CHARTED TERRITORY
Women Nriting Genealogy in Recent Canadian Fiction
by
NETA GORDON
Thesis submitted to the Department of English
In conformity with the requirements fx
The degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Queen's University
Kingston. Ontario. Canada
November. 200 1
Copyright O Neta Gordon 2001 uisiaans and Acquisitions et 3-Bi mgogrPphic Services seMees WliraphQues
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This dissertation argues that the recent refashioning of the genealogical plot by
Canadian women entails a dual process whereby, on the one hand, the idea of family is radically redefined and, on the other hand, the conservative traditions of family are in some way recuperated. For my analysis of the multi-generational family history, 1 develop a complex critical framework which demonstrates that the organizing principles goveming any particular conception of family will also influence the way that family's story is nmted. Using the book of Genesis as a narrative model, 1 begin by proposing a poetics of genealogy that delineates the range of organizing principles that control it. My poetics establishes such features of the genealogical plot as its relationship to the force of injunction, the contrasting effects of its vertical and horizontal axes, and its association with narrative temporality. 1 then proceed to a discussion of how the traditional system of the genealogical plot is both invoked and politically ador aesthetically transformed in recent work by Canadian women authon. My analysis of novels by SKY Lee, Ann-Marie
MacDonald, and Barbara Gowdy shows how the refashioning of the family plot regenerates fiction by Canadian women concemed with how the conception of family relates to subjectivity.
My study of Lee's Disap~earingMoon Cafe addresses her use of postrnodern narrative strategies as well as her confrontation with the complex process of historical recovery. demonstrating how the conse~ativegenealogical ïmpetus tends to produce problematic instances of genealogical fabrication. My analysis of MacDonald's Fa11 On
Your Knees investigates her comic challenge to both the privileged vertical axis of genealogy and the stability of genealogical interpretation in order to indicate how the forecloscd genealogical plot may be revitdized. Next, 1 show how Gowdy's The White
Bone takes up the problem of a genealogical plot that depicts the annihilation of family, cornparhg the characteristic proscriptiveness of the genealogical injunction to the inadequacies of certain types of faith. In my conclusion 1 argue that recent genealogical plots by Canadian women may be considered as part of an evolution in feminist literature that concems itself more with context than with subject. 1 consider myself so lucky to have ken supervised by Sylvia Sadedind. She is a vuly sophisticated reader, and the combination of her boundless creativity and cornmitment to ihis project has made me into a far better researcher, writer, and thinker. 1 would like to thank her for her wisdom, her standards, her insistence that 1 find my own voice and, most of dl, her humanity.
Thanks also to my second reader, Tracy Ware, for his care and professionalism. 1 have learned much [iom his determination that one observe the trajectory of critical conversation, and ihink that this attention to critical links has made Dr. Ware particularly suited to a project on genealogy.
So many of the staff and faculty members of the Queen's English Department have played a crucial role in this project by providing me with such a wonderful working environment. 1 would especially like to thank Kathy Goodfiiend for always knowing the answer to any question 1 had and for her quiet support of every graduate student that passes through her capable hands. Many thanks, aiso, to Elizabeth Hanson for her insight. compassion and tierce cornmitment to ethics and teaching.
1 am very grateful to the Ontario and Canadian government from providing me with an O.G.S. and S.S.H.R.C.. and to Queen's University for their fûnding.
Every doctoral dissertation has its own specid "team?' of coaches and cheerleaden. My team consists of Dana Medoro, my inspiration, Vanessa Wame, my passionate comrade- in-amis. and Daniela Janes, my mode1 of curiosity. Thank you al1 for your constant humour. your sympathetic rage and your brilliance.
An ovenvhelming measure of gratitude goes to Martin Gough, for his composure in the face of my anxiety. for his excitement about my work, and for the suength of his love and friendship.
1 would like to thank the memben of my own sprawling family. whose afTection for me challenges any intlexible notion of genealogical obligation. Love especially to Arnir Gordon, Shira BQ~.Talia Gordon. Eytan Gordon, Gilda Berger, Daniela Gordon. Diane Gordon. and Ruth Seliger.
And to my parents. Yael Seliger and Michael Gordon, without whom 1 am not who I am: it is your own cornitment to family and to learning thai is given form in this dissertation. your own inquisitiveness and concem with ethics that has shaped my academic soul. Thank you for al1 of the stories about my name.
This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of my extraordinary grandparents. Ros1y-n Gordon. Chava Seliger and Dr. Martin Seliger. and to my wonderful grandpa Max Gordon. Table of Contents
.. Abstract ...... ,.,... II
Acknowledgements ...... iv introduction "These are the StoryLines of,"A Poetics of Genealogy ...... 1
Chapter One Golden Chains and Narrative bots: SKY Lee's Disauoearina Moon Cafe ...... 43
Chapter Two AmMarie MacDonald's Fa11 On Your Knees and the Hermetic Genealogy...... 90
Chapter Thne The Sacred Witness in Barbara Gowdy's The White Bone ...... 137
Conclusion . - Beyond the Individual Imperative ...... 185
Works Cited .....-...... *...... *...... 198
Vita ...... ,, ...... 211 "These are the Storykines 9fPnA Poetics of Genealogy
The toledoth series. as well as the older genealogical matenal, should not [. . .] be consigned to an insignifiant collection of bits and pieces. Its importance derives rather from the structure of the whole.' (George W. Coats. Genesis. with an Introduction to Narrative Literature)
She said, "There's a me growing inside you [. . .]. It's the part that goes on living." (Am-Marie MacDonald, Fa11 On Yow Knees)
Beyond the YCeoealogical Imperative"
Towards the end of In Search of Myself, Frederick Phiiip Grove's contentious
"autobiography." he speculates about the value of an individual's existence:
Willy-nilly we live for a while under the illusion that the link in the chain
has as much reaiity as the chain itself. Death destroys that illusion; and
death may well not be the cessation of anything whatever. We live as
much in othen as we live in ourselves. For the chah of the generations the
life we live for others. in others. is the one thing which has any importance
whatever. (452)
It is not. however. so much Grove's interest in the primacy of the "chain of generations" that is taken up by critics of his witing or that seems to be the themaïiç and structural
focus of his fiction. but rather the implicit and awiliary condition of the "illusory" significance of the individual. John Moss remarks that, "in exploring the patterns of
individual isolation in Canadian fiction. it is inevitable that Frederick Philip Grove should demand separate treatment. His lone protagonists loom large in the literate Canadian imaginationy(9),and Laurence Ricou offers the striking image of Grove's '%vertical man
[who] is alien to a horizontal world," whereby "the exposure of vertical man in Grove's prairie dramatically presents the inevitability of decayW(38).in his essay on Grove's early
Gerrnan novel. Fannv Essler, D.O.Spettigue notes that "A reviewer wrote, in 1906, that the novel represented a 'search for the self.' Grove never forgot the phrase; he borrowed it for his autobiography nearly forty years later [. . . and] in al1 the novels it is taking place"(53). Grove's concem with this ontological "search" is reflected in the myriad pioneer figures that populate his novels, whose initial syrnbolic value as modem heroes of the frontier only serves to mapi@ their individual failure. The very concept of the hero is callcd into question. as R.D. MacDonald notes in his discussion of "Grove's motif of the absurd quester"(258). In much of Grove's work. it is not so much that the individual does not act but that there is neither functional nor syrnbolic value to the action.
According to Grove's assertion, however, the debilitation of the pioneer hero is somehow recovered by the "reality" of the "chain of generations." a supposition that is explicitly propounded in the quasi-non-fictional Over Prairie ~rails.' In it Grove asserts:
"Where 1 had failed. she [his daughter] was to succeed. Where 1 had squandered my energies and opportunities, she was to use them to some purpose [. . -1. She was to redrem mee*(1 17). And yet. even in such a comparatively optimistic work as Over Prairie
Trails. thrre is a hesitancy regarding the triumph of generational continuity. Grove goes on to sardonicdly remark that "Children are arnong the most effective means devised by
Nature to delude us into living on"(l18). An examination of Grove's subsequent fictional treaûneni of the "chah of generations" reveals that, far fiom countenng the plot of the failed hero. novels such as Our Dailv Bread, Fruits of the Earth, and. in particula. Master of the Mill, simply ampli& the tale of defeat by way of repetition. Various cntics have noted that what makes the familiar story of individual failure even more ominous in
The Master of the Mill is precisely its position within a cyclical pattern of events. As R.E.
Watters comrnents. "Grove's acceptance of a kind of determinkm in hurnan life - that men are pawns wi th an illusion of freedom while gripped fst by forces Iarger and stronger than their conscious will - is everywhere apparentY'(xii).W.J. Keith goes Mer to suggest that this "acceptance ola kind of determinism in human life," as it is made explicit in The Master of the Miil, is a "disturbing idea that has been latent in Grove's fiction from the beginning: the suggestion that the whole process is a part of the nature of things and that hurnan beings have no power to alter itoo(53).
Despite the glaring tension between Grove's superticid championing of the genentional impetus and his depiction of its apparent impotence. cntics have so far stopped short of investipting the function of cosmic determinism in terms of genealogy.
This ovenight is even more striking when considered in relation to the ongoing critical discussion regarding the unique narrative structure of The Master of the Mill. As a
Iiterary rnotiK genealogy manifests itself not only in terms of theme but. even more irnportantly. in terms of narrative fom. As 1 will show throughout this study. the gcnealogicai plot is most po~verfùllyinfonned by the issue of arrangement, and the organizing principles that govem any particular conception of farnily will also influence the way ihat family's story is narrated. Thus. an examination of the fmi!y dynamic in
Grove's novel will illuminate the tension in the narrative betwern coherence and rupture.
In the begiming of The Master of the Mill. the narrator posits what will become a familiar refrain throughout the novel: "Reliving a past life is a different thing From merely reflecting upon it"(Z1); as various critics have noted, it is his desire to represent the quality of Sam Clark's recollection that informs Grove's narrative experiments with such story aspects as sequence and focalization? Wattea' assessment of the novel's structure is charactenstic: '*the narrative method miiy well seem unduly cnmplicated to a hasty reader. yet it is essentially truc to real Iife. The process of summoning up the past is, for anyone. a discontinuous recall of fragments to be worked into meaninml sequence"(ix).
Watters regards the entire scope of the novel in ternis of how it reflects the lone protagonist's experience, rationalizing the narrative disruptions into a coherent pattern.
Likewise. Moss concludes that '-Grove has created for [Sam] an environment, a context, which is arbitrarily ordered to an improbably extreme degree - improbable were it not deciphered through the sphere of consciousness around the dying, mortally-perplexed septuagenarian senator. Sam CIark"(ZO5-06). Only MacDonald departs from this critical precedent in his depreciation of Sam's position. arguing that "Grove's narrative pattern goes fàr in bringing about [the] diminution of' the hunan being: there is no omniscient narrative viewpoint: instead that viewpoint is shattered into multiple and unreliable perspectiws0'(260). Building on MacDonald's assessment. 1 would further suggest that it is not Sam's consciousness that anchors the story but rather the symbol of the mill; as the narrator notes. "The individual destinies comected with [the mil11 had merely woven arabesques around it"(Z0). The "shattering" of human perspective is related to how the novel's structure operates against the basic genealogical force of contînuity as the story of the stunted Clark family is contrasted with the tale of the mill's growth.
In Time and the Novel: The Genealoaicai Im~erative,Patricia Tobin traces both the developrnent of and the various experiments with temporal nnictm as they pertain to the rise of the novel. "The genealogical imperative" refers to her idea that "events in time come to be perceived as begetting other events within a line of causality similar to the line of generations. with the prior event earning a special prestige as it is seen to originate, control and predict future events"(7). For Tobin, the term "genealogy" does not refer to the recorded history of a penon's ancestry or to the study of lineage but is empioyed as an extended metaphor for structural linearity which she perceives as king increasingly undermined in modem and postrnodem literature. The implications of her assertion that '-continuity may be the most embracing expectation we have for the novel that rehearses in its structure the family line"(24) are augmented for a novel. such as
Master of the Mill. whose very plot is also a matter of the family line. In fact, Tobin herse1 f makes numerous references to literary representations of generational plots, such as Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks. Emily Brontë's Wutherine. Heiehts, and William
Faulkner's Absalom Absalorn!. Her analysis of Buddenbrooks is particularly relevant to a discussion about The blaster of the Mill, as. like Mann, Grove is concerned with the decline of a prominent farnily of merchant millers whose ambitions come into conflict with the labouring classes and a changing market. Tobin contends that Buddenbrooks is so "patentiy a matter of fathers and sonsg(54)that once Hanno (the lasi male purveyor of the farnily name) dies at tifteen. 'zhe business is liquidated and the farnily itself is reduced to a sad collection of widows and spinsters"(5.l). Likewise. the final chapter of
Master of the Mill depicts the conversation arnong such 'widows and spinsten" as Lady
Clark. Miss Dolittle and bliss Charlebois. UnIike the Buddenbrook "fim." however- the
Clark mil1 has outlived its human architects: "lt had grown as the product of its own logic: it had grown out of the earth. The Clarks had ken mere pygmy helpers in bringing it to life"(328).
The corrcspndence between the fortunes of the Buddenbrook farnily and firm, together with the sequential ordering of the narrative's events, validates Tobin's supposition that the dominant attribute of the generational plot is continuity, even when that continuity serves only to mark dissolution: "the plot, also a respecter of fint causes, unfolds obediently - to a conclusion that has been implied from its beginningYo(63).
Conversely, notwithstanding the critical emphasis on Grove's deterministic worldview, the narrative of The Master of the Mill is anything but obedient. The confmed "logic" of the mill's growth is countered by the various ruptures of narrative sequence. as well as the motley of external and character-bound focalizers. al1 of whom are sorting through fragments of rnemory. Chapter thirteen. for example. establishes a rnomentary intersection between the story of Sibyl Carter and that of the 190 1 Langholm mil1 strike by way of Miss Charlebois' conversation with Lady Clark. which is developed almost entirely as an extemal analepsis. Despite the detail with which Miss Charlebois reports the motivations for the millhands' assault on Sibyl. however, she does admit that "I am talking. of course. only of what I was told8'(150). Her story is then juvtaposed with Sam's o\m recollections of the details of the strike's progress. from which the story of Sibyl is explicitly expurgated:
He had never inquired into what had happened to SibyI on the occasion of
her iast visit to Langholm. People would have been only too ready to
enlighten him: but he discouraged them. Al1 he knew was that there had
been what the police cal1 a riot. (165) These narrative disruptions and contradictions are set against the image of the newly mechanized mill, in which "The work of transportation had been done by gravity; a horizontal alignment had been tilted into a vertical one"(168).
The image of the vertical mill is significant for a nurnber of reasons. On the level of plot. of course. the new design of the mil1 operates as a strikebreaker. Despite Sam's utopian contention that "rightly handled, the mechanization of processes formerly perfonned by hand contained the greatest blessing that had ever corne to mankind"(l7 l), it is the recognition of their own obsolescence that ultimately forces the strikers into submission. On a metaphorical level, the vertical mill. in its erasure of the human element. functions as a displacement of the normative genealogical Iine. Edmund Clark's construction of the entirely mechanized mill at Arbala. in which "everything proceeded as in a void: no vestiges of the past were to be seen or infened"(203), corre5ponds with his resolve not to propagate the Clark lineage. As he declares to his father. "[Maud] and 1 have been mmied for two years. There is no sign of a child: there never will be"(218).
