ignores the fact that, because of differance, texts always exceed their implied, referential intentions: a text can never simply mean what it appears to purport to mean" ("Nor the Fun Tension" 92-93). For McCaffery, the very system of language itself used under these restrictive pretenses is reflective of the economic structure of exchange upon which capitalism is built, and thus in the same way that capital wields power, can be controlled by particularly advantaged agents, and determines social and societal relationships, so too does language. If, as an extension, grammar's "economic counterpart" is capital and that "[grammatical effects obtain not only in language but in state operation also...Through grammatical constraint, then, meanings coalesce into meaning" (McCaffery, North of Intention 151), then McCaffery's poetry desires to be ungrammatical, and to un-mean in general. That is, (ironically, given the desires of

CanLit's institutions) to serve a kind of political function by refusing to function towards meaning and communication. As Clint Burnham observes, under the guiding principles of language-based poetry, realism and referentiality come under suspicion by a "Marxist critique of the commodity-fetish" ("An Interview" par.25) by actively removing narrative, coherence, communication, and exchangeable value from a text (by overturning what

McCaffery calls the "referential fetish in language" [North of Intention 152]) in order to oppose the dominant political economy which posits a "bourgeois theory of production"

(McCaffery, North of Intention 203) both literally and communicatively. It aspires, in essence, to evolve upon, extremely, Roman Jakobson's 1933 assertion that "[t]he function 314 of poetry is to point out that the sign is not identical with its referent" (qtd. in McCaffery,

North of Intention 16), and to instigate significant mirth while doing so.

Despite the complicity of its own production, Seven Pages Missing remains deconstructive in several significant ways that dismantle concepts of literariness and textual value as it is institutionally construed. The collection's more lyric-looking poems are not at all what they might initially appear to be. Take the following example from the poem "Art as a Virtue of the Practical Intellect":

On no virtue genuinely develop less simultaneous name less critical the gifts assumption logical laws, a monstrosity

Two final

bring out no ailment its own spark

a new departure in the arts for, in my opinion, a nonsensical assumption (43)

Despite its associative relatedness to itself (one could construct thematic readings of it which comment upon the nature of logic, poetics, rationality, etc. — even arts funding and prizes!) the poem resists definitive and logical readings based solely on the text itself, despite whatever anxiety readers might feel about trying to understand the ways in which it means. In this way, much of Seven Pages Missing "reveals the mechanics of the machine of

[readerly] poetry (its traditions, assumptions etc.) and exposes to the reading reader the extent and intensity of their own investments in that machine and their own complicity in its functions" (Byrne and Stewart 6). So although a poem might look like it should mean, and although a text might been full of "promises/ and smiles" one has to keep in mind,

"every fragment/ deceitful" (Seven Pages Missing 142). Not every text is thus writerly, but in the brief fragments that Christine Stewart calls Seven Pages Missing's rare "gnomic bits"

(which "are very intentional. Very meant to mean" [Byrne and Stewart 17-18]), readerliness is employed in order to draw attention to the falsity of its own reliability.

Specifically, the excerpts from McCaffery's 1978 book Knowledge Never Knew are comprised of single-page poems consisting of a specific historical date and (some true, some untrue) fact at the top, and an indeed gnomic, Confucian, epigraphic, readerly line or brief stanza about writing like "to write is to reach a surface through the holes named things" (205) at the bottom; the two clusters of text are thus separated from one another with an expanse of blank page. The blankness between the two thematically incongruous clusters desires to initiate the impetus to fill the blank space with intellectual activity that forges —: entirely in the mind of the reader — a connection between the two fragments to justify their inclusion on the same page. For example, the gnomic tercet underscoring

"January 22 l916//Theophrastus invents the sea-pen" reads "consider the page not as a space but as a death occurring in/ the gap between/ 'writing' and 'wanting to say'" (208), while, after "Francis Bacon writes The Tempest" on "february 12 1598," we learn that

"meanings are what we alter/ truths what we displace" (213). The blankness of the page is, in fact, an "unthinkable space" (455) because it contains no poetry — any thinking that occurs there is not o/the text. Any connections forged out of anxiety, then, suggest that

'knowledge' gleaned from a text is never new — it is, rather, formulated within the reader's reading, for, as if to counter the (untrue) fact that in "march 28 1689" "South Africa 316 introduces apartheid," the text proves: "provide the context and the content will always happen" (224).

Much of McCaffery's concern in Seven Pages Missing is to take, in each text, "a part step in bringing poetry back to the body where it truly belongs" (438). By disrupting the "superstructure" of language ("An Interview" par.22), many of the texts work to emphasize the physicality of sound and the implication of the human body on reading and writing. On a basic level, excerpts from Evoba (149-178) mix typographical characters with hand-drawn sketches and characters, thus returning the domain of the writeable space to the human, from the machine, "ophelia in overdrive" (65-69), excerpted from The Redwood

Suite, is a readerly sequence of stanzas and lines each marked with the speeds (Slow,

Moderately slow, Moderate, Moderately fast) at which they are to be read. But instead of predetermining the way in which the text is to be experienced, this still exploits the fact that the reader must determine what each directive means in relation to the others. An excerpt from An Effect of Cellophane necessitates an even more biologically subjective intrusion on a physical reading:

what they call night in the movies was a bullet dropping in the sentence logic undescending rain immured by the speakers cusp or jet the tissue of a fold half opening the portrait to the thing itself distorting then announcing there is always the discredited signet of a certain sign the aspidistra they call the screen on every surface gone before the detonation in the engine somebody east of the sky the body (277)

Here, according to McCaffery, "the unpunctuated nature of the prose, [sic] suspends genre and creates a temporal continuum that elicits, of necessity, a biologically determined phrasing within the durational expenditure the reading involves. Such phrasing is 317 indeterminate, will vary from reading to reading and yet will be unavoidably present" ("An

Interview" par. 10). The passage may be nonsensical, but it can be recognized as a collection of words and read accordingly, but never the same way. The same text, then, subverts its own reading as a closed one, thus enforcing a writing that, in this sense,

"cannot be consumed but only produced" (McCaffery, North of Intention 150).

McCaffery's relationship to CanLit is an understandably vexed one for several reasons, not the least of which is that the deconstruction of systems and institutions that

McCaffery's texts enforce are to be seen as a direct attack on the kind of political and capitalist usefulness that the nation has assigned to literature. His traceable connections to a

Canadian tradition are difficult to argue, although Bok has suggested that his work might offer, in its theoretical poetics, a distant cousin to Davey's Surviving the Paraphrase by going "farther in subverting the mythopoetic thematics that have traditionally governed the direction of literary criticism in Canada" ("Nor the Fun Tension" 90). Like Kroetsch,

McCaffery is concerned with un/dis/covering the processes of textuality; with positing texts as producers, or, at least, not as readily consumable products. Just like Lynette Hunter's artificially constructed and ideologically fetishized nation-state then, the fetishization of readerly, realist, and referential poetry "displaces and eclipses the true nature of commodities as the products of human labour and interaction, detaching them magically from their productive bases and presenting them as self-perpetuating "things" that take their place within social circulation as an exchange value" (McCaffery, North of Intention 151-

152). By rupturing this restricted economy of such cultural and political production, Seven

Pages Missing proposes "a necessary deconstruction of the linguistic mechanism through which such a political economy operates" (Bok, "Nor the Fun Tension" 93). McCaffery 318 clearly considers his poetry to be political, and argues that "[a] political poetry should be committed to this detection, to making overt the covert workings of power and its abuse"

("An Interview" par.48). As a result, his aversion to readerly or easily consumable texts speak to his ultimate belief that "language is a superstructure, its relation to revolution thereby is interactive rather than reflective" ("An Interview" par.22). McCaffery's poetry, then, is revolutionary to poetry, and thus to the structures and institutions that value it as indicative of institutional maturity via the reproduction of a distinctive and unique national mastery over language. Perhaps the plucky and defiant imaginary promotional blurb on

Seven Pages Missing's back cover speaks loudest about what CanLit might have to say to and about McCaffery: " " — Northrop Frye.

As a potentially consecratable book, Seven Pages Missing is guilty of many of the same indulgences of F.R. Scott's and A.G. Bailey's tomes in that they all tend to value representative quantity over a more strictly regimented quality. It is easy to agree with

Stewart's colloquial assessment of the book when she posits that "[s]ome of it is so so fucking absolutely amazing. Then some not so. Or not not so but suffocating" (Byrne and

Stewart 22). The potential to 'suffocate' when reading Seven Pages Missing is figurative

(although it is nearly physically weighty enough to pose a threat to frail readers, small children, and the elderly). And Although it does make overtures towards wider accessibility by concluding with a section entitled "Documents" (433-456) comprised of the explicatory

'reading guides' published in several of McCaffery's original books, the book is not well suited to non-specialized readerships. The fact that the poetry itself requires a text which teaches one how to read the poems thus literalizes Byrne's (5) and Henderson's (2) assertions that one must, effortfully, learn how to read differently in order to engage with 319

McCaffery's poems; to become what Kenneth Goldsmith calls an active "thinkership"

(sucking on words) rather than a readership. Having only relatively recently (we are told) become genuinely, literarily, literate as a nation, a changing of the rules seems untenable and antithetical to any such national project of consolidation. Given that McCaffery's

"post-semiotic idea...was a contribution to the destruction of writing itself (436), reading

Seven Pages Missing in the context of the 2001 shortlist seems the equivalent of

"examining a system created expressly for the purpose of desystematization" (Henderson

14). The institutions of CanLit, by this rationale, could not consecrate Seven Pages Missing without also implicitly consecrating its own disavowal as a system, an institution, and a literature. As a potentially consecratable CanLit book, Seven Pages Missing seems immediately and terminally dangerous.

The question of the jury in 2001 is a particularly complex and perplexing one that gestures towards the prize's institutional and pathological power to usurp individual poetics, as well as to the potential for the jury to upend expectations established and enforced by CanLit's institutions. John Steffler's presence on the jury suggests a lyrical and place-oriented poetic champion that might find in Clarke, Hall, and perhaps even in

Kroetsch, a kindred spirit with regard to Steffler's seminal Newfoundland-rooted The Grey

Islands or That Night We Were Ravenous. Erin Moure's service as a juror might immediately come into question because of her above-stated friendship and poetic history with Hall. By a similar token, though, the fact that Moure's work owes a certain aesthetic and political debt to both Kroetsch and McCaffery with regard to their triply-shared foci on

"abuses of power, privilege, politics, patriarchy, and capitalism" (Lewis in New, Encyclopedia 761) thus complicates any simple assumptions based on creative commonalities. Suffice it to say, also, that Moure's passion for taking on personas in much of her work (as "Eirin Moure" as "Fernando Pessoa" as "Alberto Caeiro" in her

"translation" of Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person [1992], for example) also shares several affinities with Carson's jubilantly layered feminist appropriations of persona and voice in

Men in the Off Hours.

Lisa Robertson's poetics, in turn, also share much in common with those of both

Carson and Moure. Theory-laden and "research-based" (Butling and Rudy 218),

Robertson's books have consistently worked to "rewrite and reclaim conventional genres, histories, and language itself for women's purposes" (Butling and Rudy 222) in much the same way that Men in the Off Hours does. In particular, Robertson's Debbie: An Epic

(1997) suggests a connection to the academic and poetic themes of Carson's book, while the "protracted sentence structure based on repetition" (qtd. in Butling and Rudy 219) of

Robertson's The Weather (2001) (and particularly "Tuesday" [17-22]) directly finds an echo in Carson's aforementioned "Irony is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as Catherine

Deneuve (2nd draft)" which is itself haunted by cyclical variations on the phrase "This is mental" (119-126). Critics have also drawn connections between Robertson's biography, profile, and work and that of Hall's (see mclennan, "Phil Hall's surrural" par. 18) because of their involvement with the KSW, and with that of Kroetsch, whose movement towards a kind of collective biography in The Hornbooks strives to access a similar "interior of the collective" that The Weather interrogates (Butling and Rudy 226). The most direct connection between jurists and nominees in 2001, though, is found in Robertson's documented friendship with and reverence for McCaffery. Robertson's fascination with the pastoral and her continuous critique of Romantic ideology formed much of the basis for both The Weather and XEclogue (1993), which itself provided the jumping-off point for the lengthy lecture/conversation that she has with McCaffery in the 17th installment of the

PhillyTalks series at the University of Pennsylvania. This conversation, presented and published in 2000, exhibits the deep aesthetic connection and appreciation shared by the two poets on the subject of the fragment, arcadia and pastoralism, and contemporary architectural theory, as well as their long-standing friendship {PhillyTalks 25) and desire to have their texts "refuse to become useful" {PhillyTalks 23). Robertson eventually thanks

McCaffery for the "generosity of [his] engagement" {PhillyTalks 38) with her work, thus setting the stage for accusations of potential horse-trading and reciprocation as a 2001 GG jurist.