The rupture of the genealogical impetus is made even more explicit when. during the
1925 strike at the Langholm mill. Edmund is fatally shot by one of the strikers. Before arriving on the scene of the strike. Edmund says to his wife: "Al1 1 am certain of is that I am doing what is in line with the logic of evolution"(303). Clis own purposelessness in the face of the "logic" of the mill is marked by the narraior. who descnbes the death of
Edmund as "*ananticlimax"(321). The irony of the machine's displacement of the genealogical line is ampiified by the fact that the flour produced by the mil1 is a sign of human fecundity with biblical resonance. Sam's realization thar he pocsesses 'the responsibility for making the mill a blessing or a curse to mankind(60) echoes the language of Genesis, both in terrns of the curse of labour that is invoked against Adam
(Gen 3: 17-1 9) and, more importantly. in terms of the blessing of the harvest that marks the post-flood covenant between God and Noah's family (Gen 8:22).
The breach of the geneaiogical plot signals Grove's disavowal of his doctrine of the "chain of generations," which is also reflected by the novel's nanative interruptions.
Tobin's idea of the "genealogical imperative" seems pertinent here in that both the discontinuous family Iine and Grove's depiction of the son's defiance of the father are anticipated by the fractured timelinc and haphazard ordenng of events; according to
Tobin's scheme. The Master of the Mill is anti-genealogical. Even in this serviceable application. however. the limitations of the SCheme are apparent. ln the fint place, the
"genealogical impentive*' is either controlling the temporal structure or it is not and. in the face of thc modem and postmodem novel. it is not surprising that the imperative usually fails. Tobin herself acknowledges that "neither irreverence nor re flexivity is compatible with the forma1 imperatives of genealogy"( 195). as the fragmentation and discontinuity cornmonly associated with postmodem plot construction undermine the authority of originating events. Tobin's scheme is unable to comprehend the genealogical plot that does not "[unfoldl obediently"(63) unless its structural discontinuities correspond to the portraya1 of familial discontinuity. However. rvhereas Tobin is exclusively concerned with the success (or othenvise) of the "genealogical imperative." 1 am interested in the genealogical plor itself. especiaily the plot which has the potential to be concurrently disobedient and continuous.
Tobin's focus on the issue of structural linearity dso keeps her from considering other features of the genealogical plot. In Genea1o.w and Fiction in Hardv. Tess O'Toole contends that a novelist such as Thomas Hardy "does not simply use genealogical material as the subject of his fictions; he also shows how genealogical patterns are subject to fictive interventionsY(l1). OœTooleendeavors to "refine the cntical framework through which we articulate the relationship between genealogy and narrative"( 14). Through her examination of Hardy's concem with the fabrication of farnily alliances, the individual's confrontation with ancestry. as well as the repetition of familial experience. O'Toole enlarges the available cntical apparatus for analyzing the genealogical plot far beyond the framework fixed by Tobin. O'Toole's analysis emerges from her poinr that. although the
"familiar metaphon equating geneaiogy and fiction most commonly link genealogical process to control and order [. . -1. in Hardy's fiction. genealogy is habitually linked with ambiguity"(l8). While O9Tooledoes make energetic use of arguments by various narratologists. such as Peter Brooks and Ross Chambers. her study derives from the close examination of Hardy's own work. While her perception that "genealogy and narrative appear to be the most compatible of systems"(l25) is certainly more generative than
Tobin's correlating of genealogy with temporal linearity. O'Toole does not e ffectively propose a methodology for investigating the topic of genealogy in literature."
Following O'Toole, it is my project to develop a poetics of genealogy that will be able to critically account for both the thematic preoccupations 2nd the structural operations ofeven the most "disobedientw'genealogical plot. It is my intention to delineate the range of organizing princi ples that control the genealogy. making it possible to more full? examine any number or variety of genealogical plots. My mode of analysis derives thus from the structuralist engagement with the arrangement and function of literary elements. especiaily narrative elements. although 1 am equally concemed with how and why particular arrangements reveal their inadequacies in the face of certain subjects. My exploration of the genealogical plot as a narrative system will progress to a discussion of how the traditional system is subject to political andor aesthetic transformation. In particular, 1 am interested in how Canadian women authon have confronted what 1 will establish as the features of the conservative genealogical plot.
In the absence of an explicit framework for investigating the topic of literary genealogy. the second part of this introduction will be devoted to developing a poetics of genealogy based on a close reading of Genesis. The prominence of the toledoth lists, those genealogical rosters that employ the "begat'? formula indicates Genesis as a usefùl narrative mode1 from which to establish the features of what 1 will cal1 the *'conservative0* genealogy. As 1 will show. the consemative genealogy is most fùndmentally defined by its appeal to stability: many of its other characteristic features. such as its supposed coniinuity and/or separateness from outside influence. derive from the cenval conservative fiction that the family plot is stable.
The third part of the introduction will introduce and provide a critical context for the three contempotary novels by Canadian women that are the focus of this study:
Disaowarine Moon Cafe by SKY Lee. Fall On Your Knees by Am-Marie MacDonald, and Barbara Gowdy's The White Bone. The genealogical plot has been a topic of interest to Canadian women witers at least since Adele Wiseman's The Sacrifice. and through the work of Joy Kogawa. Other recent genealogical tales by women authors. aside f'rom the three highlighted in this study. include Carol ShieldsgThe Stone Diaies. Bonnie
Burnard's A Good House. Dionne Brand's At the full and change of the moon and
Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin. This fascination of women authoa with the genealogical tale. together with my own desire to explore its significance, is related to the fact that for conternporary Canadian iiterature, as Donna Paimateer Pennee suggests, "The question of 'where is here?' has been supeneded by the question that Frye thought [. . .] was less important, namely, 'who am I?' Or rather, the question of 'where is here?' has turned out to be inseparable from the question 'who am I?"Y203). In the genealogical plot, individual identity is explored within and against a system or context. As 1 will demonstrate below, the contemporary focus of the topic of genealogy fits into the trajectory of fiction writing by Canadian women which is consumed by how the "1" belongs "here." and how the conception of space relates to subjectivity.
The genealogical plot's thematizing of the individud's interaction with context is mirrored in my own way of conceiving this project as an inquiry into the conventions of a narrative system. In What is a Canadian Literature. John Metcalf states that "A [literary or critical] tradition is dive. various. densely populated. intricate. 11 is interconnected [. . .].
It is like a farnily which is constantly expanding yet managing somehow to contain and sustain contradictory personaiities and disparate aims and ambitions"(40-4 1). The novels that 1 have chosen as my corpus ail challenge particular features of the conservative genealogical plot and. in doing so. attempt to radically redefine how family is determined.
Yet. the refashioning of the farnily tree is always rooted in the desire to sustain even the most dificult "interco~ections.~'This project's emphasis on the encounter between tradition and transformation has emerged from a concem with feminist literary theory that supplernents rny strucniralist mode of inquiry. My choice to focus on women nnting gnealogy derives. in part. from what might be considered a self-evident interest in exploring how the patriarchal premise of the conservaiive Biblical ger,ealogy is challenged. In the wnrks that 1 have selected to andyze. however, this challenge is grounded in the encounter with the traditional genealogical plot, whereby the revisioning of family entails not the rejection of any particular familial conception but rather a complex series of recuperations. In my conclusion, 1 will elaborate on how recent genealogical plots by Canadian women, such as those by Lee, MacDonald, and Gowdy, may be considered as part of the evolution in feminist literature that concerns itself more with context than with subject.
Genealogy and Genesis
Most of the existing criticism on the topic of the genealogical plot focuses either on the work of British authon or on the family sagas of the Amencan South. ln Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Centurv British Literature, Sophie Gilmartin suggests that
"an exploration of the fictions or myths which surround pedigree, and of pedigree's place within fiction. reveals much about Britain's mieties over. and defence of itself as. a unified nation"(4). Robert O. Stephens also notes the interaction between the genealogical plot and the concept of nationhood. this tiine as the attendant condition of tribal self- fashioning in the southem United States: "With place as the l~cusof fmily memory. writen of family sagas in the South tumed to the family Bible as the mythic framework for interpreting remembered or reîreated experience"(3). Within a Canadian context. however. the anïiety over the idea of nation is accompanied by representations of the intempted genealogical Iine. as is reflected in the image of Rudyard Clark's account- book in The Master of the Mill.' On the one hand. Sam recognizes that it is -'a vaiuable document throwing light on the genesis of the mill. Since the mill bade fair to become a great institution of national and even international importance, the document shouid be preserved in the archives at Ottawa"(66). On the other hand, the account book's documentation of Rudyard's lucrative falsif@qgof inventory records is what makes Sam,
"the son. the slave of the millV(94);Sam's act of buming the account-book - this document of "genesis"- haunts his later years. so that even sixty yem aller the fact, "he reached for the account-book, disconcerted because it was not there0'(99).
Gilmartin and Stephen's comrnents. as well as various images in Grove's novel. indicate that any discussion of'literary representation of genedogy in Western literature must go back to the beginning. That is. it must consider the book of Genesis. Readen steeped in recent critical theory may expect a Foucauldian approach wherever the term genealogy appean. and it is thus necessary to address why this study does not emanate from such an approach. In her introduction to and Literature. Lee Quinby enurnerates the ways in which the study of literature and Foucauldian genealogy intersect:
Genealogy seeks to demystiQ the pieties that continue to haunt literature
by searching out the way 'zbe literary" is delineated, how these texts are
produced and distributed. It attends well to the altemations of the field.
highlighting modes of resistance within boih Iiterature and literary
criticism and theory. (xi-xii)
As Quinby's remarks make clear. Foucault's use of the terni "genealogy." as it appean in
"Nietzsche. Genealogy. History," and as it is employed by literary critics. does not actually refer to the topic of family history or lineage. Rather, Foucauldian geeneealogical analysis refen to a historiographie methodology that does not depend on metaphysics
(1 55) and "rvill never confuse itself with a quest for [. ..] 'origins"'(l44). As C.G. Prado asserts, "The heart of the concept is that there are no essences to be discemed behind historical developments and none that explain why things are as they are0'(33).As opposed to traditional history, genealogical analysis produces what Foucault calls
"effective" history. Effective history is charactenzed as '~beingwithout constants"(l53); as focusing on "those things nearest to it - the body, the nervous system. nutrition. digestion, and energies"(lS), and as "[aflïming] knowledge as perspectiveF(156). In other words. Foucauldian genealogical analysis is concemed with those details that undermine a pre-determined view of history. These and other characteristics of
Foucauldian genealogical malysis will become pertinent in the third part of my introduction. especially as they make up a theoretical lens through which to examine various challenges to the heritage of Canadian mappings of family histones.
For the purpose of developing a general literary poetics of gencalogy. however,
Foucault's methodology is less useful han a close reading of tÎÎe book of Genesis. Not only does the book of Genesis contain ac~zialgenealogies. but its status as a narrative text allows for the examination of such thematic and structural properties as may be compared to other narrative renderings of the Family history plot. A pnmarily Foucauldian approach to the genealogical plot might examine how the family history both relies on and conceais particular ideological suppositions. My narratological approach is more imrnediately concemed with first detemining the general features of the genealogical narrative ?stem before rnoving to an analysis of how that system is challenged. It is. therefore. more appropriate to begin with a narrative model.
The genealogical lists of Genesis forni the primary structural and thematic frarnework for the book. and their locus is the history of the fouading of the nation of Israel. However, as George W. Coats argues. the stories of the patriarchs do not provide the Unpetus for the genealogical lis& of Genesis: "The patriarchs emerge in the middle of history documented by the toledoth formulas. not at the beginning of history, not even at the beginning of Israel's history"(30). At the fundamental level, the historj of Genesis is the history of creation and of God's fint utterance to hurnanity: "Be fiuicful and multiply0*(Gen1:28).6 Despite the fact that, grammatically at lez& this phrase is a cornrnand, Judeo-Christian tradition understands it as one of the most fiindamental of
Godosblessings.' As Claus Westermann asserts, '*Humanity is the creature that extends the power of the Creator's blessing into the realm of time [. . . which] is realized in the succession of generations"(40).A poetics of genealogy, 1 contend. must not only consider the function of the generationai plot as it relates to issues of pedigree and nation but also againsi a deep narrative structure of blessing versus non-blessing. Further. such a poetics must differentiate between the two types of genealogical lists that appear in Genesis. the first of which marks a linear sequence frorn father to tint-born son and the second of which follows the diverging branches of a family. Finally, it is necessaq to explore the fictional representation of genealogy not only as a literary theme but also in ternis of form. paying special attention to aspects of focalization. character-effects and temporal sequence. as well as to the significance of the sel f-reflexive narrative.'
In his introduction to Genesis: A Practical Comrnentarv. Westermann notes that the two types of material that make up the primal history section of Genesis (chaptea 1-
1 1) are "narratives and lists. The lists are the genealogies in chapters 4.5. 10. and I 1.
Against the regular. invariable flow of these genealogies. the narratives of particular events stand out in relief"(1). Westermann's terminology implies a hierarchical relationship between the two types of material based on iheir respective textual duration, whereby the summary of genealogical tables is merely a background for the various narrative scenes. This privileging of scene over summary is echoed by Paul Ricoeur during his discussion about the mediation of plot by mimesis? (configuration):
an event must be more than just a single occurrence. It gets its definition
from its contribution to the development of the plot. A story, too. must be
more than just an enurneration of events in serial order; it must organize
them into an intelligible whole [. . .]. In short, emploiment is the operation
that draws a configuration out of a simple succ~:sion. (2: 65)
Ricoeur's demand for sorne sort of "organization" recalls the critical distinction regularly made between narrative chronology and causality as demarcated by E.M. Forster's ofi- quoted daim that " 'The king died and then the queen died' is a story. 'The king died and then the queen died of grief is a plot"(87). Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan contends that
"temporal succession is sufficient as a minimal requirement for a group of events to form a story [. . . as] causality can often (always?) be projected ont0 temporality"(l8). Meir
Sternberg's comment5 are even more specific: "chronological sequence is the backbone of the Bible's narrative books [. . .], for the Bible to communicate is to chronologize the surface itself. the narrative as well as the narrated sequence of events '(82). For the unique literary fom of the biblical geneaiogy. then it is necessary that we read the phenomenon of '-simple succession'' as empiotment, especially as this form is then projected ont0 other literq genres. A close exmination of the configuration of the toledo~hforrnulas themselves. as well as their interaction with the narrative scenes of Genesis, reveais the way in which their meaning is constituted by an emphasis on seriality. In The Torah: A Modem Commentarv, W. Gunther Plaut remarks on the significance of the phrase eleh toledorh, which first appears at Genesis 24. and which he translates as "Such is the story'(29):
[Eleh tofedoth] is elsewhere in Genesis rendered as -*Theseare the lines of
. . ." (i.e., the genealogy), making descent a keystone of biblicai history.
[Eleh toledoth] serves as a heading for the major divisions of Genesis and.
therefore, here too we should translate: "These are the lines of heaven and
earth." In later chapters we hear the lines of Adam. Noah. and the sons of
Noah (of Shem in particular); and further. of Terah (Abraham's father),
Isaac. and Jacob. (n 29)
Plaut's observation that the genealogical lists operate as forma1 "heaclhgs" for the book's primary narrative scenes is. of course. modified by the scholarly argument that the source material for the genealogies (the sotdled P-texts) is different from that of the scenes (the so-called J and E-texts). As Haut asserts. however. Ihe Torah as we now know it is essentially the repository of centuries of traditions which becarne One Tradition and One
Book0*(xxiii):this assertion accrues ever more force in light of the Bible's status in the
Western literary tradition. James Norhnberg asserts that the relationship between the genedogical Iists and the narrative scenes of Genesis is reciprocal, and that "Genealogies lead up to stones of important charactea. and issue from them. The stones exist to introduce the genealogies. as much as the genealogies to introduce the storiesF(166). II may be argued. however. that the prominence and repetition of the trokdorh formulas as functional "headings" enact a reversai of the hierarchical relationship of scene and surnrnary suggested by Westermann. Whereas the representation of an unintempted he of descent indicates the successful realization of God's blessing, the interpolated scenes mark points of narrative cnsis that may obstnict genealogical continuity.