On the basis of poetics and personas alone — and perhaps as a caution against denying the prize's pathologies by valuing too highly the poetics of jurors — we might surmise that Clarke's book is the only one of the list to which neither Moure nor

Robertson's poetics would seem to speak despite their mutual fascination with power.

Clarke's investigation of power, though, is markedly different than those that Moure and

Robertson have conducted; both of these feminist writers create texts that, after Kroetsch,

Carson, and McCaffery, attempt to democratize power relations between readers, writers, and subjects of texts, whereas Execution Poems works in an opposite fashion in order to strip the reader of agency and utterly "exclude.. .the possibility of hope" (Greenblatt 94) in any reading of the text. Both the story and the telling of Execution Poems are "scored and divided in ways that jar and alienate the reader, and do violence to the reading experience" 322

(Greenblatt 82) and thus the text is sadistic towards us because it "implicates the reader, but disallows agency" (Greenblatt 83-84).

The books on the 2001 shortlist have more in common with each other than those on the 1981 and 1991 lists. Most noticeably, all are self-conscious about the role of poetry in the contemporary world, and about the act of reading/writing poetry as a means of entry

(or disappearance) from that world. All of the poets riff on the notion of the double, or doppelgdnger, as a present absence in their texts. Clarke's speaker finds his historical cousins to be his, and each others', historical double in their relationship to race and place in the Canadian Maritimes; Hall follows his own childhood self through a difficult rural youth while navigating between good and evil Cecils; Carson's doubling up of poem drafts and impossible conversations find a strange coalescence with her poems about university

Classics professors in Montreal; Kroetsch's conflation of poet, archivist, reader, and writer, not to mention his piling of Rita, Raymond, and Robert onto one another speaks to a deep- seated belief in the intimacy of selfhood and otherness; and less directly, McCaffery's poetics enforce a doubleness of reading which forces readers to become, doubly, writers.

Another interesting thread uniting the 2001 shortlisted works (with the notable exception of Seven Pages Missing) is that they all self-consciously introduce and undermine the role and persona of the speaking poet within the texts themselves. This not to suggest, of course, that the poet and the speaker can be equated, but that the interventions into the texts that speaking "I"s pose often demonstrate distinct attempts to draw attention to the texts as products of a specific origin (the poet), the traces of whose particular contexts forge a bond (even if fractured or indirect) between poet and speaker. In and of itself this technique is not new in contemporary Canadian poetry. In perhaps the most canonical example of this postmodern turn, Ondaatje s 1970 GG-winning The Collected

Works of Billy the Kid bookends its opening photo-less photo caption (denying the confident opening line "I send you a picture of Billy" [5]) with the 'gotcha!' photo of

Ondaatje as a cowboy-costumed child, pistols drawn on the victimized reader. Before even the photograph, though, the poet himself— the speaker — gets the final word after Billy's murder when he speaks the text's final words: "It is now early morning, was a bad night.

The hotel room/ seems large.. .In the bathroom, I wash the loose nicotine/ out of my mouth.

I smell the smoke still in my shirt" (105). This closing of Billy's narrative (after seeing him shot with a smoking shotgun through the shirted chest) amounts to the speaker's metaphorical "bad night" in a conflation that asserts the speaking "I"'s omnipresence and refuses to allow any definitive distinctions to be drawn between speaker, subject, poet, and reader3.

In much the same way, Trouble Sleeping frames its narrative trajectory by the imbrication of its lyric postscript onto the story that it had just otherwise told. Also, though,

Ondaatje performs a similar conflation of absence and presence, poet and speaker, reader and writer, in Coming Through Slaughter. Published in 1976 and told primarily in the third person, it concludes by colluding Ondaatje (b. 1943), the speaker, and the (literally) institutionalized subject Buddy Bolden: "I sit with this room. With the grey walls that darken into corner. And one window with teeth in it. Sit so still you can hear your hair rustle in your shirt. Look away from the window when clouds and other things go by. Thirty-one years old. There are no prizes" (160). As in Clarke's Execution Poems, the spectre of the writer's persona infuses these stories with a sense of contemporaneity by forging a direct link to the past. Atwood's The Journals of Susanna Moodie posits a similar geographically-specific contextualization in its closing poem "A Bus Along St. Clair: December" in which the present (and present-day) speaker is addressed by the imagined Moodie: "this is my kingdom still...the snow/ is no more familiar/ to you than it was to me:/ this is my doing.. .Turn, look down:/ there is no city;/ this is the centre of a forest// your place is empty" (60-61). Coming only a page before Atwood's infamous 'paranoid schizophrenia' Afterword to the poems in which she asserts "We are all immigrants to this place even if we were born here" (62), the assertion of a speaker and/or poet within the sociospatial geography of the poems forges a direct link between the mythologizing and imagining of the poems and the referred to and recognizable geographies that have long been fixed as within the borders of the Canadian nation. Hall's book seems almost to mirror Ondaatje's Billy by re-placing the contemporary speaker within the larger constellation of its historical poems, thus collapsing the boundaries between subjects and speakers and forging a direct link between the speaking

"I" and the poets whose names adorn their books' covers. The narrative prose poem preceding the postscript might even suggest a direct homage to Ondaatje's self-reflective

"bad night": "I am awake at 2 a.m. The phone rang, I guess. I listen to my/ voice, beep, then deep silence./ Skittish. Divorced twice; two kids. Sober almost two years this time./1 stand nude in the dark, hiding my crooked teeth for who? Whom?/ A bachelor apartment. A sore stomach. An ear infection... 'No child survives'" (75). The difference, of course, is that Hall's project of self-discovery is an overt one that makes no attempt to conceal its conflations of the lyric "I" with the poet. This revelation still acts in the same way as that of

Ondaatje's though: it collapses both lyric subjectivity and narrative time and space with regard to the book as a unit, and thus renders the book a project of a poet in search of something impossibly elusive as much as a project of accessing the past.

Kroetsch's The Hornbooks of Rita K is more subversive and playful than other shortlisted works in its portrayal and presentation of the poet and speaker. In a sense, the very absence of the poet is the book's primary concern, displaying an "obsessive relationship with the other or double that is the poet" (Butling and Rudy 121), and yet the poet's presence is never/can never be denied. Rita Kleinhart, standing in for Robert

Kroetsch, is "attempting to write an autobiography in which [she/he] do[es]/ not appear"

("[hornbook #7]" 29), and yet (re)appear she does through the fragments she leaves behind and the haunting she saddles Raymond with. The occasional presence of Rita's eccentric friend Robert also pulls at the strings of presence, absence, authorship, and readership in a way that does not allow the text to exist as an authorless book and yet that refuses to definitively confirm its referential source as Robert Kroetsch. The very elision of authority is its greatest success and, I think, its least-slippery defining characteristic. Carson's intervention into Men in the Off Hours, aside from the arguable suggestion I make above regarding "Irony is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve (2nd draft)," does not come until the book's closing poem, "Appendix to Ordinary Time" (165). Opposite a

1950s-era photograph of a young mother and daughter sunbathing on a dock (captioned

"Margaret Carson/ 1913-1997/ Eclipsis est pro dolore" [167]), the speaker confesses: "My mother died the autumn I was writing this" (165) thus forging a connection between the poet "Anne Carson" and the speaker of the poem. This conferring of presence onto the poet within the preceding poems is furthered by the speaker's love of crossed-out lines of text which she pulls from the diary and manuscripts of Virginia Woolf, and that operate in much the same way that her re-imaginings of ancient historical figures does: they are "like death: by a simple stroke — all is lost, yet still there.. .Crossouts sustain me now. I search out and cherish them like old photographs of my mother in happier times" (166).

Like Carson's, Clarke's intervention into his text is a more directly referential one, pointing directly to both "George Elliott Clarke" and George Elliott Clarke as its referent.

Clarke's adoption of the story of George and Rufus Hamilton is a direct and unarguably ancestral one; his "bastard phantasms" may be reconstrued as his "dastard fictions"

("George and Rue: Pure, Virtuous Killers" 12), but they remain the speaker's figurative hereditary possessions. Thus, as above, when "Negritude" asserts that "[m]y black face must preface murder for you" (11), it is both the typeface of the poems, and the actual face of the speaking author (eventually literally 'pictured' above an "Author's Disclaimer" [46] rather as a pomace to the poems) that contextuahze the stones they tell. Just prior to this disclaimer, though, the collection's final poem mimics the layout of a page of newsprint and identifies itself as "The Casket, Fredericton, N.B.— July 27, 1949" (44). In addition to the photos of two hanged men and the assertion "Finis the Tragedy of 'George and Rue'" the poem contains the retraction of a "Literary Error" in an earlier story that had erased

African-American novelist Jean Toomer as the author of the novel Cane (and erroneously replaced him with W.B. Yeats), and that of a "Criminal Error" that had misidentified a convicted murder's motive for strangling his victim as extreme intoxication. Instead, it reveals that Spear Flowers had killed his victim "because she had begun to write/ poetry, though he prefers true crime" (44). The "Author's Disclaimer" that follows this poem offers its own photographic evidence — a photo of Clarke — and thanks several of the poet's friends without whom "[t]he crime of this poetry could not have been committed" even though "they bear no responsibility for its harms. Only the author deserves hanging"

(46). The crime of this poetry is the crime of exploiting "how history darkens against its medium" ("Childhood II" 17) and forgets those retrieved voices that threaten to puncture the coherence and harmoniousness of the nation-state as it had been institutionally portrayed. The difference between Execution Poems and the other shortlisted works in this regard, however, is that Clarke's presence in the text is recruited to a greater, and specifically referential political statement addressed not only to the readers of the book, but to the citizens of the society that those readers are presumed to inhabit. In a Foreword to the book, Gaspereau Press' Andrew Steeves establishes the direct referentiality of the poems that follow and contextualizes them as a civic narrative that thus implicates the citizenry

('us') as a societal whole: "What Clarke presents in Execution Poems is uncomfortable. He 327 is reminding us of racism and of poverty; of their brutal, tragic results. He is reminding us of society's vengefulness.. .At the heart of it, Clarke is frustrating the notion that society deals any better with these issues today than it did in the 1940s" (7). Execution Poems, thanks to the framing of its poems with the publication's referential and implicatory bylines, speaks directly to the imagined societal audience that has willfully forgotten and erased the presence of its racialized victims in both literally and literarily.