The first such point of crisis occurs at Genesis 4:2. with the story of Cain and
Abel. As Westermann notes, '-the genealogy begins in verses 1-2 and continues in verses
17-26; the narrative of Cain and Abel (W. 2-16) has been inteipolated. nius, this
narrative is an expansion inserted into a genealogy, a common feature in Genesis"(3 1 ).
What Westermann does not state is that the interpolated story of Cain and Abel poses a
threat to Adam's line of descent, as his eldest son is proved by God to be a murderer.
Funher. the "continuation" of the genealogical line that Westernam observes is actually
the list of Cain's descendants, the significance of which 1 will retum to later as it relates
to the issue of Iinear versus diverging genealogies, but whose reheanal does not solve the
cnsis in Adam's line. The genealogy of Adam is ultimately reestablished at Genesis 4:25.
with the birth of Seth. At Genesis 5:1, the tdedorh series is reinitiated. this time without
any mention of Cain or Abel, and is presented through ten genentions without
interference until the story of Noah. It is interesting to note that, along with the story of
Cain. many of the narrative interruptions found in Genesis, including the story of Abram
and Hagar (Gen 16: 1- 1 6). Jacob and Esau (Gen 25:24-27:16), and Joseph (Gen 37: 1 -
46: 7) depict the favouring of a younger son over the eldest. As Plaut remarks. "While the
naturd order of birth was believed [in early biblical days] to have divine approval. God
was not bound by it in an automatic relationship [. . .]. Many of Israel's great men came
to their prominence because God took them out oftheir inferior natural position: Joseph.
Ephnim. Moses. and David a11 were second- or laie-barn*'( 175). in the story of Jacob and
Esau. the preference for the younger son differs from previous storïes. because it is Jacob himself who trickc Esau into selling his birthnght (Gen 2529-34). Jacob's usurpation of
Esau's position operates as another point of crisis within the genealogical narrative, as is reflected by the story of the famine in Gera which irnmediately follows the story of
Jacob's tnck (Gen 76:l-35). Further, there is a repetition of the trkking motif at Gen
27529. when Jacob fools his father into giving him Esau's blessing, which indicates that this particular crisis has a greater degree of moral and fùnctional complexity than the privileging of Seth or Isaac. Instances of this sort of genealogical fabrication. whereby mernbers of the family will manipulate conditions so as to more directly participate in the energy of the genealogical blessing, are prevdent in the contemporary Canadian eenealogical plot and are generally problematic. C
hequally prevalent motif in Genesis is that of the barren wornan. as this is another point of genealogical crisis that uill provoke the interpolated narrative scene. The toieduîh formula which begins at Gen 1 1 27, "This is the genealogy of Terah." is intempted by the remark that '-Sarai was barren: she had no child?'(Gen 1 1 30). The remark functions as a point ofdeparture for various scenes, including Abnm's sojourn in
Egypt. his inheritance of Canaan, as well as the story of Abram, Hagar and the binh of
Ishmael. The moa significant and copious narrative scenes which follow the notice of
Sarai's infertility. however. detail God's several blessings and promises to Abram. from
'-1 will make ?ou a great nationW(Gen12:2), through God's forewarning that *your descendants dlbe strangers in a land that is not thein. and will serve. and they wiH afflict them four hundred years"(Gen 15: 13, to the assignent of the covenant of circumcision and renaming of Abram and Sarai as Abraham and Sarah (Gen 17:9-15).
PIaut notes that "The Bible relates several instances of barrenness, induced and then eliminated by God's will (e.g., Rachel, Hannah). This theme nkes the late appearance of the first child (always a son) especially importantW(n1 1 1). Again, the important factor in the motif of the barren women is the presence of "God's will"; as Norhnberg suggests. the story of Sarai is merely a typological extension of the story of creation: ''God3 intervention in the barrenness of Sarah has the most awesome precedent in God's original mercy to non-entity [as depicted in Gen 2:4-9ITT(168).In fact, when God visits Abraham in his tent to proclaim that "Sarah your wife shall have a son9'(Gen 18: 1O), Sarah herself is standing oirtside of the tent: in the story of her own body she is but a rninor player?
In her own analysis of the biblical motif of the barren woman, Esther Fuchs makes the convincing argument that it is "motivated by the Bible's patriarchal iirleology. which seeks to natunlize and legitimate man's political dominance0'(128). She points out that
The text makes it clear that the postmenopausal and barren Sarah conceives not because of her own conduct but thanks to YHWH's interest in Abraham0'(133). Overall, the biblical annunciation-type scene denotes "that wornan has no control ai al1 over her reproductive potentiaï-(1 35). While I agree with Fuchs' analysis, 1 am interested in detemining what this motif. especially as it relates to the theme of genealogy, signifies beyond the limits of the Bible's patriarchal ideology. It is rny contention that the deep nanative structure informing the motif of the bmen woman. as well as the motif of the younger son's inheritance. is detectable in a wide range of texts concemed with genealogy, and that the examination of this deep structure wil! rcgister any ideological shifi. The prevailing concem throughout the book of Genesis is that the line of descent is c~ntinued.'~despite a crisis in the pattern of prirnogeniture. and in spite of the initial crisis of barremess. WKle in the case of Genesis, it is God's will or blessing that ensures continuity. any rendering of the genealogical plot will depend on some notion of blessing versus non-blessing at the level of the deep narrative structure (whereby a blessing will provoke one son of narrative and non-blessing will provoke another sort).' ' Although this blessing will not necessarily be a matter of God's wili, thete is ofien a sense of the supematural. or of something "beyond human control" that is allied with the operations of blessing. In cornparison, the operations of cursing, however much they also purportedly depend on othenvoridly forces, are generally summoned by a human king. The narrative that is motivated by the operations of non-blessing reveals an absence or lack of the superhuman. or at Ieast a challenge to its absolute power.
Iwill now clarify further my use of the tem 'blessing." In the first place,
"blessing" is a gerund: it is a verb acting as a nom. Like other verbals, the gerund is not able io opente as a predicate by itself but cails for an additional performative or assertive verb in order to function. In other words, the action that is containcd within the word ggblessing"requires the force of an auxiliary action: a blessing nust be invoked or bestowed from "outside..' Further, the biblical Hebrew rooi for the word blessing, b-r-k, is also the root for the word "knre," which marks the association between the operation of blessing and the act of obeisance or '*kneeling."" Thus, it is not merely an "boutside"force that prompts the blessing but one that cornes from "above." There is direction in a blessing: like a genealogy. a blessing descends. The blessing duplicates the form of the genealogy in mother way. in that it is also a transfer. and entails conveyance and continuity. Finally. although the blessing is generally regarded as a gift, if we are to use the book of Genesis as a rnodel. it is clear. rather. that the blessing is an injunction: the recipient of the blessing is irrevocably bound by its ternis. As suggestcd above. the deep narrative structure of blessing operates in coincidence with the workings of the cune, which perveris the features of the blessing, and in tension with the operation of non- blessing, which registers an absence of, or challenge to, these features.
Canadian examples of these various deep structures at work include such novels as Hugh MacLennan's Barorneter Risina, in which the force of nation is associated with
Godosblessing. as reflected in an eariy scene which juxtaposes Neil's observation of the
Crimean monument with the words of a hymn: "God of our fathers, be the God of their succeeding nce"(9). It is this force of nation that necessitates the renewal of the family compact arnong Neil. Penny and their daughter Jean. in What's Bred in the Bone by
Robertson Davies. the blessing that informs and controls the story of the Cornish genealogy is that of Francis Cornish's artistic gifi. A novel such as Wild Geese by Martha
Ostenso reveals a battle between the workings of blessings and curses. both in Amelia
Gare's desire to erase or outwit the taint of "bad blood" in her farnily and in the fortunes of the Gare's fm.Finally. 1 would argue that the most suiiable way of reading the genealogical plot of The Master of Mill is in tenns of its exhibition of a deep narrative structure of non-blessing; the lot of the Clark family, fat from being govemed by an outside force of a blessing (or even of a curse). is merely contiguous with the cold logic of the miII,
My poetics of genealogy now includes such qualities as descent (direction), asfer (conveyance/continuity).and injunction (binding). What this apparatus does not yet contain is a way to distinguish between the two types of geneaiogical lists that appear in the book of Genesis. or that takes into account some of their formal properties.
Westermann describes the genealogical list as "a unique literary form consisting of one constant and one variable elementY(40).In the genealogy of Adam (Gen 5: 1-32), for exarnple, the constant element is the formula "And [blank] lived [blank] yean, and begot
[blank]. After he begot [blank], [blank] lived [blank] years, and begot sons and daughten.
So all the days of [blank] were [blank] years; and he died." Westermann asserts that this formula, together with variable narnes and numbers which occupy the blanks, '-fom[s] the basis of human history: the invariable creatureliness and its ever-changing historical expressions"(40). O'Toole3 discussion of the interaction between genealogy and narrative provides another interpretation of this pattern: "The operation of genealogy is perceptible through the instances of continuity and variation that mark the relationship of ancestor to descendant, simultaneously Iinking the two and distinguishing them"'( 125).
AAer having established the tension between deep structures of blessing/cuning versus non-blessing, a poetics of genealogy must also take into account the tension between repetition andior change as technical features of the story. O'Toolegs study of Hardy concludes that the instances of repetition found in his work result in a condition that she labels "narrative jarnming [. . . which] occurs when the narrative reaches an impasse. when a meaningiül degree of change within it or movement outward is no longer possible"(l33). For O'Toole. the technical feature of repetition is closely comected to
Hardy's concem with the theme of doom. whereby a character such as Jude is '-doomed to repeat both his ancestors' experience and his own prior experienceoœ(?.l).However. repetition may also operare in service of narrative expansion rather than dissolution; in a novel such as Adele Wiseman's The Sacrifice. the repetition of Abraham that is projected ont0 the figure of his gandson Moses saves the family lrom physical and spintual disintegration. The genealogy of Adam is the primary type of genealogical pattern. The vertical genealogies that connect Adam through Noah to Abraham in Genesis, and that connect
Abraham through David to Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, represent the way the narrative of the Bible, despite its wandenngs, is rhetorically focused on the chronicles of a single family (the so-called "chosen" line). Particularly in the Hebrew Bible. however, there are occasional rehearsals of other farnily lineages. such as the genealogy of Cain or that of Esau. Nohmberg describes the objectives of the two types of lists: "the genealogical imperative has two sides: the imperative to increase and multiply: and the imperative to divide and incorporate and become genetically distinct"( 163-64). He continues that "ln both lists the issue is survival"(l72). Nohrnberg's differentiation between the "patrilineal. and ethnic"(17 1) lists. however, does not take up the question of how the separate axes interact with the issue of survival, or what kind of survival is implied or ensured by each list. To get at this problem. it is uscful to espiore Sternberg's narratological analysis of sirnultaneity in biblicai narrative sequence. Sternberg outlines the hvo principal modek for the Bible's strates of "running ahead:" "One is integrative and sequential. working for plot continuity. The other is cognitive and relational: the centering of interest. attention and judgement"(l14). Instances of "running ahead" as a fiction of plot continuity occur in the vertical genealogical lists. such as the rehearsai of
Adam's line at Gen 5: 1-32. As Stemberg points out, as far as the diegesis of this chapter goes. Adam "dies" before any of his ancestors Iive (1 15), Adam's death having been recounted in the text at Gen 5:s. Stemberg continues:
Ln the action itself. as a quick reckoning establishes?Adan with his
lifespan of 'nine hundred and thirty years' lived not just to see his grandson Enoch but even his great-great-great-great-great-greatgrandson
Lamech, bom 874 years afier Creation and. in ternis of textual sequence,
as late as verse 25 [. . .]. But the early notice of death serves to give each
item dong the list, as well as the list of items, its own continuity and
wholeness. (1 15)
Further, the strategy of "running ahead" is also employed to mark "the steady altemation between the chosen and nonchosen line7'(Stemberg 1 19). Signi ficantly, once the running ahead of the "nonchosen" genealogies, such as those of Cain, Ham. or Ishmael. have ken represented, they are "never to be revisited"( 119).
The vertical -'patrilinealwlists, then. emphasize sequence, continuity, and wholeness, while the "ethnic" or horizontal lists exhibit such characteristics as relationality. dispersai. and s~s~ension.'~Further, a close reading of the two types of genealogical lists reveals that, whereas during the 1.056 years between Adam and Noah. the inventory enurnerates only the nine fint-bom sons (Gen 5:1-32). the geneaiogies of
Noah's sons include the narnes of at least sixty offspring, not to mentim a variety of lands and kingdoms (Gen 10: 1-32}. In addition. the geneaiogies of Noah's sons make no mention of any penon's life span. which diminishes the sense that the family is moving through time. Thus. while the patrilineai or vertical list focuses on the few. the second mode1 of genealogy, which may be regarded as a horizontal expansion. is able to accommodate the rnany. As is the case for the book of Genesis, the majority of literary pnealogical plots concentrate on the avis of the few. Such plots are often occupied with the paradox that the endeavor to keep the family line restricted. an enterprise that is generally conflated with the desire to keep the line pure, exposes it to the threat of annihilation. However, as 1 shall observe during my analysis of a number of recent novels by Canadian women, renderings of the horizontal genealogicd avis may be deployed as a form of resistance to this repressive paradox.
In establishing the various feaiures of a poetics of genealogy, from its deep narrative structure and formal altemations between repetition and change to the characteristics of its two axes, I have delineated a methodology for reading the map of a
Farnily plot. And while the genealogical map may be charted in space, it is important to bear in mind the relationship between the spatial qualities of the genealogy and its temporal manifestation in narrative. The geneaiogicai plot alwïys moves through time, and the examination of its operation is grounded in the exploration of temporal story aspects. As Ricoeur asserts, "time becomes human time to the exient that it is organized afier the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portnys the features of temporal experience"(1: 3). On the one hand. the genealogical plot is necessarily govemed by temporality, as is reflected by the highlighting of such siory aspects as sequentiai ordenng and rhythm. On the other hand. the customary privileging of temporal linearity is often problematized by wvay of structural and thematic renderings of simultaneity and cycles. Finally, it is worth recalling the nexus of meanings to which the Hebrew word. toledoth. refen: genealogy. history. no.. As this nexus suggests. the genealogical plot is comfortably occupied with chronicling the past and devising the future. My reading of Genesis, however, has indicated that the writing of the present is suggestive of crisis and interruption.It remains to be seen how contemporary
Canadian female authors write the genealogical present, and how their rewriting of the genealogical narrative map confronts the idea of crisis. Crisis Management: Caaadian Women Writing Genealogy
Towards the end of the first chapter of Sumival, Margaret Atwood outlines the arrangement of the book's subsequent chapten, stating that "Chapters Nine and Ten cope with two representative figures - the Canadian Artist, who is usually male, and the
Canadian Woman, who is usdly female9'(41). The irony of Atwood's distinction is that its appearance in 1972 coincides with a nsing tide of Canadian literature in which the
Canadian Woman is increasingly represented as an artist figure. Not only do many of
Atwood's own novels. in particular Ladv Oracle and Cat's EY~,take up the issue of the female artist, but the final artist figure represented in Chapter Nine of Survival is Alice
Munro's Del Jordan, whom Atwood describes as "functioning" and "plausible"( 193).