This move towards the forcing open of definitively "Canadian" master-narratives, however, is one that no longer legitimately threatens the Canadian nation. With the rise of state-sanctioned multiculturalism, in fact, one could argue that such 'writing back' against a dominant social or political ideology has in fact become the Canadian master-narrative as it has, binarily, partnered as the relationally subversive branch of what Hunter calls the

"complicitous dichotomy" (29) of thematic CanLit canons that claim to invite dissent and contestation only to then contain them as markers of openness and cultural maturity. This seems particularly true of Clarke's book which presents itself as legitimately historical, and legitimately Canadian, especially as it documents the horrors of white supremacy and colonial racism that were "fundamental" to both the establishment and the maintenance of

"Canada as a nation" (Coleman 8). In this way, then, Execution Poems enters itself into

"the gap between what happened, which was actuality, and what we choose to remember, which is history" (Woodcock, Northern Spring 308) in order to tell its story — an entrance that George Woodcock calls "that paradox which haunts every significant Canadian writer of our generation" {Northern Spring 308). Clarke's writing-back against national history that silenced his cousins engages in a project that Daniel Coleman has come to call the

"myth" of Canadian civility (colonial, white, British civility, specifically) which, for the nation-state, "operates as a mode of internal management: the subjects of the civil order discipline their conduct in order to participate in the civil realm" (9, 11). The aspiration towards civility is intimately linked, then, to the project of nation-building and nation- managing through a national literature. The upholding of the myth of civility extends to, and depends upon what Tzvetan Todorov famously called the privileging of the "I-here- now" (195) which assumes a break from and enlightenment over history's evils so that,

"convinced of our own civility in comparison to the past, we tend to demonstrate this subtler conviction by performing, even calling attention to, our self-consciousness that we are implicated in the history of racism" (Coleman 42). The consecration of a book that so virulently emphasizes the effects of the nation's systemic and endemic racism is not, then, an undermining of the nation, but an undermining of the flawed historical nation which — by virtue of this contemporary consecration — has been long eclipsed by the tolerant contemporary nation. The national sanctioning of Execution Poems, then, might be seen as an official "quarantin[ing of] that uncivil past from the civil present" (Coleman 34). This performance of civility is, for the institutional nation, "a way to manage our traumatic history" which then can be figured to further "plunge[] national aspiration into narrative, the need to cherish the (evil) memories of how 'we' — a fictive ethnicity — came about"

(Coleman 29, 34). It is, again, a totalizing move on behalf of the nation-state to own up to the traumatic events "which Canadians must assume and disavow if they are to be full members of the national community" (Coleman 34). Clarke's winning text, by this logic, is made to participate in the project of national civility despite actively denying it textually, and yet Execution Poems itself remains a kind of "cruelty" because it emphasizes "the impossibility of textual solace" (Greenblatt 92) in the face of actual historical cruelty and 329 racism; it is what Coleman would refer to as 'wryly civil' (43)4 outside of the context of its consecration, as it refuses to concede the pastness of its racism and violence by re- inscribing and re-embodying a non-recuperable violence in the text.

Clarke's relationship to a national audience in Execution Poems is by no means a simple one, but it is a prefigured and specifically tailored one. MacLeod has argued that

"there may be no poet at work in Canadian literature today who is less comfortable with the blind embrace of community and more aware of the many demands and difficulties that lurk inside what, on the surface, might seem like a simple relationship between the poet and his or her home" (98-99, his emphasis). The troubling of a sociospatial place or history as we get in Execution Poems implicitly asserts that the space's narrative is worth correcting and that the framework of its construction as a space is valid, if inaccurate — that Clarke is

"slowly tearing down the old, real world and gradually building up its replacement"

(MacLeod 108). Clarke's noted 'Red Toryism' is on display in the following excerpt from a

2007 interview about the ethics of writing in the globalizing world:

In such a world — ours — the existence of local and national cultures, as [George] Grant saw, constitutes a small impediment to the total and totalitarian crushing of cultural difference by looming transnational corporations and the superpower states.. .The simple proposition, as non-violent and namby-pamby as it is, depends on my acceptance of what the unthinking Left and the racist Right call cultural nationalism. But I would rather have cultural nationalism and a literature than

Realizing that his own effort to analyze and collect the "contradictory structure of civility" in English-Canadian (white) literary practice is itself complicit in the "justice- and equality-seeking codes of civility" (41), Coleman coins the term "wry civility" to denote that complicity while simultaneously opening a space for itself in which to continue to function. "Wry civility" is 'civil' in that it engages in "the contradictory or ambivalent project that purports to provide a public space of equality and liberty for all at the same time as it attempts to protect this freedom and equality from threats within and without — and 'wry' in the sense of being critically self-conscious of this very ambivalence and of the contradictions it involves.. .in the sense of remaining ironically aware of the pretentiousness of the civility that we nonetheless aspire to" (43). 330

globalism and somebody else's non-descript utterance.. .The Canadian solution is to defend local culture, while also being open to international influence. ("George and Ruth" 863)

In this way, Clarke joins a long line of thinkers like Thomas D'Arcy McGee, Malcolm

Ross, and Northrop Frye, who, each in their own day and way, have conceived of CanLit as a distinctive, if diverse, paraphrasable unit. The reactions of critics to Execution Poems suggests as much about the way it has been similarly read; Susan Knutson, for example, concludes that "Clarke's intertextual, consciously literary, and rhetorical suite of poems re- contextualizes and transforms such passages and images, and so carries them forward into the new contexts and different meanings of Canadian literature" (50), while Jennifer

Andrews reads Execution Poems as "a critical site for examining.. .questions of Canadian literary identities and the historical absence of black voices" (116). Execution Poems then, was always already a recognizably consecratable CanLit book.

Ultimately, what the 2001 shortlist provides us with is 5 texts that question and undermine themselves as literature, 3 of which move threateningly towards the dissolution of evaluative and referential systems by troubling their own validity. The only works that do not do this explicitly are Hall's and Clarke's, although they both trouble monolithic and/or readerly lyric CanLit canons. In its readerliness, though, Execution Poems remains the only book that does not threaten to foist more power into the hands of the reader but instead victimizes them with its textual and sociopolitical violence. In theorizing that the field of Canadian literature can be canonically divided into thematic, structural, and "a third less well-defined or taught group of alternative writings" (28), Hunter implies that unrecognizably CanLit books like Seven Pages Missing (and to a lesser extent, The

Hornbooks of Rita K), "are full of embarrassment [to the nation-state] because they insist 331 on difficult and contradictory political problems and positions.. .they are not able to fit into the complicitous dichotomy of support and subversion which thematic-based material directly addresses and into which even structural genres find themselves caught" (29).

McCaffery's shortlisting is, as I have suggested, remarkable under the rhetoric of the GGs proposed in my earlier Chapters. Because his book is representative of his larger career

(and thus of him as a CanLit figure), the fact that his willful deconstructions of CanLit and literary institutions could be consecrated by a shortlisting is perhaps only made possible by the influence of Robertson and Moure on the jury. At the same time, just as "the excess of the general economy is often recuperated by the restricted economy" (Bok, "Nor the Fun

Tension" 96), the shortlisting moves towards a further appropriation and neutralization of

McCaffery's work, at least from an institutional point of view. In the case of Clarke's sociopolitical radicalism against Canadian institutions in Execution Poems, we might turn again to Hunter's claim that "[tjhematic canons tend to focus on social behaviour and are hence far more likely to be based in the for-granted ideology of prevailing humanism.. .Thematic canons can also pursue activity which is socially unacceptable, disruptive of coherence: yet here again unless they do so in order to question ideology they merely titillate" (21). If the canon does indeed set the stage for what might be considered consecratable, Clarke's book seems a naturally good fit. Sarah Corse reminds us that

"[literature which deals with traditionally marginalized or peripheral experiences enters the canon slowly, if at all. Literary prize winners are one avenue for experimenting with such potential revisions" and that, after such a consecration, "[s]uch revisionist offerings then enter the field of canonical consideration, allowing changes in the presentation of the validated experience to occur" (103), which speaks, I think, to Coleman's recent work on the Canadian project of civility and recuperation. Steffler, Robertson, and Moure perhaps even recognized their own complicity in Execution Poems' consolidation of CanLit when they praised it as "raging, gristly, public — and unflinchingly beautiful" (qtd. in Solway

202, my emphasis). Beauty (and quality) aside, it remains a text riddled not just with the violent detritus of the totalizing actions of a nation-state, but also with "a violence for which we are all somehow responsible" (Greenblatt 93, my emphasis). Conclusion

Re(a)warding Ourselves: The Futures of the GG Awards

In the last twenty-five years or so, we have created a parodistic literary climate in which it would be more appropriate to award an annual prize to the worst poet in the country, because then at least the competition would be fierce, there would be no lack of candidates and no one could reasonably contest the results.

David Solway, Director's Cut

If it is true in an ever-globalizing Canada that "our authors are being urged to write for an international marketplace and especially for the lucrative prizes that are offered internationally" (Cavell 92), the centripetal and homogenizing forces that have produced the conditions and resources for the development of a 'Canadian literature' have become ideologically and theoretically incongruent with most emerging cultural perspectives.

Metcalf s fear in Freedom from Culture that "Small-c culture in Canada is becoming

Culture, a possession and expression of the State" (21), must be said, on our less hopeful days, to reflect a degree of truth. Although overstated, Metcalf s worries that the literary texts facilitated by the distribution of grants and awards must inherently reflect the biases of the conditions of their production and consecration in a way that renders that production unnatural and thus overtly national. I have suggested that recent critical and popular imperatives like those of the TransCanada Institute have signaled a new direction in

Canadian letters that will necessitate a reconsideration of the institutions against which

Metcalf simplistically positions himself, and yet remains incontrovertibly a part of. I have also argued that the concept of 'the natural' with regard to literary production in any organized society is itself suspect. It is under uniquely specific conditions that cultural production occurs in Canada. York has concluded that there is no distinctive mode of Canadian literary celebrity (Literary Celebrity 147), and there is similarly little evidence to suggest that the ways in which awards function here are nationally distinctive either; their uniqueness lies, rather, in the contexts and scope of the institutions behind awards which, unlike the maelstrom of contexts which initiate celebrity (and of which awards are a significant part), are more often singular in their authority and pathological in their consecrations. By way of concluding this thesis then, what follows is a general consideration of the value of the GG Awards to literary culture in Canada; what they threaten, what they enforce, and what they accomplish in and around their various fields and markets. I have argued that by better understanding and observing the machinations of literary-cultural institutions like the GG Awards and the Canada Council, which have come in very large part to establish, construct, and maintain the field(s) of CanLit as they exist today, thinkers, teachers, and other cultural workers might more broadly and acutely consider the ways in which the extra-textual scaffolding from which CanLit is erected, reconstructed, or demolished necessarily both follows and shapes the textual profile of any number of canons and considerations in and around the field. Accordingly, I will propose an alternative model for the GGs in hopes that the Award might lead the way to a more democratic framework for the consideration and consecration of CanLit that aims to productively address Scott and Tucker-Abramson's call to reformulate "prize cultures that focus upon the definition and creation of a national literature for exclusionary, expropriatory, and marketing purposes" (19).

Casing the Studies

Sarah Corse has expounded that "[c]anonical literature is driven by differentiation and chosen in opposition to the 'other.' Contemporary prize-winning literature is driven by 335 an ongoing national cultural dialogue and chosen within that tradition" (128). A quick look at the winners of the 1981, 1991, and 2001 GG contests in English-Canadian Poetry affirms this claim almost without qualification. Suffice it to say selections from other years would surely yield markedly different results and might indeed open further avenues of thinking about the prize's pathologies; the reading of Phyllis Webb (1982 winner for The Vision

Tree: Selected Poems), Lorna Crozier (1992 winner for Inventing the Hawk), and Roy Miki

(2002 winner for Surrender), for example, would introduce several different considerations than I have pursued in my Case Studies, though these three winners do loosely follow the pattern established by Scott, McKay, and Clarke. Webb, like Scott, won for a career- spanning Selected and was a senior statesperson of the poetic community at the time of her consecration1; much of her work could be easily argued to make up the field against which it was meant to be judged. Crozier, like McKay, offers a thematic poetry of a "specifically

Canadian line" that "marks a clear tradition" (Bradley 354-355) in a vernacular voice that is unmistakably o/CanLit. Miki, like Clarke, finds his poetic inspiration in the racialized injustices done to his family by the Canadian nation-state and infuses his winning book with a similarly virulent racial politics of civility to that of Clarke's.

Winning works overwhelmingly fulfill the CanLit institution's mandate of consolidating Canadian canons by engaging them in conversations which highlight characteristics that have been institutionalized as nationally distinctive, yet most also fulfill

Webb's 1980 book Wilson's Bowl did not garner a nomination for the GG that year. This so outraged a group of younger poets including Atwood, Ondaatje, and bpNichol that they took it upon themselves to collect $2,300.00 from various benefactors and award it to Webb as restitution and an act of appreciation (see Hulcoop). the prize's requirement to expand those conversations by swerving (out of anxiousness?) into areas of newness that can yet be reasonably accessed from the tradition. In this way, the consecrated works of Scott, McKay and Clarke all demonstrate a Bloomian "clinamen" whereby the "poet swerves away from his precursor" (14) in an effort to "clear imaginative space for themselves" (5) in the context of CanLit. Books like McKinnon's and

Fitzgerald's which might refer tangentially or indirectly to some established Canadianness or recognizabilty do not do the work that the Awards wishes them to do, or at least do not do it as well as those of Scott's or McKay's. Books like Michaels' or Carson's which posit a cultural and geographical internationalism might wish to be claimed by the Award as a protectionist manoeuvre, but their cosmopolitanism might also mark them as unconsecratable alongside more true-blue CanPo like the undeniably Frederictonian

Execution Poems.

It cannot be contested to any great degree that the Awards have tended to celebrate books that mean, and that mean in a certain acceptable way. Books like Kroetsch's or

McCaffery's which implicitly or explicitly threaten the stability of the constructions and institutions doing the consecrating, that simply are more than they mean, have most often performed the roles of foils to the readerly CanLit of the winners. Still, they remain prefigurative for having been public contenders for consecration as CanLit, and they thus begin the processes of their own recuperation into dominant discourses of normalization by critics, historians, and interested readers. In this way the Awards provide a visibly public avenue for the revising and expanding of national traditions and canons that rely upon a model of evolutionary aesthetic progressivism and cultural maturation, but they also demonstrate their general inherent conservatism in taste and literary value on behalf of a citizenry that often produces more radical and anomalous poetries than the GG canon would suggest. Thus, in addition to the swerve towards canonical expansion by celebrating and claiming new work, the Awards also perform a swerve through their institutionality; they perform the unifying work of recognition that Mount designates as the third qualification of any collected literature by recognizing the work of poets as wildly diverse as Wah, Blodgett, Heather Spears, Dionne Brand, Robert Hilles, Domanski, Clarke, John

Pass and Moure as "a discrete body of writing, with its own history and its own set of works and characteristics" when in reality it may be "far too internally disparate and too interwoven with other literatures to admit such definition" (Mount 5). These Case Studies indeed suggest a narrowing of aesthetic standards (to say nothing of their seeming gender biases) that often seems to betray the diverse poetics of the jury members making the consecrations. If CanLit (and CanPo), through its institutions, "exists only in perception, an object whose birth was simultaneous with its recognition and that survives only in restatements of that recognition" (Mount 5), the GG Awards continue to be the quintessential public gatekeepers of what remains acceptable as CanLit through their continual recognition of literature that echoes that which we most likely already know as

CanLit.

Branding CanLit, Naturalizing Readerships

If the role of awards is both to consecrate and to draw attention to themselves and their patrons by initiating scandalous contention, then Canada's prizes have certainly been doing their jobs. While the GGs have had their fair share of scandal, it has been the Giller that seems to have drawn the most ink and ire from Canada's literary journalists and critics, perhaps because of the prize's unabashed biases. The prize's most vocal critic, Stephen Henighan calls the Giller "the most conspicuous example of the corporate suffocation of the public institutions that built our literary culture" (A Report 272). A noted defender of the GGs, Henighan points here to the inescapability of institutionality in the construction of a literature, and to the sense of threat that private awards which, despite deigning to consecrate the best writing nationally, demonstrate no official obligation to any particular constituency of readers. As a result, Henighan claims, the Giller has become Toronto- centric and politically suspect because of the "concessions" its administrators must continually make to the Bertelsmann Group who own the majority of Canada's large publishers (A Report 273). Alex Good, who coined the term "Giller-bait" for the kind of pseudo-poetical geographically-specific historical fiction that he sees as eminently prizeable by the prize's juries, argues that "[t]he Gillers have.. .become an institution so incestuous and sclerotic they have their own systemic biases" and wonders of the prize

"whether it is perhaps now doing more harm than good" (65). These sentiments are becoming increasingly widespread as the connections between institutions and literature are further examined; the larger threat that newer prizes like the Giller are thought to pose to cultural fields is that of the encroachment of the neoliberal market onto constructions of literary value. The commodification of certain kinds of literature, then, as highly marketable and profitable for larger companies is generally understood, I think, to imperil the integrity of specific fields of artistic production which, like the players in the

Bourdieusian field of restricted production, are successful essentially in their economic non-success (see York, Literary Celebrity 91). Godard sees this transformation of the cultural fields as being in keeping with the general move towards a homogenizing transnational capitalism that began, long ago, to infect the arts by proposing that "[sjound cultural production, good publishing, are evaluated on the extent to which they maximize profit for shareholders, not on the quality and force of ideas they put into circulation as these transform people" (250). If the GG Awards are, for some reason, able to resist these imperatives by being less overtly interested in the potential of the economic markets, then their remaining ability to resist the vagaries of those markets must be further explored.

If major prizes claim, as they all do, to be trying above all else to get books into the hands of readers, then they must be seen to be trying to get specific books into the hands of specific readers (namely, those who will pay for them); thus, the relationship between awards and markets is solidified. What is lost, then, in the drive for consecrating marketable books, is the very diversity and plurality that the GG Awards have sought so directly to pursue as a matter of consolidating a population of citizens not-yet solely conceived of as consumers. Certain kinds of books tend to win awards — this fact cannot be disputed — but the criteria for what makes a book prizeable vary depending on the nature of the award itself. Once the pathology of a prize is established, however, its consecrations must necessarily tend toward a degree of homogeneity that Godard calls "a discursive strategy by which hegemony is exercized, fixing thus restrictively the thinkable, the sayable" as CanLit (186), be it of the Giller brand, the Griffin brand, or the GG brand2.

The major threat that globalization and neoliberal capitalism might pose to the literary arts

It must be noted here, in spite of my own argument, that the GGs have recently begun talking about and promoting themselves as a "brand" as a result of a new "conscious institutional notion" designed to increase their recognizability (Larocque-Poirier, personal interview 25). This turn to the vocabulary and ideology of commodity-fetishism reaffirms Dobson's observation that "the nation- state and neo-liberal models of globalization are ever more similar" (Transnational Canadas xviii), but also suggests the urgency with which we must act if the Awards can still be recovered to more equitable means and ends. lies in the tendency to similarly homogenize and package particular kinds of writing, thus enforcing an "erosion of particularity and uniqueness" (Szeman, Zones 3) in what might be considered excellent or exemplary writing in a specific field. Habermas reminds us that

"[a]s nation-states increasingly lose both their capacities for action and the stability of their collective identities, they will find it more and more difficult to meet the need for self- legitimation" (80) — a phenomenon that I would argue has always been visible at the fore of critical and literary discussions in Canada. If the GG Awards have been, since 1936, an avenue of self-legitimation for the nation and its constituents, it would seem that their relevance in the present world is rapidly decreasing. What remains, and what this project has hoped to initiate, is a discussion as to what literary citizens who have the fact of Canada in common stand to lose with their seemingly inevitable dissolution and overtaking by the glitzier and more capital-rich prizes. Godard, for one, worries that the Canadian government has been, over the last two decades, "disentangling itself from culture in response to pressures from the US for a level playing field for cultural industries. This leaves a few celebrities, feminized and ethnicized in respect to power — the Atwoods and the Ondaatjes — to float in the global firmament of culture under the logos of American multinational publishers" (270-1). While Bourdieu himself has noted this trend with regard to Canada (see Firing Back 90), little is presently being done to address the withdrawal of governmental (financial) involvement in arts industries. We must strive, I think, to recuperate the models that we have abandoned by remaking them and refocusing them away from "regressive Utopias of closure" (Habermas 88) while still addressing a constituency that largely resists the impetus to be seen strictly as consumers in need of formula and various frameworks of (artificial) stability. 341

The arguments that "[a] literature has its own natural rate of growth and change" and that in Canada "[sjubsidy has distorted natural literary development" (Metcalf, What Is

99) are widely contested in the work of scholars like Godard, Bourdieu, Davey, Hunter, and

York who refuse to acquiesce to a politics of purity for cultural production. Nation-state subsidy has ostensibly created and maintained the cultural framework of CanLit as it exists today in all of its glories and failures, so when Metcalf complains that "the Council has put into place a parody of the entire machinery of a literary culture" because it has "tried to buy a literature much as a parvenu might hire a decorator to create for him instant antiquity"

(Freedom 33), it behooves me to argue that the parody (to which Solway also alludes in the above epigraph) is one of an imaginary structure to begin with. One suspects that the colonial impetus in both Solway and Metcalf would lead them to point to European models of literary culture as exemplary and 'natural' examples against which CanLit has failed to measure up, but this negates the facts of cultural production in all traditions and falls back upon "the romantic notion of economically unbesmirched creativity" (Davey, Post-

National 13) which English deconstructs by tracing the cultural prize back to the Athenian dramatic contests through the French Academies of Cardinal Richelieu, to the National

Book Awards in the United States in The Economy of Prestige. The argument is always that

"[t]he money isn't neutral" (Metcalf, Freedom 41, his emphasis) because it "comes with too many ideological strings attached" (Butling 43) that end up reflecting a national bias in the work produced from that subsidy, presumably both because the writers have been granted the money to pursue projects with which the Council agrees, and perhaps because the writers do not want to lose the favour of the Council and imperil future subsidy by undermining or calling into question the very system by which they have been offered a 342 living. Like an award, capital always comes with strings attached, even if it is earned from an employer, bequeathed from a wealthier or more senior agent in the cultural field, or granted on the basis of an understanding of exchange between the parties concerned; where there is the exchange of capital, there is the politics of power — the exercising of which leaves its marks, subtly or overtly — on what and how cultural artifacts are produced and circulated in their given fields. In the introduction to Love and Money: The Politics of

Culture (in which, ironically, Metcalf has a piece of fiction), David Helwig suggests that

"[t]he issues and conflicts considered by the writers of this book are specific to Canada in

1980, but most of them have been found, in one form or another, in many countries and many times" (7-8). In other words, the pressures of economics and politics that Metcalf and

Solway suggest besmirch the natural development of Canadian letters are omnipresent in any cultural production. Furthermore, Caroline Bayard warns that "the elements that a culture rejects from its own description as extra-systemic will be seen to be essential to that culture as the source of its future development" (113). This seems particularly true of

Canada where we are so often reminded that culture as we know it depends on the State.

Hunter argues that between 1960 and at least 1990, the State "has consistently defined and funded specific policy areas such as women, multicultural communities, aboriginal peoples, over which it perceives a need for control. This is not entirely a cynical story for that control enables the articulation of concerns. It is essential for a liberal and democratic state; it reduces the possibility of confrontation; and it leaves the printed product indissolubly tied to an ideological project. But at least there is a product" (18). While I can agree with

Metcalf that the job of the critic should be to look past the traces of that ideological project 343 that might show up in texts and considerations thereof, one cannot pretend to ignore them altogether if one is interested in considering a work contextually.

Reinstateing the Nation

Under the increasing dissolution of borders and boundaries in the fields of economic trade, culture, academic disciplines, etc. thanks to the increasingly technological global village, the extent to which 'national' literature in Canada has evolved or resisted its national impetus remains largely to be seen. The resistance to 'imagined communities' posed by (and yet often employed by) the identity movements of the 1980s and 1990s posited correctly that such formulations were appropriative and oppressively opportunistic on behalf of the nation and its agents. Richard Cavell notes, however, that more recent concerns have forced us back to a reconsideration of the fact that the nation remains an

"international political reality" (Redekop 263):

In a sense, globalization has retrieved 'nation' from the excesses of nationalism at the very moment of its supercession and reintroduced it within the domain of Benedict Anderson's 'imagined communities,' although here the emphasis is on the materiality of the imaginary, as opposed to the virtuality of the communal. Both multiculturalism and postcoloniality were part of a Cold War narrative that sought to address 'otherness' in terms of an 'us' versus 'them' narrative, a narrative that was transcribed within the Canadian context as 'native' versus 'cosmopolitan'. (89)

Anderson himself, in the 1991 revised edition of Imagined Communities, noted that, despite the posturing of the more idealistic and anti-nationalist thinkers, the reality of the matter of nation remained quite plain: "the 'end of the era of nationalism,' so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight. Indeed, nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time" (3). In Canada this seems especially to be true when the "vector of the nation continues to have profound psychic resonance for Canadians" (Sugars, "Can the

Canadian Speak?" 117) even if that resonance is a negative or oppressive one. Habermas 344 goes so far as to suggest that, despite all of our globalized post-nationality, the nation remains the one arena through which we have learned to recognize the vagaries of the nation: "We perceive the trends toward a postnational constellation as a list of political challenges only because we still describe them from the familiar perspective of the nation- state" (60-1) which has not yet, as it was feared, "dissolve[d] upwards" (Derksen 1) in the face of globalization. If consideration and attention to nation is a "still-necessary project" that is being denigrated by "many perhaps premature dismissals" (Siemerling, "Trans-

Scan" 133, 130) from theorists hell-bent on globalization as a product, then the importance of examining the institutions of the nation as they have been erected by the nation itself

(like the GGs) seems imminently important. To consider the problem transnationally,

Siemerling proposes a valuable concession: "for all the critical sense that we should be

'through' with essentializing narratives of nation and 'go beyond' or 'transcend' them, I think the only way to do so is by also going further through and across Canada" ("Trans-

Scan" 133).