Lives of Girls and Women goes so far as to compare men3 writing with wornen's writing. In "Heirs to the Living Body," Uncle Craig's rnethodic composition of a history of Wawanash County, as well as his work on the family tree, is contrasted with the energetic and fragmented storytelling of Aunt Elspeth and Aunt Grace. Craig's techniques reflect a creed of objectivity:
To UncIe Craig it seemed necessary that the narnes of al1 these people,
their connections with each other, the three large dates of birth and
mariage and death. or the two of birth and death if that was al1 that
happened to them, be discovered, often with great effort and a stupendous
amount of worldrvide correspondence (he did not forget the branch of the
family which had gone to Australia) and written down here, in order. in his
O wn large careful handwrîthg. (26) On the other hand, the Aunts "told stories" (28); derthan describing their style, Munro depicts the gossipy tone of their overlapping dialogue, in which the two voices altemately blend together and reverberate off one another, and whose focus is the recollection of sensory detail (28-29). Del is initially irked to inherit Uncle Craig's manuscript, choosing to store it in the cellar where it is eventuaily ruined when the bsement floods (52). She becomes similarly disenchanted with the ?idiculously complicated language" of Auni
Grace and Aunt Elspeth (50). in the epilogw, however, Del attests to having ken the beneficiary of both her uncle's and aunts' approaches to story: "Voracious and misguided as Uncie Craig out at Jenkin's Bend, writing his history, 1 would want to write things dow [. . .]. And no list could hold what 1 wanted, for what I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thoughtT'(210).
For many of the novels written by Canadian women during the 1970s and 1980s.
the desire to tind an authentic voice is a dominant theme; likewise, much of the criticisrn
of the period focused on this issue. In Private and Fictional Worlds. Cod Am Howells'
study of Canadian women novelists of this period, she notes that "Many of these novels
have women wnten as protagonists engaged in a stniggle with language and inhented
literary conventions to find more adequate ways of telling about women's
experiences"(5). Howells initiates her examination of the portrayai of the femaie witer
with a reading of Margaret Laurence's noveiist figure. Morag Gunn:
Morag suggests the multiple huictions of fiction writing for women as a
way of creating the illusion of order out of the random contingencies of
experience. as a way of restructuring the pst, as a way of self-assertion
out of social or economic constraints. (29) From here, it is possible for Howells and other critics of Canadian women's writing to address a wide range of issues, including Laurence's strategy of identity formation based on a confrontation with the past, Atwood's feminist aesthetics that challenge patnarchal structures, Munro's exploration of the uneasy relationship between the minutiae of memory and the search for truth, and Joy Kogawa's re-telling of history. Further,
Howells' analysis is representative of another critical cornmonplace of the period, in that she likens '-the historical situation of women and of Canada as a nation"(2). She concludes that al1 of the novels discussed in her study are "responses to the pressures of colonial history and the contradictions wiihin a colonized rnentality where one's selp image is split between imposed traditional patterns and authentic experience"(1 84).IJ
This sort of conflation dtimately weakens both the investigation of women's witing und the topic of Canada's colonial past. as Smaro Kamboureli suggests in her review of
Private and Fictional Worlds. Kamboureli uses Frank Davey's tenn of "paraphrase" to describe the process by which Howells transfomis "fernale otherness into nationality"(174) and aslis: "What is to be gained for feminist writing by taking women3 fiction to be a metaphor for the old colonial amiety about Canadian identityY(l74)?
Davey himself addresses the problematic nature of the "women u Canada*' paradigm in
Post-National Arguments, in which he asserts that 'rhis identification leads to a monological construction of Canada as a resource-rich trading nation, and to minimal consideration of how women might contribute to Canadian polity"(211). What Howells' cornparison does suggest. however. is that one of the predominant concems of Canadian women's writing is a preoccupation with identity; as Mickey Pearlman declares in her introduction to Canadian Women Writina Fiction, "the issue of identity [is] the linchpin of Canadian writing by women"(4).
Finally, Howells' study cultivates an idea which is still of great interest to many contempomy critics, and which correlates to the concems of the topic of genealogy in
Canadian women's writing. She States that, "If we are looking for distinctive signs of
Canadianness in wornen's novels of the 1970s and 1980~~1 suggest that the most important of these may be found in the wildemess which provides the conditions of possibility for the emergcnce of Canadian women writers"(l2). In her summary of nineteenth-century women's response to the Canadian landscape, as well as in her analysis of witen such as Laurence. Atwood, Munro, Mian Engel and Kogawa,
Howells submits that 'The wildemess as the pathless image beyond the enclosure of civilized life was appropriated by women as the syrnbol of unmapped temtory to be transfonned through writing into female imaginative space"(l5). It is the image of ggunmappedtemtory" that is taken up by more recent critics of Canadian writing, many of whom have retumed to the images of exploration suggested by Northrop Frye's w°Conclusionto a Li terary History of Canada." and Atwood's Survival, especidly now that the dust of criticat contempt seems to have settled on those works. In Paths of Desire:
Images of Exolontion and Maooinn in Canadian Women's Writing, Marlene Goldman refers to the "growing nurnber of cntics and w-riters, including W.J. Knith, Germaine
Warkentin. John Moss, Shemll Grace, Rudy Wiebe. and [an MacLaren, to name a few.
[who] are tuming their attention to the importance of the legacy of exploration literature and its impact on the English-Canadian literary traditionY(8).Go1dman.s own study. along with Graham Huggan's Temtorial Disoutes, Helen Buss' Maminrr Ourselves. and ment articles by Antha Van Herk and Howells herself,"' are al1 part of a critical conversation which seeks to investigate how Canadian women writers "draw cornparisons between the plotting of language and the mapping of geographical ternin, and invoke images of exploration and cartography to signal their interest in recoding traditional representations of female identity"(Go1drna.n 3). My own use of the word "map" to descnbe the genealogical chart is intentional as, in the absence of a distinct tradition within and against which to investigate the writing of genealogy in Canadian literature, 1 am interested in situating rny own inquiry within a critical trajectory.
In his close reading of the map reading strategies employed by the protagonist of
Atwood's Surfacinq. Huggan comments on the necessity of her cartographie defamiliarizrition: the narratois father's map is 'wexposedas both a false guide and a false constmct: it purports to advise but actually dictates and distorts7-(50).Atwood's protagonist Iike rnany of the other "rnapbreakers"(l3) examined by Huggan, is responding to "a perceived need to revise. reformulate. and. in some cases. dismantle or discard spatial paradi-ms that have traditionally served the interests of patriarchal culture"(95). Goldman reiterates Huggan's position, stating that "In order to appreciate the impact of the protests launched by these fictions [. . .] it is crucial to consider the extent to which many of the novels advocate a radical reshaping of the mapmaking process a hich. in some cases. means abandoning traditional maps and mapmaking a1togetherm'(5).Otien. this '-radical reshaping" turns out to be either an unfinished process. as is the case for Audrey Thomas' "relentless portraya1 of a world in 'fl~~~"'(2I 1) in htertidal Life. or a necessap reinvention of the condition of wildemess. Goldrnan's assessrnent of Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historie confirms that while "the map of official history is king deconstructed, the novel is simultaneously reconstnicting (retrieving and inventing) a history of 'dark space'"(2 14). Thus, both Huggan and Goldman concur with
Howells*valorization of an "unrnapped territoryt as the appropriate site of female identity formation. While the idea of the inadequacy of certain maps is effective, the succeeding notion of *'unmapped temtory" relies on a rash erasure of centuries of history fiom the land. For the genealogical plot. the tracking of a retum to the condition of wilderness is inapplicable; while a poetics of genealogy allows for various ways of interpreting the genealogical chart, the chart itself is a foregone conclusion. in contrast with the "rnapbreakers engaged in the dismantling of a patriarchai system of representation" as well as the "mapmakers involved in the plotting of new coordinates for the articulation of (female) knowledge and experience"(Huggan 13, my italics), novels such as Disa~pcarineMoon Cafe. Fa11 On Your Knees, and The White Bone, depict various mapreaders. whose engagement with an interpretation of the already "charted temtory" of the genealogical map not only pays heed to the endurance of the chart but is predicated on a derp affection for its contents.
Lee. MacDonald and Gowdy signal their regard for Wiarted temtory" in a nurnber
of ways. While the ahrementioned critics cite "the wildemess" as a likely scene for
female mapping. the prologue to Disao~earineMoon Cafe depicts an emergence from the condition of wildemess that is necessary to the genealogical plot. The prologue is set in
the rnountains of British Columbia at the end of the nineteenth century. an archetypal
"Canadian wildemess" backdrop which begs the very son of mapmaking narrative that engages a11 manner of Canadian women witers, fiom Susanna Moodie and Catherine
Parr Traill to Atwood and Engel. Upon closer inspection, however, it becomes evident that Lee is questioning this preferred mode1 of "uncharted ter~itor~:"'~while to Gwei
Chang, the mountain landscape is initiaily a dangerous and opaque place, to Kelora it is sirnply the place where she lives. Gwei Chang's fim reaction to his surroundings is that of complete distress: -'He felt totally hemmed in. His eyes untrained to see beyond the wall of wildemess. his heart unsuited to this deep, penetrating solitude. Hunger had aircady made him hallucinate, afraid of the mstling leaves and whistling animals"(2).
Kelora's appearance out of this '~wilderness"establishes her in the hackneyed role of the
Indian guide: '-as if the barren wasteland around hirn had magically opened and ailowed him admittance. he followed her through dense thickets, up hills and down through ravinesg0(-l).As the prologue proceeds. however. Kelora's grasp of her surroundings is revealed to be a matter of experience as opposed to enchantment, and despite Gwei
Chang's inclination toward superstition ( 14), he too lems to negotiate the landscape and
"love the same mother earth( 1 4). Lee's disavowal of the characteristic deployment of the trope of "uncharted territory" is also revealed in her portnyal of Keiora's family, whose presencc in the region is deeply entrenched: "Her family on her mother's side was very wvealthy. oid and well-respected(7). Just as Gwei Chang's mission of collecting the bones of the Chinese who have died on the mountain bespeaks his comection to the
network of '-uncles" who carne before him, so too must the love affair between Kelora and Gwei Chang progrcss under the eyes of "her numerous aunts and female cousins.
watching without really looking, as if they were trying to get a sense of himg'(8). As the
analyis of the altemation between headings and narrative scenes in the book of Genesis
showed. in order for the genealogical narrative to commence. a system of descent must
already be established. and the condition of wildemess left behind. in keeping with this postdate. the first chapter of Disap-marine Moon Cafe takes place in the urban landscape of Victoria. and begins with Kae's rehearsal of "the intncate complexitiss of a family with chinese rootsgg(1 9).
While images of mapmaking and mapbreaking rely on some sort of break with tradition. the procedure of mapreading interacts with tradition. and enacts a reinterpretation of extant material. O'Toole points out that an "orientation toward the pst infoms the structure of Hardy's family history plots"( 11), and the same may be said for the novels that are to be addressed here. O'Toole echoes Tobin's notion of the
"genealogical imperative" in her deduction that "Hardy's genealogical plots are about experiencing one's place in an already written scriptT'(J7).resulting in both '-the exhaustion of narrative options" and 'Ihe discornfort of the narrative subject"(l8).
Conversely. the thematic foci of Disaooearine Moon Cafe, Fall On Your Knees, and
White Bone a11 seek to counter the idea of a necessarily coercive farnily history plot.
Their emphasis on undetennined modes of reading (and writing) the genealogical plot recalls an excerpt from Foucault's '-Nietzsche. Grnealogy. History." In contrast with
O0Toole'scritique of Hardy's plots. Foucault asserts that genealogy's "duty is not to demonstrate thai the past actively exists in the present. that it continues secretly to animate the present. having imposed a predetennined fom to al1 its vicissitudes~'(l46).
For rny examination of the differing ways in which Lee. MacDonald and Gowdy formulate an orientation toward the past. it is usehl to look at Foucault's account of genealogical analyis as a methodology for both understanding and dccumenting history.
In the first section of -'Nietzsche. Geneaioey. History." Foucault States that geeneealou "must record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous tinality: it must seek hem in the most unpromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history
- in sentiments, love, conscience, instincts"(1 39-40). Quinby reiterates the minute concerns of Foucauldian genealogy as it manifests itself in literature, noting that
"Genealogical fiction focuses on the rogue events, people. and places that are excised from conventional historicai and literary narratives"(xix). The interpolated narrative scenes in the book of Genesis solve the genealogical crisis either by "running ahead"(Stemberg 114) or by a process of containment. While the family of Cain enurnerated at Genesis 4: 17-24 is left as an unfinished story, the genedogy begi~ingat
Genesis 5: 1 lists only one child of Adam: Seth. Conirastingly, the work of Lee,
MacDonald and Gowdy is very much concemed with pursuing those "rogue events" that are initiated by genealogical crisis. Lee's Kae and MacDonald's Frances are bent on retrieving the incidents that have been temporarily removed from the official farnily history. and Gowdy*s Date Bed goes so far as to muse that .you are the sum of those incidents only you can test@ to. whose existence, without you. would have no earthly acknowledgement'*(271 ).
Quinby progresses frorn Foucault's statement that "the development of humanity is a series of interpretations"(l52) to her assertion that "Fiction that is genealogicd challenges the will to knowledge that freezes the pst by claiming its injustices and cruelties to be ordained or inevitable"(xix). In al1 three novels. the act of writing genealogy is compared and contrasted with the workings of fate. Disappeainn Moon
Cafe is the most explicitly occupied with the ideological impetus that directs the
recording of history and Lee highlights the cornplex process of historicai recovery in her
rewriting of the Janet Smith Case. a 1924 murder that had a large impact on Victoria's Chinese community. MacDonald is more interested in how predestination forecloses narrative options and seeks to counter the idea of fate with plots that celebrate paradox and thematize the comic miscarriage of anything ordained. In Gowdy's work, the doctrine of inevitability is associated with the dangers and inadequacies of certain types of faith.
The White Bone's formal status as a ruptured ailegory connects with Gowdy's portrayals of characten that are forced to reexamine a well-entrenched system of belief. Lady,
Foucault's comment that '~hefinal trait of effective history is its affirmation of knowledge as perspective"(l56) corresponds to the emphasis each novel places on the role of the storyteller. The conservative genealogical plot depends not only on the wholeness of its components. whereby the completion of a farnily member's story reflects the soundness of the system. but also on the soleness of the privileged line. Convenely. the disobedient genealogical plot is revitalized by the unsettled event and by the rivalry of intcrpretation.
As 1 mentioned above. the features by way of which the fiction of the conservative genealogical plot is upheld. including its supposed continuity. its relationship to injunction. its wholeness and/or its soleness. al1 aise from such a plot's most necessary fiction of genealogical stribility. In order to get at the particular ways in which Lee.
MacDonald and Gowdy confront the features of the conservative genealogical plot. it is useful to examine the placement of the genealogical chart as it appears in each book. The placement of the map not only relates to the type of nanative that is developed but also to the kind of tellers who inhabit these narratives. In Disamearine Moon Cafe. the map of the Wong Family is part of the prefatory material. situated adjacent to the novel's table of contents. The rnap begins with the union of Shi'atko and Chen Gwok Fai, Kelora's parents. and ends with Robert Man Jook Lee, who is the son GC Kae and her husband. Of course, it is the middle section of the map that contains the complications of the novel. as it documents the various affairs that occur in the farnily, as well as the hcestuous relationship between Morgan and Suzanne.
If the reader were so inclined. she or he could read the "plot'. of the story without reading a line of the main narrative; clearly. "plot" is not SKY Lee's predominant concem. Rather, Disappearing Moon Cafe is preoccupied with how it is possibie to tell a story in the face of a heritage of unwilling tellers. As Kae muses. -1 have a misgiving that the telling of our history is forbidden. 1 have violated a secret code"(180). In Chapter
Two. 1 will examine Disao~aringMoon Cafe's status as a "New Worid Myth." especially as the conventions of this type of historiographie metafiction contend with the conservat ive genealogical plot. The episodic structure and exploded timeline of the novel. together wiih the self-reflexivity of the narrative render visible such problematic aspects of the genealogical list as its concealed authorship. its implied stability and its inability to accommodate familial expansion. Disa~warineMoon Cafe charts the slowly intensiQing celebration of the idea of genealogical crisis. whereby the reluctant storytellen are ultimately absolved of guilt for their narrative trespasses. in particular their dabbling in the fabrication of farnily histocy. Finally. the plotting of the Wong genealogy is justaposed with the community's history in order to show how the chronicling of Chinese
Canadian history is also vulnerable to. on the one hand, a cultzral injunction toward silence and. on the other. various types of fabrication.
Unlike Disappeatine Moon Cafe, Fa11 On Your Knees does not include a genealogical map as a preface to the narrative; conversely. the details of the Piper- Mahrnoud-Taylor genealogy are held back until the very end when Mercedes' family tree
Iay bare al1 the pieces of the intricate puzzle. The status of the genealogical map as a solution to a punle is in keeping with the occult realm of alchemy that runs chroughout
Ann-Marie MacDonald's work. Her interest in spaces of limbo, the motif of the twin. and the function of the cune derives from her fascination with C.G. Jung's alchernical studies. While Lee's postmodem orientation toward the past undermines the pnstine authonty of the linear plot. MacDonald's handling of the hermetic genealogical plot offen a comic challenge to the stability of interpretation. The comic impulse towards temporary resolution. of the very sort Foucault envisions in his description of genealogical emergence. in which '*developments may appear as culmination, but [. . .] are merely current episodes in a series of subjugations"(148), is present in al1 of
MacDonald's work. operating as a mechanism for feminist revision. Further. whereas
Disaowaring Moon Cafe presents a series of reluctant storytellers. MacDonald's novel offers a motley of competing tellen whose stories not only embrace the past but actuaily transform the future. The act of storytelling is often equated with a type of talking cure. as is the case for Frances who -'needs to Say a story out loud to divine how much truth ms beneath its surface"(321 ). MacDonald's affection for Victorian literature witten by women is apparent in her use of the attic as a symbol of the Iim bichermetic space and in her predilection for plots which focus on sibling relationships. However. while Nina
Auerbach traces the inevitable dissolution of the sister compact in the novels of Jane
Austen and Louisa May Alcon. whereby "in order to survive economicaliy and emoiionally. the girls must scatter themselves in rnamage"(36). MacPonald's siblings remain both co~ectedand. to use Atwood's tem?"plausible." MacDonald's narrative focus is thus an exploration and recuperation of the horizontal axis of genealogy which challenges i ts designation as 'honchosen" and, there fore, lacking.
As Lee did in Disap-marine Moon Cafe, Barbara Gowdy includes the genealogical maps of the central elephant fmilies in the prefatory matenal of The White
-Bone. Gowdy's charts differ from the Wong family tree, as well as the chart ultimately produced by Mercedes, in that the mapping of the elephant families dspicts their pre- narrative state. While both Lee's and MacDonald's trees record the deaths of fmily members, the genealogical charts in The White Bone do noi make note of the numerous casualties in the narrative. nor do they register the binh of Mud's calf. Bolt. Thus,
Gowdy's orientation toward the past is ironic or apocalyptic; her narrative describes the diminishment of a family (or rather a series of families) as opposed to its growth. And while both Disa~pearingMoon Cafe and Fall On Your Knees come to celebrate instances of genealogical crisis. integrating cases of adultery. rape and incest back into the family history. the crises that occur in The White Bone threaten the story's very existence. Lee's reluctant tellers and MacDonaldosmotley function in stark contrast to the increasing absence of elephant tellen who are able to enurnerate the specics. rnythology and history; as Gowdy's narrator states in the novel's prologue. "They contain memory, yes. but what may not be so well knowvn is that they are doomed without it"(1). As an imperfect allegoy The White Bone is preoccupied with metaphysical concems. as chvacters such as Mud. Date Bed and Tall Time try to come to terms with the absurdity of faith in the face of annihilation. Gowdy actively engages with the deep narrative structure of blessing venus non-blessing that underpins the genealogicai plot. Once the will of the She is called into question. being becomes a matter of a will to memory. to narration and to love. as is reflected in Gowdy 's formulating of various Christ symbols. Gowdy's novel shares its impetus with other stories of survivors, in which the genealogical crisis produces the obligation for narrative: as Ricoeur declares. "We tell stories because [. . .] lives need and merit being nanated. This remark takes on its full force when we refer to the necessity to
save the history of the defeated and the lost. The whole history of sufiering cries out for
vengeance and cdls for narrative"(75). The Hebrew word roledorh, as it appears in Gen 5: 1, Gen 6:9, Gen 10: 1, Gen 11 : 10 etc., is translated as "genealoey" in the New King James Version of the Bible. The Hebrew word, however, refen to a complex of words that includes histoiy, story and lineage. and appears initially at Gen 2:4: This is the history of the heavens and the earth when they were created." The generic status of Over Prairie Trails is notable not only in and of itself, but also in ternis of Grove's fiaught deployment of fictional and non-fictional literary forms. W.J. Keith's classification of the work as "not so much a memoir as an imaginative recreation offering essential tmth rather than prosaic fact9'(37) is particularly usefûl. While the use of the phrase *'narrativeexperiments" may seem a bit hyperbolic in light of the writings produced during the modemist period, the structure of The Master of the Mill is enough of a departure from Grove's other works to be considered remarkable. Further, as Keith notes, "We should remember [. . .] that the Canadian novel was decidedly traditional at this time. and that Grove's methods here qualiQ as fictional pioneering"(5.l). '' In her epilogue. O'Toole does provide a series of thought-provoking questions that may. ostensibly, be asked of any genealogical plot: Towwh eextent are individuai identities detemined by prescnptive stories. including those prescribed by our family histories? Does our susceptibility to the seductiveness of story make the individual collusive in this process? What is the balance between the pleasure of narrative seduction and the pain of narrative coercion" ( 174)? For my analysis of SKY Lee. an author who is especially intcrested in the problem of the fabrication of farnily alliances. these questions will become pertinent. For the most part. however, these queries are ciiiefly applicable to the study of Hardy. 5 This correlation between the anxiety about nation and the intempted genealogical line also appears in such Canadian works as John Richardson's Wacousta . Marcha Ostenso's Wild Geese?and The Sacrifice by Adele Wiseman. Al1 quotations from the Bible will be taken from the New King James Version. unless othewise indicated, ' 1 will return to the significance of the grammatical structure of the phrase ,.Be fruitful and multiply" below. My narratological ternis correspond to those explicated in Mieke Balos Narratolopv. 9 Sarah's laughter at Godossuggestion that she will conceive (Gen 18: 12) is a fleeting challenge to the force of God's blessing, although God quickly makes it clear to her that her laughter is not nearly as powerful as his will, rhetorically asking: "1s anything too hard for the Lord?"(Gen 1 8: 14). IO It has been argued above that the phenomenon of succession gives the genealogical narrative meaning. but perhaps a better word for this phenomenon is continuity Tobin also uses this term. but her notion of continuity is actually more like pure succession. " 1 should state here that non-blessing is not the same thing as cursing. Cursing and blessing are very much two sides of the same coin, sharing a variety of characteristics. Non-blessing, on the other hand, implies the absence of blessing. l2 While the most obvious reference to the motif of kneeling is the title of MacDonald's novel, which most certainly refers, at least in part, to the relationship between a person and the object of her/his faith, images of knees and kneeling aiso run throughout Disapwarine Moon Cafe and The White Bone. in Lee's novel. for exampie, the fraught relationship between Mui Lan and her daughter-in-Iaw, Fong Mei, is often described in terms of one woman bringing the other "to her knees"(I 34). And while The White Bone's references to bended knees is necessitated by eicphant physiognomy, it is significant that the hymn Tai1 Time sings includes the lines, '~Withgladsome pulse and open throatl Down on my knees 1 falll To thank the She [. . .] Full in Her sight we lowly stand"(l36). l3 My use of the terms *verticalwversus "horizontal' to delineate the two axes of genealogy recalls Grove's image of the Langholm mil1 whose "horizontal alignment [is] titled into a vertical one"(168). thereby replacing the traditional vertical family line and depriving the millworkers of thcir livelihood. '" Other instances of this critical stance may be found in Loma Irvine's Subhersion, Wayne Fraser's The Dominion of Women, and in Marlene Goldman's recent study. Paths of Desire. 15 See Van Herk's "The Map's temptation or The search for a secret book" and "Mapping as Metaphor." as well as Howells' "Dismptive Geographies: or. Mapping the region of women in contemporary Canadian women's writing." l6 AS Karnboureli points out, *Orecent feminist theonsts such as Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray. and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have shown that. far from being 'a perfect image.' the wildemess as the 'colonized' space or the 'dark continent' of the female self remains full of traps for women. especially for women witen conscious of the forms and language they use"( 175). Golden Chaios and Narrative bots: SKY Lee's Disanaearinn Moon Cafe
'Knot derhot afler hot!' Sue cries. 'All this bondage we volunteer on ounelves! Untie hem! Untie me! Don't tie any more!' (Disa~waringMoon Cafe)
The a~nitybetween genealogy and fiction lies not only in the inherently narrative structure of the family line, but in the fact that genealogies involve a certain arnount of speculation, perhaps even fabrication. (Tess O'Toole, Genealop and Fiction in Hardv)
'No wonder no one mites family sagas anymore!' (Disapwarine Moon Cafe)
New World Ghosts:
As the narrator henelf declares, the short story "Safe Sex." included in SKY Lee's collection Bellvdancer, is a "st01-y of enchantment"(l30). It recounts the haunting,
initidly unwelcome but ultimately cherished. of a young Chinese Canadian woman named Naomi by a "lovesick presence"(l28). The "ghost" of Lee's story signifies in
various ways. In the first place. as the title of the story sugpsts. the ghost is associated with sexuality and the issue of contagion; the narrator is "sure that it would not have happened if l had stayed encapsulated in my own car. I picked it up somewhere between my mom's house and my place. From seats in public transit"( 12 1 ). Even derNaomi has
embraced the presence and given "it" the name Sissy. the sexuality that is represented by the ghost retains a fluidity of meaning. On the one hand. as the narrator explains, Sissy
"would have to be a woman because I am a woman [. . -1. Maybe al1 there is. is gentleness and understanding as 1 get to know myselr(l31). On the other hand. the haunting is a
sign of the narrator' s bwgeoning lesbian identity. as the ghost 's presence encourages Naomi to take note of a woman walking dong the seawall: "Sissy and 1 both agreed that the woman was shaped beautifully, with a womanly sway to dl her curves'y 132). Lee's concem with the topic of femde sexuality runs throughout Bellydancer, from her examination of the intricate sisterhood of exotic dancers in the iBeIlydancei' stories,
through her tale of a rniddle-class "white kid's" (150) encounter with the mernben of a
feminist literary collective ("Dyke Dollars"), to the final story in the collection, "Lesbians
and Other Subversives," which reintroduces readers to Naomi, who is now "giving
educational talks on being a lesbian to schooIgirls"(203). And while ir! Disappearing
Moon Cafe a sexual relationship is never explicitly established between Kae Ying Woo
and Hermia Chow, their mutual adoration is marked.'
The ghost in "Safie Sex," however. has other associations beyond sexuality. many
of which are also signi ficant in ternis of Lee's broader interests. The nurator's ahviety
about sexual contagion is augmented by her fear of mental contamination, as she declares:
"There's a lot of mental illness out there. 1 know because I see"(l22). After being
Followed home from the ferry by "it." Naorni holes up in her apartment to battie with
increasing feelings of insanity: "1 told myself again that 1 was not crazy and 1 could not
allow myself to be victimized by these illogical feelings"(t28). In Disap~earin~Moon
Cafe. madness is a lemale problem, and while Kae's description of Hcnnia as "crazy as la
liine"(2 16) is affectionate, the tendency towards "craziness" has darker implications for
the Wong women. Kae's desire for secret knowledge drives her "alittle cwo(l 2 1). and
die eruptions between Mui Lan and her daughter-in-law are increasingly demented. Mer
yet another of Mui Lais deranged verbal attacks on Fong blei. in which she '-drown[s]
her in a deluge of putrid accusations"(l36-37), Fong Mei chases her mother-in-law with a pair of scissors, "dragg[ingj her back with the strength of ten mad-wc>men9'(137) so that
Mui Lan may witness the mutilation of a marriage-bed quilt. Most significantly, the problem of madness is linked with Suzanne Wong, whose affair with her half-brother
Morgan, as well as the botched delivery of their child, leads to her suicide. It is Suzanne who condernns the entire Wong family as a "crazy house"(203). Lee's attention to the complex relationship between femaleness and madness, and the problematization of this relationship by issues such as social conditioning and modes of interpretation are indicated in "Safe Sex." Naomi's initial reaction to her haunting yokes a mental and a political resistance: Y am not insane or radical or feminist or anything like t.hat9(122).
Afier she accepts Sissy into her life, Naomi's interpretive abilities are altered. as when she finds henelf "browsing through sales bins of paperback romances. just because they were al1 so shiny and new and nice to touch. 1 am able to see their loveliness now. whereas before I wouldn't have notice&'( 130).
Finally, Lee's "story of enchantment" co~ectsthe particular ghost of female sexual and interpretive autonomy with the traditions of Chinese culture. Naomi's epiphanic moment of acceptance occurs when she has a dream:
1 was very young on a feast day [. . .).My mother, young again, had
dutifùlly placed the platter of sacrificed bird on a specially Iaid-out table in
the front room of our little home. So 1. witb cairn child's eyes. examined
evev inch of that table, because she told me that ancestors were sitting
there on the three chairs she had carehlly amged for them. and they
were visiting us. And 1 understood; 1 accepted their hushed presence at our
solemn Iittle altar. (129) As Naorni's dream continues. the feast day ceremony is replaced by the image of her young self standing '-in front of the class, where 1 tried to explain al1 these holiday miracles to some boys who snickered until the whole class giggled, and even the teacher, with a tiny silver cross pi~edto her lape!, laughed out loudV(l30). It is this drearn of her unseen connections to the past, which have ken repressed by the dominant culture, that allows for Naorni's metamorphosis. and for her encounter with tradition. Like her interest in female madness. Lee's represcntations of Chinese culture in Bellvdancer and
Disap~earinpMoon Cafe are complicated by. on the one hand. her interrogation of traditional. patriarchal Chinese values. and. on the other hand. a radical reawakening of cultural identity. The role of the ancestors in Disaornarine Moon Cafe reveals the novel's fraught examination of the past and the present, and its treatment of the genealogical plot.