When it comes to culture this pragmatism seems similarly important. Godard argues that the officially construed Canadian nation-state "continues to be a significant horizon within which to produce and study culture, when national arts and research councils accord financial support to culture within their geopolitical boundaries" (51), while also noting that the literal and material production of literature is similarly dependent on a certain sense of national distinction and security. Laura Moss sees this particular concession, especially in light of more recent resurgences in vigilant and protectionist nationalism particularly in the

United States as merely a fact of life: 345

[Nationalism is irrevocably part of the practice of everyday life.. .the nation isn't going away. Just as we have had to ask where the local and the national is in globalization, we also have to ask where the globe sits in the current climate of increasing nationalism. Even global citizens are located somewhere, grounded even, within a state (or moving between states) governed by laws and priorities.. .Even as we talk about the interconnectedness of humans in a planetary context and we study the arbitrariness of borders and the impact traversing those borders has on people, it is still necessary to locate national cultures in the framework of a history of laws, practices, and preferences. If context contains memory, then it is also vital to consider social, political, and historically specific contexts to remember what is, or has been, done in the name of nation. ("Strategic" 10-11)

In terms of literature, then, the thrust of the nation that has so relentlessly infiltrated discussions and criticism of Canadian literature since its various inceptions remains an important factor. So, as Donna Pennee suggests, "there is no question of doing without the national; it is rather a matter of doing the national differently" ("Literary Citizenship" 83).

Jeff Derksen has argued persuasively that, far from being at risk of disappearing into the ether of globalization, nation-states are maintained by the agents of neoliberal capitalism in order to effectively micromanage populations while still enforcing capital- driven ideologies. Thus, because it remains necessary to neoliberal capitalism, it offers us a potential site of resistance through which we might re-form and re-organize ourselves against globalization's homogenizing tendencies. Also, because "the national is not a scale that can be pulled out of the project of democracy" (Derksen 10), it offers us the chance to continue to pursue democratic ideals that neoliberal capitalism works, by nature, to reduce.

As we might expect, if we are to re-do the nation more equitably we must evade the appropriative and exclusionary organizational caveats for which political and cultural nationalism are often criticized. Derksen thus proposes conceiving of the nation beyond spatiality (which, I must note, itself ignores what I earlier called the 'fact' of Canada) by considering it as a communal and collective structure in which one must willingly continue to choose to participate, and which cannot be spoken, in general ways, on behalf of. The goal, then, is to collectivize without appropriating or effacing identities; to speak with, instead of for, one another to whatever extent this might be possible. This shift proposes, then, its own erasure; that of the hyphenation (the hyphen-nation) of 'nation-state' so as to resist the imposition of structures of governance and cohesiveness that the administrative

'state' strategically exacts upon the 'nation' that it claims as constituents (see Derksen 12).

All collectivities require a degree of governance or organization, but the willingness to opt out of such collectivities would seem to open more equitable sites of interaction, organization, and democracy, if only primarily in cultural and social fields. The trick then becomes to find new ways of organizing, circulating, and evaluating cultural products through programs like the GGs that might begin to serve the nation more readily than the

State that has used them to, in effect, govern culture.

Derksen's proposal for renewing the nation is immediately problematic for several reasons but it offers us something that is so very often in short supply in contemporary cultural criticism: hope and positivity in the face of our own seeming erasure as individuals.

That we remain citizens of a particular country to which we pay taxes and which demonstrates a responsibility for us, yet that we similarly participate in several societal fields in which national difference is utterly unimportant puts us in a position of ambiguity

— of belonging or not-belonging as we see fit and as is seen fit for us. If we are to return to the concept of the nation as an organizing social and cultural structure, we must learn to think the nation away from exclusivity, and to think of it as an institution upon which we must rely if we are to improve it; to consciously, and as a matter of course, "struggle against and, importantly, with nation-state discourses" (Walcott 21) as we continue to participate in overlapping and porous categories of being and cultural production.

Derksen's recognition that the nation remains the primary resistance to a culturally homogenizing process of capital-driven globalization follows that of Habermas':

From a normative point of view, the fact that the democratic process must always be embedded in a common political culture doesn't imply the exclusivist project of realizing national particularity, but rather has the inclusive meaning of a practice of self-legislation that includes all citizens equally. Inclusion means that a collective political existence keeps itself open for the inclusion of citizens of every background, without enclosing these others into the uniformity of a homogenous community. (Habermas 73)

Just as we must realize that globalization remains an abstraction with concrete results, we must begin to understand the relationship between the nation and globalization as a dynamic (Cavell 89), and as a dynamic that will necessarily find itself reflected in the literature emerging from the specific sets of social conditions it fosters. In the same way that Rinaldo Walcott has suggested that institutional thinking on multiculturalism has exhausted its vocabulary and poetics as it has attempted to make it fit the extant frameworks in place in its various fields, we must reconsider the very structure of the institutions that have come quite understandably to shape CanLit but that have been thus demonized for having done so. We require, says Walcott, "a theory of contradiction. We require institution without form, without laws, without rules... [like Spivak] I see a necessary and urgent need for a return to the collective. Any theory of contradiction must allow for a method to think the social and political categorization of our lives in overlapping and disjunctive ways" (20). This move is actually, of course, contradictory; it is a move away from an untenable idealism and towards pragmatism that still holds within it, the dream of an equal and unfettered literary citizenship. It is both an appeal to the 348 political fact that Canada, in some way or another, continues to contain us, and an insistence on the constant recognition of this very impossibility.

Literary citizenship in its contemporary forms must mean a number of different things. First and foremost it must actively work to recuperate the "democratic deficits"

(Habermas 71) of globalization in the way that Szeman posits above as imposing and homogenizing. Indeed, a renewed sense of literary citizenship, like national citizenship, is required in order to address a renewed set of problems that literary critics and journalists have thus far merely been willing to complain about. Brydon has suggested that the very idea of literary citizenship is one of particular import to the scholar who has a responsibility

"to her subject, her profession, her national and global situatedness, and her students, whom she introduces to these overlapping worlds" ("Metamorphoses" 11). Beyond scholarship, however, I am proposing that we require a reconsideration of literary subjects as individuals and the different citizenships that they might be able to employ. Scholars are readers too, and although they may indeed hold positions of great influence over present and future reading publics, so too to the students and readers to whom they speak, the publishers to whom they turn for increased availability of texts, the editors who select and shape the texts, the booksellers who determine, in their own right, the conditions of availability and distribution, and the awards that do the valuable work of evaluation on behalf of all of those agents. Almost as if addressing Lecker's fear in Making it Real that criticism and discussion of CanLit was moving indoors, Cavell urges his readers to "stop talking to ourselves; we need to develop a public culture in Canada by becoming public intellectuals" (91) and by stoking the fires of conversation about CanLit in all arenas of our civic and cultural realities and in all capacities as literary citizens ourselves. 349

The fact that poetry and poetic aesthetic in Canada have themselves shifted (and are always shifting) in new directions is evidenced by much of the work that the Griffin Prize has been able to consecrate; that of Christian Bok, Sylvia Legris, and Robin Blaser come immediately to mind as formal examples of a shift towards wider poetic conceptions in and of CanLit. Most recent GG consecrations suggest, however, that the Award itself (and the institution behind it) often remains more partial to lyrical poetry rooted in and emerging from speakers' immediate and specific Canadian surroundings. Barnholden, in deriding this model of verse as 'official,' argues that "as we, whoever we are, have passed from official verse culture through New Canadian Poetry, it may be necessary to look elsewhere for poetry in and of the globalized present" (par.28). Certainly, I think, it is time to at least address any new Canadian poetries that may be emerging by refining and examining the

GGs' system under which has been thus far largely ignored. What this kind of development will require is a general relinquishing of control on the part of the Council alongside a maintenance of their administrative prowess, and a general increase in active literary citizenship by the constituency of writers and critics who are so willing to write letters, Op-

Ed pieces, blogs, and articles condemning the prize economy and administration upon any decision with which they personally disagree or find fault. It requires, in short, a re-thinking of the relationship between what the nation's "literary and governmental workers" in which

"the instrumentalist view of literature is abandoned and the time taken to respond to literary texts within the terms they set.. .Released from merely instrumental views of its functions, literature becomes more powerful. Both literature and the state need to be released from focusing on identity to contemplate what makes a good society"

(Brydon,m"Metamorphoses" 14), to say nothing of what makes good literature. While the 350

Canada Council is not technically a governmental organization, I argued earlier that they must be seen as complicit with and enabling of the nation-state's ideological designs for its population, as their power to form, maintain, and change Canadian literature remains so significantly reliant upon the good graces of the government.

Part of the kind of literary citizenship that I am advocating requires a kind of double movement; an ambiguity and contradictoriness that allows us to think and act in ways that are resistant to extant institutions (via Derkson's new 'nation') while remaining indebted to, if not wholly reliant upon them. Literary citizenship strives towards an affirmative deconstruction through which the structures that have been institutionally erected and argued to be natural are always understood to be artificial and un-natural, yet are also recognized to be necessary and potentially productive models of cultural production. In his examination of the GG Awards, for example, Davey observed of their loudest critics that

"[o]ne of the reasons people.. .get angry is because they mistake awards to be absolute judgments — or worry that others may mistake them so to be. Better for the blood pressure to see them as reflecting the cultural enthusiasms and blindnesses of one's time" ("Tales"

15, my ellipses). If the GGs operate on the basis of a system that, like Canada Council's granting system, must perform what Milligan describes as "the impossible" (82) in ascribing what is ultimately a subjective and abstract literary value to one text or individual at the expense of another on behalf of another group, then that impossibility must be made a part of critiques of the Council's failures.

Lament for a Council

While above I quote Godard's criticism of the governmental disentanglement from the realm of the arts with regard to financial support, it must be clarified that a certain kind 351 of disentanglement is necessary. Godard is referring, above all, to the lack of priority assigned to the fields of arts and culture by recent and present governments, who seem to be more interested in their export-value than in their intrinsic worth to a citizenry. She fears, I presume, the eventual development of the kind of anemic and apocalyptic cultural landscape that Metcalf describes in his theorizing of a Canada sans Council in Freedom from Culture (68). The kind of disentanglement that is required for the GGs and the

Council to regain their legitimacy and relevance in contemporary cultural production must occur at the level of control, not of support. If Godard thus criticizes the Council in the year

2000 for their shift from "working in the 'public interest' on behalf of citizens to a corporate model of rationalization serving clients" which complemented the "reduced importance accorded jury decisions and more direct bureaucratic intervention by council administrators and government itself through programmes administered by Heritage

Canada" (250-1), then a return to earlier models of Council operations might be a place to begin this thinking3.

In 1980, Milligan noted that the Council had always suffered from an "ambiguity of status" (67) because of its divided loyalties to governmental ideological pressures and the support of unbridled and unencumbered creativity. This created, he believes, an "essential tension" (82) between the Council and both its patron and the constituency it patronized. It is in the recognition and understanding of this scandalous tension as omnipresent — as a

I am certainly not the first to propose this kind of return to earlier incarnations of the Council. Milligan's essay implied a similar strategy in 1980, and Woodcock's 1985 book Strange Bedfellows: The State and the Arts in Canada (which begins with biblical epigraph from Job 1:21 "The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away," [6]) actively argues for the restoration of an earlier administrative model for the Council (194). 352 condition of the system's operation and not a malfunctioning of it — that I believe we might more clearly begin to address the institutionality of the literature that it facilitates and consecrates through its grants and through the GG Awards. While the increasing governmentality of the Council and its funding practices has certainly led to an aesthetic consolidation (if not stagnancy) in the creation and maintenance of CanLit4, the creative agency that it has thus siphoned from a Council that had, in its earlier incarnations, demonstrated a more independent and ideologically-inclusive method of arts funding, was gradually substituted with a bureaucratic drive to consolidate and politically neutralize the kind of work being generated from, and consecrated by, Council funds.

The gradual encroachment of the nation-state's interests onto the policies and procedures of the Canada Council after 1965 was marked by what Milligan calls the government's "preoccupation with 'rational decision-making'" (78) that required that

Council granting decisions were to be measured by predetermined ends, thus narrowing the scope of rewardable projects to those that were recognizably modeled after previously- funded projects that had been deemed successful. The government's influence thus brought with it an evaluative rationale fuelled by "an abhorrence of inconsistency and a reliance on deductive reasoning to eliminate contradictions and anomalies" (Milligan 78) that thus precluded the recognition of entirely new or immediately unrecognizable projects or

Godard argues that as Council funding continues to be withdrawn from arts-service and research organizations, artists and arts groups have become less visible to their wider publics because they can not secure funds for readings, festivals, or other public cultural events that qualified them as members of larger communities that overlapped with numerous other communities. "This implicitly consolidated an image of the artist as isolated genius, a heroic individual rather than an integral part of the body politic with claims on its resources" (251), leading, if I may, to the kind of cultural environment wherein the Prime Minister can more easily criticize spendthrift artists as being distinctively separate from 'ordinary Canadians.' 353 approaches to cultural production. In politics, consistency and reliability are highly valued; in the arts they quickly lead to homogenization and defensive consolidation of what already exists. The Council, before 1965, seems to have understood that the ongoing facilitation of an ever-developing cultural environment was, in fact, the very sign of cultural maturity that the nation-state always seeks to promote, but which it then commodities by fixing in time and space. Despite the ideological resistance with which the Council's administration may have attempted to greet this increasingly expected governmental 'rationalism' (see Milligan

78-80) the "aspirations to omnicompetence within government" (Milligan 80) eventually usurped the cultural expertise of those at the Council whom the government had, of course, only recently entrusted as the keepers of culture at the founding of the Council in 1957.

As unfashionable as it may be, then, to return to a seemingly outmoded version and vision of the Council, Milligan's sketch of the pre-governmental Council seems an attractive one for an emergent criticism seeking to address a collectivity without enforcing an official or appropriative ideology. He argues, then, that "[o]nly a totalitarian regime can eliminate the contradictions inherent in public patronage — by nationalizing philanthropy and tastemaking together and subordinating all to the dictates of the State and the embodiment of the General Will, or the will of God or the proletariat. For the Canada

Council, to resolve or eliminate its contradictions would be to destroy its utility; for its task is — in the fullest sense of the word — to contain them" (84, his emphasis). If the nation has regained its critical pertinence in the discussions of the present day and in the face of globalizing forces that are increasingly threatening cultural difference and diversity in the same way that the nation-state ideology had in previous decades, then the examination of its structural and ideological evolutions is well in order. By returning to an earlier model of 354 the Council and of cultural production and consecration I am not proposing a retraction, but a revisitation of possibility that might better remain aware of its fallibilities and its tendencies towards appropriation. Like prizes, the Council and the government that administers them can only ever function as imperfect. Their (and our) refusal to accept this

(or rather their willingness to believe in the dream of perfection, of system, of objectivity) is what renders them controversial, scandalous, and flawed. In the case of prizes this scandal is an asset, but in the case of the institution behind the prizes that is widely understood to be a natural and perfectly functional system, we find reason to criticize and deride. This is not to suggest, of course, that particular injustices or aporia are not to be addressed and criticized, but that the basis of that criticism should not be the mere fact that the institution's machinations are imperfect or disagreeable.

My arguments in favour of the restoration and re-envisioning of the GGs are not based upon the Awards' history of recognizing excellence or consolidating CanLit. Like

Henighan, "[m]y argument.. .is in support of the GGs' superior potential rather than their present form" ("Giller's Version" 87). For Henighan, 'potential' means the uncovering of new literary talents and the promotion of Canada's independent publishers by the provision of a playing field upon which they will be on even ground with Canada's larger publishers.

For me, the potential of the Awards lies not only in the material that they might more justly recognize or the credit that they might more readily assign to texts otherwise ignored by bigger awards, but in the possibility that they might begin to operate in an alternative manner that has the potential to quell much criticism of nepotism and homogeneity by better reflecting the desires and evaluations of their constituency. To speak on behalf of a larger constituency is always already an impossibly appropriative task with which one becomes complicit upon serving on a jury or accepting an award; a significant degree of this representativeness remains simply unavoidable, even if it is consciously denied by its agents.

By way of working towards the development of theories that can be put into practice in order of affecting change (moving towards Cavell's call for a more overt public presence and hopefully evading the criticisms that Bourdieu levels at the work of Derrida for "failing to question its own position in the philosophical field" [Johnson 20] and

Foucault for refusing to look outside of his own 'field of discourse' [Bourdieu, Field 33]), methods by which we might begin to engage a new ideology of collectivity that infiltrates and alters institutionality in CanLit are needed. Habermas argues that "[w]e will only be able to meet the challenges of globalization in a reasonable manner if the postnational constellation can successfully develop new forms for the democratic self-steering of society" (88), so any project that strives towards change must originate from both within and without the institutions requiring change, and must come from an institutionally- conscious citizenry. The dangers of employing appropriative pronouns like 'we' and 'us' in such discussions remain, but they are hopefully somewhat curtailed by the fact that, since

CanLit's general 'ethical turn' towards transnational understandings of texts and their contexts, they try to avoid such appropriation by remaining conscious of their own double ability to refer to a collective as opposed to a harmonious or homogenous community imagined from on high (see Brydon, "Metamorphoses" 2). Still, the fact of citizenship's plurality — that a scholar can be a poet, a novelist can be a teacher, a critic can be a juror, an administrator can run a reading series etc. — leaves us with little choice but to use such pronouns hopefully and porously, with a conscious "ability to think of people wildly 356 different from ourselves as included in the range of 'us'" (Richard Rorty qtd. in Wyile

824).

The vagaries of globalization have been well articulated for quite some time, but the threat that they pose to the GG Awards lies, I think, within the institutional framework of the Awards that has consecrated what we now widely consider to be a relatively normative body of texts by in fact 'normalizing' them with the Awards. The seeming chicken-and-egg inescapability of this formulation seems immediately hopeless, but like the larger incarnations of globalization's consolidative thrust, it remains crucial that such an observation is the beginning of the thinking and not the end: "The list of problems that confront anybody who reads a newspaper these days can, of course, only change into a political agenda for a public which maintains a degree of trust in the possibility of a conscious transformation of society — and which can in turn be entrusted with it"

(Habermas 59-60). In the case of the GG Awards specifically, the newspapers (and magazines, journals, blogs, etc.) have been unequivocally critical without offering much in the way of the trust to which Habermas refers. The overwhelming cynicism about the

Canada Council's administrative handling of the most recent major controversy concerning

Jacob Scheier's receipt of the 2008 GG in English-Canadian Poetry for More to Keep Us

Warm suggests (one hopes disingenuously) a field of critics and readers who are for the most part wont to deconstruct but hesitant to reconstruct.

What remains unsaid in the critiques of the GGs and the Canada Council is often more telling than the critiques themselves. As we have seen, critics are eager, if not vehement, to note that money and recognition derived from a win or shortlisting is not neutral, it comes with strings attached, yet no critic, to my knowledge, offers any kind of corrective to this problem aside from Metcalf s self-consciously ludicrous 'what if?' scenario in Freedom from Culture in which he argues that if the Council were dissolved and state support of the arts revoked entirely, they would return to a state of localism, purity, and Darwinian competition thus improving the general quality of literature in

Canada and allowing it to "accommodate itself to its natural audience" (68). This very idea that Canadian literature has a natural audience, presumably unbesmirched by gangrenous academic interference via the imposition of theory, philosophy, or social thought onto the interpretation of literary work, or by the nepotistic and cliquish reviewing, granting, and promoting practices funded through the Canada Council, is one that requires further examination, for it smacks, as so much of Metcalf s criticism does, of an impractical idealism. In his scathing indictment of the Council's influence in sculpting CanLit Metcalf offers little affirmative potential other than admitting that he himself has "no instant solutions. An end to all subsidy and the disbanding of the Council is perhaps a touch apocalyptic" {Freedom 35) despite his aforementioned theoretical sketch of the idyllic pre-

Council history of Contact Press {Freedom 67-70). And although Metcalf insists that his vision of a Canada sans Council is a "particularly joyous one" {Freedom 67) because it lays the foundation for a more 'natural' tradition to take root, it is rendered ineffective and unproductive because of the very untenability that he refers to with his apocalyptic touch.

Re-rigging Juries

The case remains, I think, that "[i]n Canada, few openly profess a belief that the government should not 'involve itself in the arts in any way'. Our arts are too tender a plant for such a state of affairs" (Marchand 63). Purple metaphor aside, the reliance of literary culture in Canada upon state-erected frameworks remains very nearly absolute. This fact has not yet been accepted as a fact from which we must move on by several critics, nor has it dissuaded them from calling for the end of Council-funded initiatives like the GG

Awards. Poet and critic Zachariah Wells has been among the very few vectors of positivity in recent debates about literary awards in Canada (though his positivity is often well- disguised as critical outrage) and he has maintained an active attitude towards Council processes while remaining conscious of the fact of their necessary shortcomings. His several suggestions pertaining to the GGs' administrative processes embody much popular sentiment around what possibilities yet exist to literary citizens who are constantly disappointed by the Council's failures. For example, he embraces the notion of trying to escape CanLit's incestual nature when he writes: "Assuming that the elimination of the

[GG] award is a foolishly idealistic notion, one option is to staff juries with university and college professors, who are somewhat less likely to know applicants personally" ("Scratch" par.5). Although this proposal is worthy of discussion, I suspect that it is itself rather naive in the division it posits between academics and the goings on of contemporary literary communities. Aside from the significant amount of time required of jurors that would not likely allow a working professor to devote the requisite time to the adjudication process, this proposal also moves further away from the democratic ideal of the jury model in the first place by homogenizing the jury's perspectival approach to literature to a significant degree.

Another popular suggestion is to build a jury of foreign judges who would be less familiar with the politics and history of CanLit, in order to quell widely-held suspicions that

Canadian jurors' "decisions might have to do more with politics, compromise and horse- trading than with artistic excellence" (Wells, "Scratch" par.9). This model has been adopted, with what I personally feel to be a great deal of success, by the Griffin Trust who, since the inception of the Griffin Prize in 2001, have constructed juries consisting of only one Canadian poet or writer alongside two foreign jurors. The surprising, various, and diverse canon erected by the Griffin's winners over the years is suggestive, I think, of the merit of this model in evading CanLit biases. The Giller Prize, in fact, recently began to include non-Canadian jurors in its selection processes with its inclusion of Colm Toibin as a juror in 2008, and its use of Russell Banks and Victoria Glendinning for the 2009 contest.

(Prior to 2008, all jurors had been Canadian citizens with some direct tie [as academics, publishers, writers, politicians] to the field and biases of CanLit). In the case of the GGs, however, this scenario seems immediately less likely to be granted approval by administrators if only because of the federal government and the Canada Council's visible sponsorship of the awards as exclusively Canadian processes. One suspects that the fear of cultural colonialism that the Council was originally designed to combat might spark significant resistance to government funding agencies who remain focused on enforcing the exclusive and natural difference they hope to be inherent in Canadian literature, and the independence of the cultural framework from outside influence. The use of foreign judges immediately reduces potential criticism of consecrations on the basis of field or industry politics, though its implication that CanLit is best assessed by foreign qualifiers is counter to the very ethos upon which the Council is based, thus rendering it theoretically irrelevant.

Also, it is interesting to note that, as Good suggests of the Giller's active attempt to diversify its juries has proven, "none of these supposedly outside-the-box jurors have changed the nature of the award" (71) which is rooted, rather, in the award's institutionality. 360

Other more logistical suggestions for improving the GGs offer more immediate and logical means of democratizing the processes in relation to a collective citizenship. Wells' observation that "something should be done to limit the number of titles submitted to the award" and his suggestion of "a rule whereby each publisher is only allowed to submit one book or a quarter of its list, whichever is greater" ("Griffin" par. 16) offers, I think, a sensible way of reducing the amount of administrative work and the amount of hours required to complete assessments by placing the initial onus of evaluation and consecration on the producers of literature themselves. This suggestion also has the potential to allow smaller publishers who launch, say, 4-10 books per year, a more even playing field alongside major publishers who might release ten times that number of then-eligible books.