Depictions of ghosts or spirits. especially as symbols of traditionai Chinese culture. also appear in such works as Jim Wong-Chu's poetry collection. Chinatown
Ghosts and Paul Yee's folktales. Tales fiom Gold Mountain. As Lien Zhao asserts,
Wong-Chu's poems represent a series of "dialogues between the pets and the Chinatown ghosts [which 1 help to recover the silenced lives of the Chinese labourer generation*(126). W'hether the ghosts are the "golden mountain men/ searching for scraps/ of memory"(2 1 ). or such half-defined personal ghosts as the "figure/having no legs or ~vaist."who is "able 10 corne and go/ like so many/ half rnernories"(38), their haunting of the living enacts a profound comection to the pst. In his poem. "Fourth
Uncie." Wong-Chu evokes some of the difficulties this enacting involves. the sort of difficulties addressed in the fint sections of Disavpearine Moon Cafe. as when the Wong
patriarch Gwei Chang. "an old man now." is shown to be at the mercy of mernories that "played with him"(5). or when Kae's mother "finally loosen[s] a Iittle of her iron grip on her emotions in order to reved a little of her past that she thought so shameful"(23). In
"Fourth Uncle." the speaker admits that he "feel[s] faf fiom the distant village relative who has "traveled and worked up and down this land," and who has corne back "to be burieci/ beside the others/ in the old chinese cemetery"(l9). The speaker's vision of his
"uncle" as "an old elephanti [returning1 to his graveo'(1 9): bespeaks the generational and cultural gulf that the narrator of **SafeSef manages mystically to overcome. but which agonizes so many of Lee's characten. In the story "Broken Teeth," for exarnple, the narrator buckles under the effect of the news that her grandfather has died:
But I had nçver met rny grandfather [. . .]. So why accuse me. Mother?
Yet. her guilt-ridden blow struck with the desired effect. This man died.
This man was supposed to mean something to me. And 1 didn't even
know. 1 didn't know because I was local bom. (4)
While there is no ghosl in "Broken Teeth." it is her mother's conjuring of memory that motivates a temporary bridging of the familial gulf for the nanator.
As with Wong-Chu's poerns. many of the stories in Yee's Tales from Gold
Mountain seek to confirm the experience of Chinese labouren in Wes:em Canada. As
Chao contends. "The collection which begins with 'Spirit of the Railway' and ends with
'The Revenge of the Iron Chink.' emphasizes the historical presence of the Chinese immigrants in pioneer projects of the CPR and the BC saIrnon industry'(55). The ghostly figures that appear in both of these stories. especially the father figure in "Spüit of the
Railway" who tells his son of "an accident here [that] killed many men"(lJ), are thus dso engaged in a "dialogue" of hiaorical recovery. Yee ailudes to the sort of generational and cultural gulf depicted in '-Fourth Uncle" and "Broken Teeth" in the tale "Forbidden
Fruit," in which Farmer Fong refuses to let a non-Chinese farmhand marry his daughter, a decision the nameless daughter figure silently accepts only to die of heartbreak. Yee's representations of ghost figures are often drawn from the Western tradition of folklore and myth. Chao reads "Spirit of the Railway" as an archetypal quest tale in which "Yee loads his character Young Chu's journey dong the CPR construction sites with two tasks: one. to look for his father and two. to cross the traditional mythological threshold in order to achieve maturity"(58). Other tales from the collection include such folklore motifs as
the exchange of twins ("Sons and Daughters). the talisman of love that does not age or
burn ("Ginger for the Heart"). the scattering of three sons ("Forbidden Fruit"). the
magical performance of a series of impossible tasks ("The Fnends of Kwan Ming"), and
even the agc-oid story. utilized by Chaucer in his "Pardoner's Tale." of greedy gold-
hunters who end up killing each other ("Rider Chan and the Night Rive?'). Yee discusses
his use of Western folklore motifs in an interview with Geoff Hancock:
When I wote those taies, 1 was not writing Chinese mythology. I have not
read a great deal of Chinese literature. My stones and tales came very
much out of BC's history of industrial capitalism. the labour force. racism.
the landscape. and the everyday folk culture that my people brought over
here. The stories also came out of reading Western folklore: Little Red
Riding Hood. Hanse1 and Gretel. Sleeping Beauty. Bock reviews have al1
comrnented on the Chinese tradition in my worL. but 1 was not witing in a
'Chinese' tradition: 1 was writing in a Western tradition. (Hancock 346) Yee's cornments emphasize the twofold narrative operation of his tales, whereby the conventions of Westem folklore defimiliarize the historical details included in the story.
While Chao rationalizes Yee's fonnula by arguing that "pedagogically, folklore is more accessible than history for readen of any age"(oJ), it should be noted hthis tales also embrace certain features of historiographic metafiction.
Linda Hutcheon defines histonographic metafiction as "fiction that is intensely. self-reflexive art, but is also grounded in historical, social, and political realitiesg'(l3), arguing that such fictions "ask us to rethink those conventions [of realism], this time as conventions. but also as ideological strategies"(21). Mile Yee's tales do not contain the sel f-re flexivity so prevalent in postmodern li terature. his use of Westem conventions does challenge their authority. In "Ginger from the Hem." such folkloric conventions as
Yenna's fidelity to her lover. her placing of a lamp in the window to syrnbolize her devotion. and even her occupation of sewing are interrogated in the context of the historical status of unrnarried Chinese women in early twentieth-century Canada. Yenna's lover leaves her. not to seek his fortune or banle a dragon. but rather because "He had borrowed money to pay his way over to the New World. and now he had to repay his debts. [. . .] he set off with miners hmaround the world. clutching gold pans and shovels"(36): her fidelity is particularly striking because "There were few unmarried women in ChinatouiC(36) due to restrictive immigration policies. and her work as a seamstress reflects her position as yet another Chinese labourer. Marie Vautier clarifies the sort of historiopphic metafiction that engages the conventions of folklore under the heading "New World MW9and "seeks to examine various ways in which [. . .] contemporary fictions strive to destabilize the accepted workings of traâitional myW(4). Building on Margery Fee-s use of the term "New World Myth to explore Howard O'
Hagan's Tav John. Vautier concentrates on novels that 'Yoreground their interest in histocico-political situations in a way that the nanators of Tay John do not7'(J7), and examines various tensions that the narrators of such novels produce:
Tension is first generated by the obvious conflict between historicd reality
and novelistic fiction, which draws the readers into the debate: 'did it
really happen this way?' Second. the narrators' drive tc their
version of the pst ('it happened this way') conilicts with their and our
awareness of a fundamental epistemological uncertainty about ever really
knowing the past. Third. a refusal of certain givens - such as history as
taught by the colonizing poweo. or God. or religion - conilicts with the
need to use givens in order to illustrate and then problematize their power
over the imagination. Fourth. the narrators' oven awareness of the
narrative process [. . .] conflicts with heir self-consciousness about its
limitations and the readers' awareness of the techniques being used in the
text. Fifth. the very term 'New World Myth' could be said to generate
tension [. . .], the term itself is oxyrnoronic; it deliberately introduces a
histoncal dimension into traditional notions of mythic universality. (34-
3 5)
The term "New World MyW may be used to describe Yee's double narrative formula but is even more pertinent to Lee's writing of the ghost story and her mixture of history and m-yth in Disappearine Moon Cafe. Further. Lee's utilization of the features of "New
World MyW allows her to trouble certain conventions of the conservative genealogical plot. most especially the concealed authonhip of the genealogy. the implied stability of genealogical details. and the genealogy's own potential for disrupting the lives of those it enumerates. Lee's own "destabiliz[ing ofj the accepted workings of traditional mythg-(Vautier4) operates in service of writing the genealogical plot in the face of problems of narrative structure (of telling); problems of narrators (of tellers), and problems of hifstory (of the told).
The Legend of Kelora:
In my introduction, 1 made a distinction between narratives of mapbreaking and mapmoking. of the sort examined by Huggan and Goldman, and genedogical nmtives that depict various modes of mapreading: nanatives that engage in an interpretation of the already "charted temtoryg'of the family plot. Further, as suggested by the development of a poetics of genealogy. such narrative maps should be read in tems of their relationship to foms of injunction. or foms of blessing versus non-blessing; in tems of their directional mis, and in terms of their degree of continuity. Thus. the affiirrnation/disniptionof an ordained impetus to. or the linear seriality of, the genealogy would signal its deep ideological structure. Yee's taie "Sons and Daughten" tells the story of wealthy Merchant Moy: "More than anything in the world. he wanted a tàmily. In particular. he wanted sons to carry on his family name"(l9). When Moy hem that his wife has given birth to hvin girls and is thereafter unable to bear any more children. he takes his daughters to China and sells them to a peasant family in exchange for their twin boys. When it comes time for Moy's sons to rnany. he sends them back to China in order to find wives and. as is to be expected in Yeegsworld of folktale, they end up marrying the abandoned twin girls. Back in Canada, the girls are unable to conceive and Moy reaiizes that "he alone had placed this curse on his chil&en9'(23). It is only after Moy's will is read, in which he divides his property between his two sons and stipulates that they must "give notice and change their farnily name"(23), that the girls becorne pregnant. The genealogical cnsis of the twin girls' temporq infertility is solved by annulling the patriarchal injunction, while the dividing of Moy's vast property signals a modest challenge to the vertical axis of genealogy. The successful births of two children at the end of the tale. *-oneboy. one girl." display a deep structure that approves of the redressing of gender inequalities but is unconcemed with other ideological issues. such as that of cIass.
The genealogical map in the prefatory matenal of Disa~oearineMoon CaFe begins with the farnily unit of Shi'atko. Chen Gwok Fai, and their daughter Kelora Chen. Unlike her lover and daughter. Shi'atko is not provided with birth or death dates and. as the prologue continues. it becomes clear that Shi'atko is not a single person but the name of a native clan (8). The woman that Gwei Chang initially takes to be Kelora's mother is actually an "old aunt who was visiting0(8),Kelora's birth mother having died several yean earlier. Further. Kelora's actual Mer is "a white man [who was] dying of a
festering gunshoi wouncï9(T)when Chen first arrived at the cabin. Chen's role in Kelora's
life is settled by her mother's family who refer to him as "Father of Little Kelorà0(7):his appearance out of the network of Chinese "'uncles" who live in the region is as randorn as the role Keiora's female relatives play in her upbringing. The inscribed fmily unit of
Shi'atko. Chen and Kelora is thus an act of interpretation that provides Kelora with
fictional geneaiogical roots. This prefatory interpretive act signals the prominence of the genealogical map in the Wong family nanative and the lengths to which they will go to uphold its fictions; at the same time, its clumsy, premature authority throws the novel's description of Kelora's untethered spirit into further relief. Lee's representation of Kelora as "a healer and a retriever of lost s0uls'~(7),her witing of Kelora in the context of a
"New World Myth," shows how one must read the novel's crarnped genealogical plot.
Kelora's story provides a legend for interpreting the pnmary narrative of Disap~earîng
Moon Cafe by way of its structural properties, its representation of voice, and its blending of history and myth.
As do Fall On Your Knees and The White Bone, Lee's novel begins with a prologue that considers the workings of memory. While both MacDonald's and Gowdy's prologues introduce certain themes that will run throughout their novels, and in the case of Fa11 On Your Knees. the central cast of characters, they are principally descriptive.
Strictly speaking. MacDonald's photographs of the dead and Gowdy's contemplation of elephant memory are not events of the primary plot. Their concems are diffuse: their levels of narration are indirect. Conversely. Lee's prologue, entitled "Search for Bones." is taken up with substantial elements of the plot, inciuding Gwei Chang's bone-searching expedition in the mountains. his transport of the bones back to the Benevolent
Associations in Victoria with the help of his Fnend Lee Chong, and, most importantly. his love Sair with KeIora. Further. Disappearinr? Moon Cafe is unlike Fa11 On Your Knees and The White Bone in that it also includes an epilogue, in which the story of Gwei
Chang and Kelora is pursued once more. Their story acts as a hetale for the elements of the plot that take place in Vancouver in the years after Gwei Chang has left the mountain cabin. and this framing device is emphasized by the focus on Gwei Chang's memory. The first words of the novel are "He remembered(l), a phrase that becomes the prologue's refrain. The second section of Tearch for Bones,'. which is labeled "Gwei
Chang: 1939," clarifies that the events recounted in the prologue and epilogue are the recollections of a dying man: "He was an old man now. And he played with his memories al1 day long. Or they played with himW(5).While the fiaming device of deathbed recollection is hardly unique, Lee's choice of Gwei Chang as the purveyor of the novel's support structure shows her preoccupation with the problem of authority. Unlike the authorial consciousness that directs the prologues of both Fa11 On Your Knees and The
White Bone, Gwei Chang's consciousness is unable to contain many of the novel's events. Gwei Chang's death in 1939 precludes him from having direct knowledge of the birth of his grandchild Kae. the calamitous affair between Morgan and Suzanne. or even the death of his estranged son Ting An.
In their structural capacity. Gwei Chang's memories are granted a porousness of scope that merges with the mystical quality of his experience. Before being sent on his bone-hunting expedition, the elders of the Benevolent Association "sent [Gwei Chang] into a trame. Around him. the mountain bmicaded with trees reaching into the etemal mist. and the rain pressed dom from the heavenso'(2). It is out of these magicd woundings that Kelora fint emerges: "In this dreamlike state. he thought maybe he had died and she was another spirit here to guide him over to the other sidt'(2). As 1 discussed in my introduction. the narrative quickly undermines Gwei Chang's hackneyed perception of Kelora as an Indian spirit guide: she and her fmily are well established in the region and Lee takes care to describe aspects of the Shi'atko clan's material existence.
When Gwei Chang begins to revel in '-the indian ways" of the sdmon harvest. 'rhink[ing] that he might never starve like a chinaman againF*(234),Kelora inf'orrns him that "even with this abundance. her people faced famine later in the wintei'(234).
Lee's use of an Aboriginal figure, especially in the sections of Disapoearine Moon
-Cafe most sumised with mythological features. begs certain questions about idealization
and the evasion of cultural difference. hluch as the narrator of Obasan asserts that "Some
of the Native children I've had in my classes over the years could almost pass for
Japanese, and vice ve&'(2), Gwei Chang recognizes in Kelora "familiar features on her
dark face9'(4), as well as the fact that "She had a way of murmuring as they walked. Gwei
Chang remembered chinese women doing the very same7 13). ' As Lee's novel reaches
its epilogue, entitied "New Moons," it becomes clear that the figure of Kelora is more
cornplex. and at the same time more ordinary. than the role of "spirit" assigned to her by
Gwei Chang. Kelora's material king is unquestionably present in Ting An's charge
against his fatherosrenunciation of "a dirty half-breed, buried somewhere in the
bush"(233). Further. in his article about Disaowarinn Moon Cafe's manipulation of the
romance genre. Huggan argues that the initial "comic exchange of racial epitheW(37) by
Gwei Chang and Kelora is "a brilliant parody of the White Man's racial thinkingg*(38).
Guy Beauregard agrees that this scene displays Lee's "awareness of the stereotypes that
fix the cultural bordea of 'Chinese' and 'Native"'(63). Gwei Chang's perception of
Kelora. however. proves much more hazardous than her initial perception of him.
Intimations of Gwei Chang's dual course of idealizing and primitivizing Kelora appear in
"Search for Bones"; he perceives her as -*astrange one, with her o~nprivate language -
neither chinese nor indian, but from deep within the wildness of her soul"(l4). The
repercussions of his appraisal are reveaied in Wew Moons." at the point when Kelora dissolves Gwei Chang's illusions about the magicai "indian wayso' of a boundless salmon harvest: "In the next instant, he looked at Kelora, and saw animal [. . .], in that case, what was he except her prey - her trap so cleverly woven7'(234). In the last episode of the epilogue, Kelora disavows Gwei Chang's perception of her. stating: "Y ou' re just getting sentimental in your old age"; when Gwei Chang accuses her of6haunting me al1 my life,"
she is at first silent, before telling him to stop whining (236). The concluding image of the novel is not of Kelora's spirit, but of her body, as Gwei Chang has a final vision of their
intense and yet domestic lovemaking: "She, wet from tears. slick with lust. steeped in
weat; their souls keening, reaching for etemity. From another part of the village, a child
whimpered and sighed"(236).