Douglas Fetherling, weighing in with one of the more collectively beneficial suggestions, emphasizes that if awards are indeed about supporting artists and the arts, then why not "emulate the pari-mutuel system of horse-racing and divide the purse into win, place, and show" (156)? While most major prizes, the GG included, do offer significant financial rewards to shortlisted works to be used for the explicit purposes of their promotion as such, a more equitable division of actual prize money would still maintain an award's formula of distinction and consecration by choosing a winner over and above other books, but it would simultaneously offer non-winning books a greater slice of cultural and actual capital than merely being shortlisted might.

Conflict of interest on juries, even if entirely unavoidable in Canada, seems to be at the very heart of much public dissatisfaction with the Council and the Awards. Wells suggests that "the Canada Council should take steps to ensure that at least the most egregious conflicts of interest are obviated" and that they should "conduct routine audits of 361 juries to ensure that no significant conflicts exist — if not prior to submission of the short list (which would be a logistical nightmare), then at least once the short list has been submitted by the jury but before it is made public" ("Scratch" par.8). This seems eminently sensible of course, until one begins to define what a 'conflict of interest' might consist of.

According to the "Guidelines" section of the Canada Council's official "Conflict of Interest

Disclosure Form" a conflict exists if judges are asked to assess applications:

-from your full-time employer, client or organization where you are a board member or for whom you serve as a consultant in strategic or financial planning; -where you have a direct financial interest in the success or failure of a project/ application; -where you have been involved in legal proceedings against an applicant, or have been placed in adversarial positions; -where the applicant is your spouse/partner or an immediate family member; -where the applicant is your close personal friend; -where your spouse/partner or immediate family member is a senior staff member, contractor or board member with the applicant organization; -where you judge you are uncomfortable or unable, for any other reason, to assess the application objectively. ("Conflict of Interest Disclosure Form")

The broadness of the last qualification in particular suggests that the responsibility for assessing conflict of interest remains largely in the hands of jurors themselves5.

Even for the most vigilant and careful juror this system remains problematic and unpredictably fallible. In my conversation with Christian Bok about being removed from the 2006 GG jury for a conflict of interest that he had already declared ("The Politics of Poetics," Open Letter 13.3 (2007): 113-131), Bok offers his 'would-have-been' long list of consecratable books (which is remarkably aesthetically and poetically diverse) alongside a brief breakdown of how he personally could have been connected to every poet earning his nomination with the exception of one. These guidelines also leave the word "adversarial" in the third point open for interpretation. Although Bok, in the same interview, argues that he is "absolutely certain that [he] could have objectively assessed" the work of Carmine Starnino if it had been submitted for consideration (even though he would have signaled a conflict as a matter of course ["The Politics" 121]), the two poets have developed a relationship that has become, definitively, adversarial: instigated by Starnino's scathing review of Eunoia ("Vowel Movements: Pointless Toil and Empty Productivity" reprinted from the June/July 2002 issue of Books In Canada in A Lover's Quarrel [129-135]), the conflict between the poets continued in Bok's argumentative review of Starnino's review that appeared in a 2003 issue of Matrix (#64, 2-5, the anagrammatically-titled "A Minor Cannister."). The intellectual brouhaha 362

Interestingly, the official "Conflict of Interest Disclosure Form" filed by Christian Bok on

August 7, 2006 regarding a potential conflict with a work submitted for the 2006 Poetry competition covers the above points as the entirety of the "Guidelines" section; the form I was given during my own interview with the Council in May 2009 as the standard template offered to all the jurors involved in the aforementioned controversies has been significantly amended and re-titled. The above seven bullet points are now listed under the "Guidelines" sub-section "For All Council Prizes," on the newer "Conflict of Interest Disclosure Form for Prizes," while a new sub-section, "For Literary Prizes," declares that a conflict exists if

-you, or your spouse/partner or family member have a book in contention -you edited one of the books -you are a staff member or board member of one of the nominating publishing houses and that a conflict "may also exist" if

-you contributed to the development of one of the books (conflict of interest exists of you have made a direct, intellectual contribution to one of the books) -you have written a promotional text or review of one of the books -your name is listed in the acknowledgements section (conflict of interest exists if your name is listed in such a way that it implies a contribution to one of the books).

That the new specifications directly address the conflicts that have drawn negative attention to the Council over the last couple of years seems immediately logical, even though

Larocque-Poirier suggests that the amended form was, in fact, the one distributed to the

2008 jury (Personal email). Regardless of the timing of these revisions and the fact that they stand vehemently by Scheier's receipt of the prize (Larocque-Poirier, personal

recently culminated in the "Cage Match of Canadian Poetry" held at Mount Royal University in November 2009 which pitted the two poets against each other (and as representatives of their conflicting communities) in a debate about the state of Canadian poetry. 363 interview 24), the Council appears to be taking heed of the enthusiastic public discussions that have taken place around its jury politics in recent years. These changes suggest a concerted effort to curtail the particular cultural capital of scandal that might be derived from the extra-textual framework of prize-giving, and a simultaneous focus on the literature itself that is absent with Canada's other major awards; they even encourage "spirited disagreement and discussion" (Governor General's Literary Awards) about their annual consecrations, and have sought a degree of transparency unmatched by the Giller or Griffin by making (a version of) their prize-giving policies and procedures available on their website6.

Still, in order for the Council to enforce the kind of policing of jurors' relationships to applicants, the regulations would still need to be far more specific than they are at present, and the screening process far more invasive — likely to the degree of prohibitiveness and anti-constitutionality — with respect to jurors' and nominees' personal lives. The notion that, in the interest of transparency jurors must become the property of the public also runs counter to Wells' complaint that jury "decisions might have to do more with politics, compromise and horse-trading than with artistic excellence" ("Scratch" par.9) by in fact making the politics the focal point of the process that primarily enables them to assess the literary excellence. Similarly, the cry for the GGs to "make the deliberations of the jury accessible to the public — especially since it is public money at stake here"

Here we must consider again the arm's-lengthness of the relationship between the government and the Council; such apparent transparency is not required (and perhaps not desired) by the Giller or the Griffin, but the Council has adopted a degree of performed forthrightness typical of government itself, which must at least appear to be publicly accountable. 364

("Scratch" par.9) runs into difficulty when the nature of the deliberation process is primarily oral and in-person. Documents, emails, official forms and so on might certainly tell otherwise obfuscated stories, but the numerous hours of actual deliberation between a jury are otherwise impossible to capture unless they are recorded as audio files and made available for interested citizens with enough spare time to listen to them.

So if, in the eyes of much of the literary citizenry, the crux of the Canada Council's problems continually seem to be reducible to the problems inherent in speaking as any kind of collectivity as a jury, and for any kind of collectivity as an imagined community, then the expectation of a jury's 'success', let alone perfection, is an impossibly irrational one.

Davey, for his part, recognizes this irrationality as a matter of course when he suggests that

"[t]he [GG] awards have always been a lottery anyway, governed by the chance of who else publishes that year and who the council happens to pick as jurors" ("Tales" 15).

Accordingly, my own proposal for beginning to address the institutionality of the GG

Awards by weakening the divisions between the institution and its constituency focuses on the possibility of both corralling some of the necessary randomness inherent in these systems of consecration, and reducing that randomness when it comes to the Awards' actual bestowal so that it might more genuinely reflect the evaluative designs of its citizenry. One of Wells' more seemingly farfetched proposals was to suggest that the

Canada Council "open up jury duty to volunteers from the general public. Isn't it from the citizenry that juries in the courts are formed, even if they are largely ignorant of the intricacies of the law? There may not be many people who sign up, but what possible harm could come from the odd taxpaying layperson having his or her say? I somehow doubt the

Canada Council could do much worse" ("Scratch" par.6). Immediately one must consider that this proposal is crippled by its idealism; who is this public? How would they be organized (as one can hardly imagine a citizen with little to no interest of connection to poetry agreeing to serve on a jury simply because they had been chosen)? How would they be proven to be eligible? How would they be expected to find the time to serve on such a jury, and what kind of qualification would they bring or (I assume Wells to hope) not bring to deliberations? While the proposal is noble in its democratization of inclusion, it presupposes a significantly interested public that may not exist in as large a capacity as

Wells imagines. Instead, the system would require an already-interested and condensed public, and it is my contention that anyone with the desire to make the sacrifices necessary to sit on a jury as it is presently construed would bring to the jury the same type of biases and pretensions, and the same kind of horses to be thus traded en route to making a consecration. The beginning, I believe, is not in the opening of the jury to members of the public per se, but in the opening of the construction of the jury itself.

An Immodest Proposal

Assuming that a reversion back to the titular authority of the prize by having the sitting GG choose an annual winner is untenable (despite providing a seemingly ideal

'common reader' who is not explicitly academic and yet who must, by some degree of necessity, be culturally engaged and intelligent, and despite eliminating the entire question of democratic representation by employing a single judge), my suggestion involves a re­ thinking of the jury and its processes to a significant degree. What follows, then, is by no means and under no pretensions a proposed solution to the problems inherent in the current

GG processes, but rather builds upon Wells' idea of democratizing juries by opening their comprisal. It is intended, again, to begin the discussion, not to conclude it. 366

First and foremost, any renewed approach to the GG Awards that proposes to render them more democratic and more truly the property and province of a literary citizenry requires a different general understanding of institutionality and representation that I have proposed above; an omnipresent consciousness that the GG processes are as apt to plurality, aporia, contradictoriness, and relativity as the postmodern subject. If the Award is worth salvaging for its potential to celebrate literary work in a context that is less directly influenced by the push and pull of commercial concerns than those erected by other major corporately sponsored prizes, the literary citizenry that takes such pains to denounce the collusion of literature and commerce by demonizing globalization (as a culturally apocalyptic end instead of an ongoing state of process) will need to demonstrate a degree of practice with which to accompany their theory. The majority of the complaints against the processes surrounding the GG Awards have to do with processes of exclusivity and cliquishness — that awards reflect the consecrations of and for a small and exclusive group of people standing in for the entirety of a literary community or a country — especially since that cliquishness feeds the horse-trading and score-settling so popularly thought to dominate jury deliberations. At present, GG juries are annually built by a single bureaucrat at the Canada Council who holds the title of Program Officer of the Governor General's

Awards (Larocque-Poirier, personal interview 16), thus suggesting the authoritative singularity of a particular vision governing the processes of even selecting a jury from the beginning. Despite this officer's best efforts towards plurality and diversity, the singularity of their authority establishes the Awards as the province of a few on behalf of many. My proposal begins, then, with the opening of this specific process itself towards a more democratic ideal through which any interested literary citizen stands an equal opportunity to participate in the processes of consecration.

I would propose, initially, the establishment of an Order or a Union of the Governor

General's constituency. Inclusion in this Union would be open to any and all interested literary citizens from any and all cultural, political, and social fields but, for administrative reasons, would require a nominal annual membership fee ($5 or $10/annum). The fee must not be so high as to be prohibitive to any significant percentage of the interested population, but it is required in order to offset further administrative costs incurred by this model. The largest hurdle in collecting this fee will be in justifying such a demand on a population that feels, in general I believe, that they are already paying for the Governor

General's Awards in the form of income, property, and sales taxes. The Union, by its very establishment, would redirect the general focus of the GG Awards away from the representation of a general citizenry (the Canadian polis) to the representation of an interested citizenry, and would encourage, ideally, citizens who become interested for whatever reason (perhaps the selection of a winning title with which they do not agree) to join the Union as a kind of democratic corrective. It would also quell the impossibility of imposing a particular cultural identity onto members of a general citizenry who might otherwise deny it. By joining the Union, a citizen would be tacitly agreeing to actively participate in a judicial process should they be chosen to do so, and would be well and clearly informed of their responsibilities and opportunities as a member of the Union in a membership contract or agreement that would be required of all members. Should members be called upon for their judicial input, they would, of course, have the opportunity to defer their service if personal circumstances required it, but the extent of the involvement 368 requested of them would also be significantly less than is asked of jurors under the present system.

Additionally, I would propose the adoption of a system for reducing the number of books submitted for a prize annually which takes its lead from Wells' suggestions above in order to reduce the amount of reading and assessment time (and honouraria) required in the development of a shortlist of 4-5 texts. By asking publishers to submit only a percentage of their list or by placing a cap on the number of titles they are allowed to submit for consideration, a degree of the evaluative and/or logistical decisions inherent in any such consecratory act would begin with the publishers themselves. In theory this would refine the list of eligible titles by restricting them to texts that the publishers (as producers) themselves believe to hold the highest potential for consecration (to say nothing of literary quality, which this system would, I hope, more acutely consider as a matter of course). This certainly has the potential to incite more incendiary and contentious relationships between writers and their publishers, but it also has the potential to forge closer and more mutually beneficial relationships between the two while hopefully encouraging writers to consider the logistics of publishing with larger and/or smaller presses.

The development of a shortlist under this proposal is an area which still requires further thinking. The present GG system dictates that the three selected jurors deliberate and establish both a shortlist and a winner simultaneously even though the shortlist is announced well in advance of the winner in order to both create a sense of intrigue and interest (and to generate book sales) and to allow publishers of the winning work the opportunity to prepare for what they hope will be a deluge of sales of the winning title. I would propose, instead, that a shortlist of 4-5 titles be similarly established without the pre- 369 selection of a winner. The most effective and democratic method by which this shortlist is to be derived remains uncertain, but several possibilities exist: Given that membership in the Union would facilitate a mailing list or a listserv — a system by which members are able to nominate a single title each might establish a shortlist based exclusively on a democratic majority. Alternatively, a rotating jury comprised of 3-5 randomly selected union members modeled on the present system might be employed in order to determine a shortlist at a significantly lesser time and cost (in travel, accommodation, and the necessary honouraria) than having a jury deliberate and agree upon a single unanimous winning work.

Although this particular model encounters the same general problems as the present model, by refusing to choose a definitive winner it exerts significantly less power over the eventual selection of a winner meant to reflect the temperature of a much larger field. The first of these options begs the question of why the entire system is not itself shifted in order to allow all members of the Union to choose a winning book. Aside from the logistical nightmare that the tallying of these results would likely entail, and in addition to allowing significant degrees of self-promotion, vote-rigging, and other forms of sabotage, mail-in or online voting refuses the necessity of putting everyone on even ground and thus get us further and further away from the stated intention of the Award in the first place, of determining and celebrating comparative literary value within a given field. Admittedly the field under this proposal becomes a closed and forced one as it moves through its necessary evaluative processes, but I would argue no more than the field presently constituted by the extant system, while still allowing a wider and more genuinely representative constituency to determine and debate literary quality. Upon the establishment and announcement of a shortlist, the work of the GG administrators would become of paramount importance. I would propose the dissolution of the present processes of jury selection and their replacement by one in which the juror pool is expanded to 15 or 25 randomly (electronically) selected members of the Union. Those members of the Union, upon agreeing to serve as jurors, would be sent copies of all of the shortlisted works (purchased from the publishers by the Council at cost thus increasing circulation and availability of the books to begin with) as well as a simple form with which to indicate their selection as the winner. Jurors would be asked to read the shortlisted works and make a selection from amongst the list (no 'write-in' votes would be accepted); they would not be required to comment upon, discuss, or otherwise justify their decision, and their identities would not be made known to each other or to the larger public in order to avoid any direct petitioning or electioneering. The winner would, very simply, be selected by winning the largest number of votes, and while various protocols would have to be established governing tie-breakers, the number of votes would theoretically be large enough to correct any anomalous, random, biased, or explicitly political votes. In fact, determining a winning work in such a manner means that biases and politics can be taken for granted, while strategic voting based on familiarity with other jurors becomes a virtually impossible option. The commitment required of jurors then becomes quite a manageable one — the reading of 4-5 books of poetry, some of which they will, in all likelihood, already have some degree of familiarity with. While their participation in this process would be primarily one of voluntary service to the community, jurors would have their annual membership fee waived for the following year as well as receiving the complementary copies of the shortlisted works. In this way, I think, the GG Awards hold 371 within them the potential to act as a more genuinely reflective award, and more truly a people's choice/people's poet award that draws its evaluative consecrations from a wide cross-section of literary citizens in a variety of cultural and social markets. This proposal insists upon a significant increase in administrative and bureaucratic work on the part of the

Council, which inevitably insists upon greater operation costs than those of the current system. It is my suspicion, though, that much of these costs would be recuperated by the imposition of a limit of books eligible to be submitted by publishers as Wells proposes above (thus reducing reading time and honouraria in the development of a shortlist), the potential reduction of travel and accommodation costs for jurors, and in the accrual of the proposed annual eligibility fee.

This proposal, as imperfect as it will undoubtedly prove itself to be upon further critical thinking, will still manage to accomplish the stated goals and designs of any literary award while managing to address several of the criticisms leveled at the current system. In re-addressing the 'national' scope of literature in the age of transnationalism, this proposal also posits something akin to the 'natural audience' whose loss Solway and Metcalf so virulently mourn, but who have never existed in any legitimate capacity anyway. I have proposed that literature's 'natural' audience in Canada is made up not of academics, poets, novelists, critics, publishers, or readers, but rather of plural literary citizens whose cultural identities overlap and pass through many or all of these identities at various points in time and space. The 'common reader' so antagonistically posited by Solway in Director's Cut

(142) and Metcalf in What Is a Canadian Literature? (101) then, is not an audience that has been lost or that is yet to be found, but one that has evolved into something that singularity, binary thinking, or simplified categorization of literary citizens as either one thing or 372 another is unable to address. The democratization of the jury pool allows for the participation of any and all interested literary citizens who desire and can afford the very menial entrance fee into the discussion.

There arise several questions and concerns that must be addressed regarding the logicality and practicality of this model I have proposed. Perhaps of most urgency (aside from the financial implications of the new model's administrative requirements) is the possibility that the model would actually quell the very literary discussion and debates that prizes like the GG are designed to initiate. My hope would be that this model would not put the scandalous value of the prize itself under threat — as scandal itself is sure to follow any consecration of this type. In fact, instead of quelling literary debate surrounding the

Awards, it would refocus much of that debate onto the literature itself in the face of GG consecrations that must be seen, by nature of their more genuine representativeness of the field, as somewhat more incontrovertible. This formula, instead, would eliminate the ability of reducing such consecrations to mere matters of political or poetical difference and the personal settling of scores. Because the jurors would remain part of the literary citizenry and would be rather encouraged to discuss their choices and opinions after the fact, the potential for endless scandal and contention in the form of critical engagement and debate about the texts would instead open itself into a wider discussions of literature and literary value that moves necessarily beyond simplistic and stunted explications of particular consecrations at the hand of horse-trading, score-settling, or individual power-wielding.

Deliberation, if it is indeed to be made public, can occur in the magazines, journals, coffeehouses, and pubs of the ever-changing nation, more free of personalized attacks and the airing of dirty laundry, and after the jury has made its consecration. In his defense of the 373

Canada Council's extant adjudication system, Milligan argues that "the democratic process serves as a crude yardstick, highly imperfect but the best we know" (79), so one can only assume that the widening of the scope of that democratic ideal would lead to a truer taking of the field's temperature.

In the 1978 report entitled The Future of the Canada Council, an Advisory Arts

Panel predicted Milligan's argument that "artists judging artists, though far from a perfect system, is the best there is" (qtd. in Milligan 65), so with the growing understanding of the plurality of a given literary citizen's potential cultural identities that has emerged with postmodernity, a widening of the ideological awareness surrounding the production, the consumption, and the consecration of CanLit is required in order to salvage the GG Awards as the possession and reflection of an actual and physical collectivity. In attempting to improve a system that is "anything but systematic, but rather eccentric, confused, and loosely unregulated" (Davey, "Tales" 11), my proposal attempts to avoid reproducing what

Althusser calls the "productive forces" (4) in the production of literature. And while it may not change the ways in which literature is consecrated through the bestowal of awards, it will offer literary citizens the opportunity to participate in a collectivity that privileges their own differences, biases, and systems of literary value. The proposal offers, I hope, the potential to wrest a significant degree of power from the hands of various institutions by integrating institutional frames of structure with an actual citizenry in a way that reduces the degree of appropriation on either part. In this way the GGs can offer — through the best intentions of the nation-state and not its more egregious historical forgettings — a more equitable and genuine consecration of literary work that despite its shortcomings, opens 374 spaces of resistance against directly commercial and/or exclusive cultural homogenization.

Envelope Please...

Aside from putting forth its admittedly rudimentary theses on the movement and character of various literary awards, this project has aspired to initiate a strategy of cultural reading (of both texts and contexts) that consciously avoids obscuring the sociopolitical naturalization of the nation-state (Walcott 22) under which so much CanLit has been consecrated and normalized. Meredith Quartermain, like so many others, has noted that

"Can Lit is no longer, if it ever was, a homogenous literary family of fathers, mothers, rebellious sons and dutiful daughters" (par. 13); "Prize Possession" has desired to envision an awards system that operates with relative transparency towards a more democratic ideal, and one that offers literary citizens in Canada further opportunities to contribute to the ways in which they are represented to each other and to larger international cultural citizenries. Brydon argues that "the creation of an imagined community is a continuous work in progress, involving making and unmaking, learning and unlearning, aiming not to fix boundaries but to encourage movements across them. If the role of the state is to consolidate, then the role of literature is to unravel those consolidations through the kinds of critique, questioning, and reimagining that enable new groupings for form that may be more responsive to the needs of the day" ("Metamorphoses" 13). If the political fact of

Canada, despite the inequities with which it may still treat its citizenry, remains the basis

(but not the limitation) for our imagining of a cultural collectivity, then it remains the responsibility of all literary citizens to engage in their cultural contexts in a manner that presumes an idealism while preserving the necessary pragmatism with which to affect change. Like Rinaldo Walcott's journal New Dawn, this line of thinking acknowledges that transnational and transcultural movements "will have to rely on the state while changing the state" (Bourdieu, Firing Back 43), in this case by positing "a refusal of CanLit in its institutional guise" which still "depends on CanLit for its very sustenance" (Walcott 23).

Like Daveydian canons, this does not imply a denial of (and thus appropriation by) a single dominant construction, but a refusal to grant any institution the absolute power of dominance — to eliminate the hierarchies of its old structures and to make its relationality more fluid and democratic. We must, after Marcel Mauss, remain aware of the ways in which the systems that organize our culture actually operate (which is always different that the way in which they claim to operate) if we are to uncover more equitable ways of exchanging cultural and actual capital (see Mauss 82-83) as a collectivity.

If the GGs remain a taking of their fields' temperature — an annual "litmus test" of

CanLit value (Laird 21) — in terms of literary merit because they remain less directly affiliated with the neoliberal and capital-driven agendas of private and exclusive corporations, then their preservation and improvement seems of the utmost importance. To deny them cultural province, (to deny the impact of any award), is foolhardiness; to imagine or ascribe them too much power in the literary markets of the past, present, and future is disingenuous; to ignore them, though, especially as they retain the claims and constituency of the nation, is to ignore the very processes by which, according to Davey,

"the prejudices of the present" ("Tales" 16) that will come to colour literary history and evaluation of the future, can be assessed, negotiated, and influenced. The GG Awards have a long and storied history of generosity, benevolence, and prestige, but also, inevitably, of controversy, appropriation, and politicization. I agree with Cavell when he emphasizes that

"the way literature represents Canada has as much to do with citizenship as the right to 376 vote" (92). As explicit representations of Canada and CanLit, they might offer us one opening towards the further democratization of that representation and one possible way of renegotiating the literary public's relationship with institutions like the Canada Council and perhaps also to larger corporations whose true interest in the arts (as opposed to in the conspicuous visibility of being a supporter of the arts) is coming under more and more criticism and suspicion. In a field and a discipline that we have long been told is rapidly shrinking in popular and institutional interest despite its tremendous import, keeping our eyes on the prize can mean encouraging and maintaining an awareness of the cultural framework that has been erected for and around us as literary citizens of a specific yet fluid place and moment. Works Cited

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