The stocy of Kelora not only warns against the sentimentalization of both the
present and the Fast but also against a rigid interpretation of their sequence. Much as the
function of Lee's prologue and epilogue as a hetale inforrns the concern with
embedded narratives that intempt the genealogical plot. so too does the ordering of
Kelora's story. as well as her characterization in terms of the possibility of achrony.
refiect Lee's rejection of fomal linearity. The relationship between Gwei Chang and
Kelora exists out of time: afler noting Kelora's face. "ignited by the firelight [. . .] a
beautiful face of vision"(5), Gwei Chang falls into a deep sleep which lasts for the span of
their love affair: %y the tirne he awakened. he had stayed for three yearsœ'(5).Gwei
Chang's perception of their atemporal love leads him to proclaim: "Love like that only
cornes around once in ten lifetimes. And it's love beyond death. You could spend the rest
of our reincamated lives searching for a love like that."(235) This declaration is
undermined. however. when he castigates Kelora for dying in the bush. Kelora henelf is much more nonchalant about the effects of the's progression; as she informs Gwei
Chang, "When we walk in the forest, we say 'we walk with our grandmothers'"(l4). She cures Gwei Chang of his physical weakness by suggesting that "he go and bathe in the nver"(8), thus associating herself with "The river's forces [. . . that] pulled him in al1 directions at onceo'(9). Gwei Chang, however, is unable to settle into Kelora and her father's world of fluid exchanges (9). As one who is heavily reliant on maps and marken
(1 I), Gwei Chang is suspicious of Kelora's role as a "retriever of lost souls'~7), manifested by her "peculiar intuition for locating gravesites whose markers had long ago detenorated(l4). While the details of his leave-taking of Kelora are explicated only in
"New Moons," the final sentence of the prologue, "Gwei Chang parted ways with the bones at the bone-house in Victoria [. . .] and began his trek back home to Kelora'*(l8), indicates the son of enforced flattening of spatial and temporal vajectoties that will complicate the mapping of the Wong family tree. As the iegend of Kelora reveals. the healthy genealogical plot must be able to accommodate sequential disorder and narrative repetition.
Lee also raises the issue of narrative repetition in her representations of voice, as
Kelora is associated with the sounds of the wind. The wilderness out of which Kelora appears is one in which '~hewind snatche[s] the words out of [Gwei Chang's] mouth"( 1);
Kelora's Iaughter. on the other hand, "gurgled like an infant's blown back and forth by the windo0(3).While Gwei Chang cannot comprehend her counsel that he "listen to
[himselfj sing! Every sou1 has its own voice9'(14), the wind's voice is heard by various other characters. Ting An's sole consolation after king orphaned occurs "When the wind spoke throua the branches of the ta11 trees, [and] he heard his grandfather whisper through him tooV(l14),while Suzanne's moments of peace are also figured as offices of the wind's "strong cleansing effect on me [. . . 1. I couldn't help thinking that it was a continuation of a strong wind fiom another dimension that 1 could only guess at9*(l72).
Even Mui Lan hem Kelora's wind-voice; during the scene of her disastrous decree that
Choy Fuk must be allowed to procreate with a surrogate, "She suddeniy became aware of the glas wind-chimes that hung on the porch downstairs [. . .]. It made her slightly uneasy"(6 1 ). Most significantly, the 1950 episode representing Suzanne's apprehension of the "strong wind from another dimension" is directly followed by an episode from
1968; to Kae's mind this wind is, on the one hand, linked with the ghosts that haunt the
Wong household and, on the other hand, at odds with the "silence" surrounding those who have died ( 174).
In her endeavor to "summarize the discursive strategies that have repeatedly occuned in Chinese Canadian writingsT'(xiii),Chao "adopts a power paradigm of silence vs voice to identify the historical transition experienced by Chinese Canadians from a collective silence to a voice in the officia1 discourse"(l7). Chao goes on to quote Kae's notion of the '-unpredictable impact"(Disaveaaring 180) that results "from transforming silence into voice [and that] can disturb the stability of the existing social structure"(Chao
22). In relation IO a poetics of genealogy, this transformation offen a unique challenge to the genealogical injunction described by Kae as a "secret code" of "silence and invisibility"( 180). Rather than contesting the energy of an uttered injunction. such as
God's blessing in Genesis. Lee's novel must engage with the cultural force of reticence.
As Donald Goellnicht argues. "Such secrecy was a necessary tool for sunrival in the world of restrictive immigration. but the next generation views it as a damaging cultural characteristic that must be overcome through narrative tellingY'(318). Thus, Gwei Chang's suspicion of Kelora's ability to heu the voice of the bones is a marker of Disa~warinp,
Moon Cafe's representations of reluctant narrators. A merengagement with the issue of tellen is revealed when Kelora's deas the purveyor of the wind-voice is repeated in the figure of Kae. who continues the recovery work of the storyteller. Ultimately, it is the conflated figure of KelordKae that allows Gwei Chang his fmal rest as "He closed his eyes. the heavy chant of the storyteller tuming to mist in his head"(22'0.
The work of the storyteller takes us back to Disa~pearingMoon Cafe's statu as a "NewWorid Myth." especially in terms of Vautier's notion of "the narrators' overt awareness of the narrative process [. . . which] confiicts with their self-consciousness about its limitations and the readen' awareness of the techniques king used in the text"(3-l-35). The bulk of Disa~warhgMoon Cafe altemates between episodes that employ an extemal narrator and whose labels signai both their central character and their temporal setting, and episodes that are narrated by Kae. Lee makes the self-reflexiveness of her project explicit in the chapter entitled The Writer," in which the progression of the plot is collapsed with Kae's commentary. Mer imagining the scene between Fong Mei and her daughters at the moment when Suzanne and Morgan's affair ir revealed. Kae e~claims:What a mean writer's trick. to drag Fong Mei kicking and fighting back again'( 18 1 ). The line between the extemal narrator and Kae's role as an intemal narrator is fùrther blurred at the end of a section labeled "Fong Mei: 1925," as the rules of focalization that have govemed the rest of the novel break dom. The voice of '-the w-ritei' interrupts the narrative with the rem& "See there, another example of the unpredictable power of language!-(184). The chapter continues with an episode labeled ~~Feedingthe Dead: 1986,- in which ''the writef' conjures up a parade of ghosts to give their thoughts on "themany and varied ways to destroy loveW(185).The narrator's imagining of this scene as, on the one hand, "an opinion poll" that begins with Suzanne
"being interviewed on a wintry Vancouver street for the six o'clock news"(185) and, on the 6ther hand, an ancestral reckoning that entails "ail the women wailing around a timeless circular table9'(187), illustrates the novelTsjuxtaposition and subversion of a variety of generic conventions. As Bennett Lee remarks, Disa~~earinaMoon Cafe
"reinvent[sj the past as domestic melodrama, bonowing elements fiom the Chinese popular oral tradition and weaving in incidents from local history to tell a story of the
Wong fmily which is part soap opera. part Cantonese opera and whoily Canadiad0(4).
Kelora is absent from this parade of ghosts, even though her story provides a template for --themany and varied ways to destroy love" as they are revealed in the novel.
And while Kelora's wind-voice is eventually received by Kae the stocyteller. the legend of Keion operates outside of '-the writefsg' internally focalized narrative, reflecting the intricate relationship among the various embedded stories whose commentary traverses episodic frames. Further. Kelora's delicately shifting status as both a mythical and a historical figure. as both an integrated and a framing character, emphasizes the complicated representations of hi/story that associate the novel with the category of "New
WorId Myth." Critiques such as those of Beauregard and Goellnicht address '-Lee3 narrative risks [ofj positioning Kelora as an agent of what Tery Goldie has called
'indigenization"'(Beauregard 63) and are at pains to point out that -'the reiationships between Natives and Chinese are explainable in historical terms"(Goel1nicht 325 n. 10).
However. as Huggan points out. the idealizatiord primitivization of Kelora by Gwei Chang is only one instance of the interrogation of the process of cultural bbothering''(37), functioning as a template for the investigation of both externally and intemally motivated ethnocectrism. However. Kelora's rnystical participation in the historically grounded activity of bone-hunting indicates Lee's own "supentitions'~(14)about the telling of history which, even (or especially) as a revisionary exercise is bound up with the process of ficti~naiization.~While Lee does refer to such historical conditions as the various Acts by way of which the Chinese Canadian comrnunity was politically penecuted, her treatment of history extends beyond the sort of grounding that anchors Yee's folktales.
Lee's depiction of such specific events as the 1924 murder of Janet Smith, as well as her representation of early Chinatown. is not as unproblematically factual as Chao's reading of the novel would suggest. Lee's concem with the problem of the told resonates with
Vautier's assertion that "New World Myth" novels "do not set out to impose a new, fixed order on historyo'(33).
Of Telling:
As one of the first critical examinations of Disa~pearinaMoon Cafe, Graham
Huggan's article "The Latitudes of Romance" lays the groundwork for a discussion of the novel's structural properties. He locates both Lee's novel and Marilyn Bowenng's To Al1
Ap~earancesX Ladv as operating '*wiithin the deliberately hyperbolical tradition of the genealogical romance: a tradition in which romantic (mis)adventures are assimilated to identituy Cable. and the generational conîlicts of an extended famiiy are contained within a redemptive structure of collective - "group" - endeavoufe(35-36). Huggan likewise uses
Tobin's notion of the "genealogical irnperative as it pervades the "structure or redistic narrativeo0(HugganJO), in opposition to the discontinuity of the romance fom. He goes on to assert that "Lee mounts a [. . .] challenge to the genealogical imperative by undercutting the stable linear structure of the conventional faMIy saga [. . . and] by providing a series of contending - often contradictory narratives"(41). For al1 its persuasiveness, however. Huggan's reading of Lee's novel in the context of its application and subversion of the romance form (36) is unduiy totalizing. Chao dismisses
Huggan's essay as "the kind of reading that aims to fit minority experiences into the straightjacket of mainstream univeaalityY'(104). Chao's main point of contention with
Huggan is that he neglects the "sociohistorical context simply to illustrate how the
Romance genre dominates Disa~pearineMoon Cafe"(192-93 n.2). It may be added that
Huggan's insistence on Lee's use of the romance fonn results in certain critical blind spots. such as Iiis claim that "The cyclical structure of romance places emphasis on the potential for regeneration (Frye): and in that restricted sense, To Al1 Appearances A Lady and Disappeanng Moon Cafe both end where they began"(42). As 1 have argued, Lee's epilogue shows the consequences of Gwei Chang's interpretative wbjection and betrayal of his lover. as well as the dispirited vanishing of the first generation of Chinese
Canadians. Huggan's analysis of the way Lee "reinterpret(s1 that [genealogical] history as a time-deeinp network of interconnected stories"(J1) ultimately downplays those elements of Disapwaring Moon CaCe that are grounded in fact or are pessimistic in outlook.
Chao provides her own reading of Disa~~~neMoon Cafegs structure as a subcategory of her broader examination of the ''various narrative techniques [Lee uses] to connect cornmunity and individuals into one historical reality in which 'the collective selF emerges as a double identity construction for the Chinese Canadians7'(93). Her description of Lee's structural fashioning of the collective self is quite detailed:
Instead of following a traditional chronicle, Lee tells her stones in a great
number of episodes [. . .]. These episodic entries appear to be assembled
almost freely, repetitively, and unchronologically over one hundred years,
representing a free interaction. By putting these episodic entries into a
continuous process of interaction, the writer brings past and present,
individual and collective into one narrative space [. . .]. Moreover, the
episodic structure allows the writer to juxtapose the outcomes of historical
events with the reinterpretation of these events from a contemporary point
of view. ( 102)
Beauregard sums up the etT'ct of the structural techniques both Huggan and Chao address. remarking that 'rhe process ofcomecting individual historical moments is one in which we as readers are invited to participate"(66). And yet, while Chao's censure of tluggan's literary universalism is well taken. her own apped to the concept of "one histoncal reality" seems similarly rigid. While the analyses of Huggan and Chao are usehl for interrogating Lee's witing of the genealogical plot, as 1 have argued in my reading of the legend of Kelora. Disao~earinp.Moon Cafe resists narrative definition.
Lee's plotting undermines the forces of injunction, whether thcy be generic. historical or familial. as 1 wvill show in my examination of modes of repetition and problems of genealogical direction. Further. the analysis of the genealogical tension between repetition and change will direct me to an investigation of the themes of Uicest and miscegenation as they undencore Lee's concem with an overabundance of sameness or difference in th;. genealogical plot.
In another story from Bellvdancer, "Daisy the Sojoumer." a Chinese-Canadian narrator describes her friendship and falling out with a French-Canadian woman named
Daisy who calls henelf Minou. The title of the story makes reference to the figure of the
"sojourner:"
This individual typically drearned of making his fortune in gum San - gold
mountain - and returning to China [. . .] (hence, the migration to Canada
was supposedly viewed as a 'sojourn' and not as a permanent move).
Instead. he found himself stuck between two worlds: too poor to stay in
China. not rich enough to return. yet cut off fiom integrating into Canadian
society by discriminatory laws. (Bennett Lee 4 j
Lee's epigraph rxplicates the sipificance of the terni: --theChinese immigrant corning to this cotintty is drnied the righfs und privileges extended to others in the wcry of citizenship; the lrnv cornpels hem [sic] IO remain aliens"( 108). Of course, in this story, it is Daisyhfinou who makes a "sojoum" into Chinese Canadian culture by way of her friendship with the narrator. as well as her love affair with "a chinese guy named
Eddy"(l17). Much as the characterization of Kelora allows Lee to interrogate the problematic process of racial idealization. the role-reversal enacted in "Daisy the
SojoumeT' challenges any sort of cultural entrenchment. As the narrator says to her husband. '9 think Ilinow why people are so prejudiced. They react to everything according to how familiar or foreign it is to hem [. . .] it's your farnily that signals - in fact. decrees - your response to everything you wil1 do in your entire life"'(l15). The nmtor is both amused and mystified by Minou's desire for the stability of a Chinese union, as she "always drearned of escape and adventure but lived quite predictably. driving carloads of family and relatives to and hom chinatown"(l16). Further, the narrator is distressed by her comrnunity's tendency towards the sort of genealogical conditioning that Tess O'Toole notes in her study of Hardy's firiion, in which "a consciousness of family history is linked to an awareness of the irnpossibility of any unique or original experience0-(3).As Lee's nanator puts it. The displaced penon's instinct for durability and the survivor's fear of annihilation were definitely the heritage that our disenfranchised Gold Mountain-sojouming forefathers dumptrucked on me, and
I married into more carloads of farnily and relatives, thus binding my feetW(ll6).
While "Daisy the Sojourner" ends with two drearn-visions that signifi the cultural gulf between the nanator and Minou. Disa~warinn.Moon Cafe displays a more varied investigation of the impact of fmily history. O'Toole's analysis of Hardy's fiction is a useful entryway into a discussion of Lee's methods of approaching this issue. Much as
O'Toole argues that "Hardy makes the dominant story not the family history itself [. . .] but rather the individual's encounter with that history - that is. with narrative"(47), so ioo is the central narrative of Lee's novel taken up with Kae's encounter with the Wong farnily plot. At the begiming of "Waiting for Enlightenrnent." the first chapter of the novel. Kae adrnits: 'Tve come to erpect the cerernonies and assemblies that come with families [. . .] it \vas easy to see an inevitable logic underlining life. a crisp beginning and a weil-pemed conclusionanice and neat, and as reassuring as receiving a certificate for good attendance'-(20). Kae's expectations are comparable to O'Toole's reading of
"Hardy's geneaiogical plots [which] are about expenencing one's place in an already written script"(47). O'Toole's interpretation of this process of familial encounter as a process of "narrative coercion"(45). associated with doom and punishment, echoes in stories like '*Daisy the Sojournei' and "Broken Teeth," as well as sections of
Disa~warineMoon Cafe. Lee's ultimate cornmitment to the activity of mapreadir~g, however. demands that she offer some sort of challenge to the idea of genealogical fatalism. It is by way of her writing of repetition that Lee mounts this challenge. as it is the repetition of experience. as well as the narration of this experience. that. according to
O'Toole. most niinously circumscribes the story of the individual (14. 73). While novels like Hardy's Jude the Obscure or Grove's The Master of the Mill represent "the exhaution of narrative options"(0'Toole 65). in which a character is "doomed to repeat both his ancestors' experience and his own priot experience"(O'Too1e 73). Lee's novel depicts familial repetition variously in terrns of both haunting and redemption.
Before exarnining the various instances of repetition presented in Disa~rxarinq
Moon Cafe. it is useful to review the two forms of repetition delineated by J. Hillis Miller in Fiction and Repetition. Working frorn a passage by Gilles Deleuze. Miller distinguishes between -*Platonic"repetition. "grounded in a solid archetypai mode1 which is untouched by the effects of repetition:' and in which The validity of ihe mimetic copy is established by its truth of correspondence to what it copies*'(6)and "Nietzschean" repetition. which "posits a world based on difference [. . -1. It is a world not of copies but of what Deleuze calls 'simulacra' or 'phantasms"'(6). Miller's study works fiom the
"hypothesis that al1 modes of repetition represent one form or another of the contradictory intertwining of the two kinds of repetition0-(4).In a Canadian context. it may be argued that MacLennan's Two Solitudes displays the sort of 'Platonic" repetition associated with "realistic fictiono~Miller6) with its dual narratives of French and English reconciliation.
On the other hand, the dimming of Sam Clark's recurrent recollections in The Master of the Mill. or the emerging fiendship between Moses and Aaron at the end of Wiseman's
The Sacrifice, may be related to Miller's suggestion that "there is something ghostly about the effects of this second kind of repetition"(6).4 Also, Miller's two axes of repetition recall the two axes of genealogy, whereby "Platonic" repetition corresponds to the vertical êuis of genealogy and its dependence on the operations of sequence, continuity. and wholeness, and "Nietzschean" repetition exhibits the characteristics of reiationality. dispersal and suspension of the lateral auis. It is by way of these models that
1 wish to examine the various instances of repetition that occur in Lee's novel, giving special attention to her contrasting and subversive rendenngs of male and female lineage.
The second genealogical crisis to assail the Wong family is in direct opposition to the supposed crisis of lateral expansion enacted and experienced by Gwei Chang; rather. it is the farniliar biblical crisis of childlessness. As Kae puts it, Mui Lm's distress over the situation is "ordinary enough. She wanied a grandson to fulfill the most fundamental purpose to her life [. . .]. A little boy who came from her son, who came from her husband. who also came lineally from that golden chah of male to male"(3 1). Various cntics. including Huggan. Chao. Bennett Lee and Di Brandt. have commented on Lee's attack on '-the narrow-minded patriarchal mindset of the traditional Chinese family system'*(Brandt 127) and her rewriting of "the Wong family saga [in ternis of. . .] the lineage of women*'(Chao 101). As a story such as "Broken Teetho' informs us. however, even in the face of its darnaging absolutism, the patriarchal impetus is a significant
feature of that same traditional Chinese culture whose recovery is so vital for Chinese Canadian wwiters. After telling her tale of accidentally falling on her brother and then being beaten so hard by her father that her teeth "dangled off my shredded gurns"(8), the narrator's mother insists on an adequate mernorial for her father's death. The last line of the story is the mother's reminder to the narrator '70 corne back on Sunday and pay your respects thenW(9).For al1 her representation of the problematic patriarchal impetus in
Disa~wxineMoon Cafe, Lee is similarly unwilling to totally reject its energy or utterly condemn its participants. In the fint place, it is the femaie characten who articulate the importance of the pauilineal "golden chah:" as Mui Lm demands. "'are we going to Iose face on account of one no-good femde-bag [. . .] if she can't do justice to our fmily narne. then another woman will"'(29-30). Fong Mei's elder sister scolds her sibling for resisting the sexual demands of her husband: "'Remember, a good wife must be chillingly correct [. . .]. When you have your sons cherish them! Your hard work will convince othen of your righteousness as a woman. If. however. you're a no-gocd wife. even the ancestors will curse you"(46). Even Kae admits that her determination to perceive her family as **alineage of women with passion and fierceness in their veins" aises from her defensive *'prefer[ence] to romanticize thema.(145).
In the second place. Lee's writing of the male line. especially in terms of its tendency toward repeiition. is fairly sympathetic. The most significant problernatization of the "golden chain*' is Lee's representation of familial recunences in the suppressed lineage of Gwei Chang. Ting An. and Morgan. It is aiso useful. however. to examine how the figure of Gwei Chang is thematically repeated in the figure of the houseboy accused of murdering a white wornan. In her epilogue. Lee juxtaposes an episode that depicts
Gwei Chang's process of dying with one that details the water terture of Foon Sing, the houseboy, at the hands of Chinatown's reigning brotherhood.' Like the drowning houseboy, Gwei Chang "fought the hand on the back of his oeck, pushing his face down into murky waters of memory"(2 18). The association made between Gwei Chang's and
Foon Sing's experience recalls O'Toole's concept of *-narrativejamming," a phenornenon that "occurs when the narrative reaches an impasse, when a meaningfiù degree of change within it or movement outward is no longer possible"(l33). Like Gwei Chang, Foon Sing is simply another member of '7he numbing, claustrophobie world of single. chinese men"(22 1) who is swept away by a woman. Foon Sing's relationship with someone from outside of his cultural sphere is as ill-fated as Gwei Chang's affair with Kelora. and each is a repetition of the folk stoy that Gwei Chang tells himself about the star-crossed spimer and cowherder who "met and fell deeply in love. The gods or the powen above were very displeased with this liaison between unequals [. . .]. So. the powers-that-be split them apart and created a racial chasm between them. as impossible to cross as the heavens themselves" (223).
Gwei Chang's suppressed "golden chain" is also subject to e ffects of *-narrative jamming" and ghostly repetition. as his son and grandson grappie with rhe taboo against miscegenation. For al1 of the fact that "Ting An refused to be Gwei Chang's son"(220), his attachent to a white wornan functions as a censure of his fatherasinability to formally acknowledge Kelora. Morgan is a repetition of a father who *-behavedrnuch like a ghost. never very visible"( 1 13). and is 'quite simply a haunted man"(64): Morgan's unfortunate inheritance of mixed blood collides with the problematic "purity" of the legitimate (or legitimized) Wongs. It is interesting to note the paradox of the novel's representation of a mixed-blood lineage. a line that commences at least with the pairing of Kelorawsmother and father. Whilr Huggan argues that "Lee produces a chaotic family narrative that exhibits and applauds its own mixed ancestry'Y38), Goellnicht righifûlly notes that "after [Gwei Chang and Kelora's] interracial relationship, there is no sense ofa successfully negotiated hybriditfo(3 14). Still. whereas Gwei Chang abandons Kelora out of a sense of his "duty as the eldest son"(235) towards the vertical êuis of genealogical sequence and wholeness. it is actually Gwei Chang and Ting An's lateral movements that temporarily ensure the continuity of the suppressed "golden chah."
Lee's writing of the "lineage of women" proves a potent counterpart to the male plot of Familial desertion and racial difference. Officiaily. Mui Lan is "simply the mother of Gwei Chang's only son. Stamped on her entry papers: 'A merc hanteswifeW.(28). It is her individual energy. however. that instigates the rewriting of the Wongs' genealogical plot. Likewise. once Fong Mei has been ~vrittenout of the family history. "punished. not for something she had done but for some apparent blank part of hefo(61). she experiences a sense of freedom and "no longer felt like she was a part of sornebody else's plans"(92).
It is she who seduces Ting An and requests children from him. *--alinle family to ... take care or"( 183). Thus. both Llui Lmand Fong Mei are responsible for fictionalizing the fmily tree in order to solve genealogicd crises; both dabble in acts of reiationality and suspension in order to simulate genealogical linearity.
While the lineage oFGwei Chang, Ting An and Morgdn is so haunted by its associations with desertion and difference that it nins out of narrative stem. the female line. thou& narratively potent. is plagued by problems of desire and sameness. The namtor of Disappearine Moon Cafe provides historical pounds for the coincidental relationships between Beavice and Keeman. and Morgan and Suzanne: 'Since 1923 the Chinese Exclusion Act had taken its heavy toll. The rapidly dirninishing chinesesanadian community had withdrawn into itself, ripe for incest"(l47). While critics such as Chao and Huggan are satisfied to rationalize Morgan and Suzanne's incestuous relationship as
"a reaction to intolerable outside pressures"(Huggan 40), Goellnicht ernphasizes the family's own accountability: 'ïhe demise of the Wong family comes through their pathological obsession with 'authentic' bloodlines"(3 16). Kae's inheritance of her role as
"the writer'. not only comes from Kelora, the "retriever of los1 souls"(7) but also from her great-grandmother and grandmother, whose fabrications prove disastrous. Thus. the repetition of Suzanne in Kae. who not only looks "just like Suzie"(l90). but also becornes embroiled in her own flair with poor Morgan, is marked by a dangerous energy which seems the exclusive domain of the female characters.
The most unfortunate product of the colliding male and female gcnealogical plots is Morgan and Suzanne's baby. who is most gently referred to as simply a "bad mistake"(204) and most violently depicted as a battered monstrosity "that nobody wanted"(208). Goellnicht notes the "full-blown. melodramatic irony [of the fact thatj the last Wong male child tums out to be the 'illegitimate' offspnng of this incestuous relationship. a baby who dies at birth. thus signaling the end of the patrilinear family line and the collapse of the community from within"(3 16). Lee does oppose the finality of this collapse by following her depiction of the ruined baby with an episode that portrays the contented play of Kae's son Bobby "exuberantly celebrating the idea of pot lids as cymbals"(Z09). Kae is represented as being explicitly aware of the moment's antithetical significance. exclairninp to Chi: "'1 am the resolution to this aory [. . .]. I have to give this story some sense of p~rpose"~(209).She regards her own collation of the family's geneaiogical plot as a careful process of untangling:
1 must work at unraveling knots - knots in my hair, knots in my stomach.
Knots of guilt: bots of indecision. Knots in Our dainty gold chains.
Figurative knots in our children's shoelaces. Don't panic lest we get more
tangled! We must pick, trace. coax and cajole each knot out. One at a time
even when we know there are hundreds more. (123)
However. just as the legend of Kelora demonsirated the importance of genealogical fluidity and the pitfalls of enforced linearity. the male and fernale plottings of the Wong farnily tree operate as a waming against both the rejection of racial clutter and the fabrication of "pure" genealogical strands. In other words. it is the isolated "golden chainw'that is prone to the misfortunes of "knotting."
Of Tellers:
As 1 assert above. Chao's analysis of Disamearing Moon Cafk and other literary works by Chinese Canadians focuses on the ways that "An imposed cultural silence cm give birth to a resistant voice''(22). giving emphasis to instances of cross-generationai dialogue and collective endeavour (24-26). Chao argues that. in Lee's novel. the fashioning of "'the collective self also indicates that the histoncal silence and invisibility of the community still affect contemporary genentions: they cmot gain a more respectable identity in today's society unless their collective history is recognized as part of Canadian experienceW(93).ïhe figure of Kae thus "exempli fies the process of rereading comrnunity history by the conternporary generation"(98) and becomes the site where "Lee locates the voice of resistance of the Chinese Canadian women"( 100). In addition, Chao's interest in the recovery of voice resonates with the contemporary privileging of litenry recourses to "oral gossip and communal (mythic) memory," especially as they confront foms that are "modeled on the historical chronicle and the individual need to record in writing"(Hutcheon 53). Thus, Disap~earineMoon Cafe's prologue opposes Gwei Chang's reliance on "maps and markers"(l1) with Kelora's ability to read the soulesvoice (14).
While there is no doubt that part of Lee's project is to "challerigc the old
European-inspired order of history" (Vautier 33), Lee is unwilling to set up a binary whereby the altemate version of history simply supplants the old order. As is the case for other "New World Myth" wtiten, Lee is concemed with confronting the unknov~abilityof the pst (Vautier 34). In her effort to redress the historical elisions of "mainstream universality"(Chao 104). Chao's analysis tends to disregard the fact that Disapearing
Moon CaFe is a fiction and that. in postmodern fashion. it goes so far as to thernatize the fictionmaking process. Consequently, her reading of the novel does not acknowledge the way in which Lee problematizes the fiction-making process either. Chao evades Lee's questioning of "whether the dueat to the Chinese AmericanlCanadian cornmunity is wbolly extemal [. ..] or whether sorne of the responsibility mi@ fdl on the Chinese
AmericanICanadian community itself'(Goel1nichi 3 17-1 8) and is content to ignore ail female culpability for the plot's unPortmate turns (Chao 10 1).
Hutcheon argues thai g-Postmodemtexts tend to make very self-conscious their witing, their reading, and the various contexts in which both acts take place"(l T), going on to assert that "it is the conventions of narrative in particular that get rethought. especially the so-called 'transparency' of stories and stoiytelling"(l09). The incestuous relationship between Suzanne and Morgan exarnined above is, of couse. not only a problem of familial fabrication but even more so a problem of silence and secrecy. This twofold predicament of teiling reveals Disapwarinn Moon Cafewspostmodern concem with voice. Such self-reflexive aspects of the novel that highlight "the writer's" process of plotting are cornplicated by, on the one hand, an increasingly necesszuy suspicion about the effects of fictionalization and, on the other hand. the perils of silence. As Kae admits,
"In witing, 1 feel Iike a drunk weaving al1 over the road. The air can be made wavy and warped, hot with tension, full of mirages"(l85). So. although Chao's reading seems to bypass the explicit "literariness"(Fe1ski 28) of the novel; her emphasis on Kae's own recovery work is consistent with Hutcheon's assessrnent that "the act of making fiction is an irnavoidably ideoiogical act. that is, a process of creating meaning within a social context"( 10).
Lee reveals her interest in the ideological force of fiction-making in "Dyke
Dollars," a story that includes a feminist revision of a babysitter's story. While Monica's description of a moud of macaroni surrounded by peas as "a princessasisland [. . . and] brave soldien in boats guarding the princessœsmoat"(155) captivates her young charges. her taie is shut down by their mother's fkiend. Wendy: "We don't do 'princess' stories because they glorify the rich and privileged at the expense of the poor and oppressed. And they're sexist as hell"(l56). As is the case in Disappearing Moon Cde, however, the story's representation of revision is open to interrogation: Wendyosupbraiding is part of her playing a role: "And with her impenetrable makeup, black-and-blue rasta hair and full punk-mom regaiia, she looked comrnitted to her causeg'(156). Even Bitsy, the mother in question, recognizes that the ceonire of Monica has more to do with her king a
"newcomei'(l56) than with asserting a political agenda; Bitsy is "familiar with how prorniscuous those rituals of self-preservation can beq(157).
As Kae acknowledges at the beginning of her own narrative, the '-rituals of self-
preservation" enacted by the Wong family are largely bals of secrecy. Kae's initial
reaction to her mother's waming that "there has ken much trouble in Our family. It's best
that what 1 teil you does not go beyond these four walls"(23) is cornpliance. Kae too "Hill
leave it boxed in our past - mine and my mother's, the four walls that we share!"(23).
Throughout the novel. most of Kae's interruptions into the externally narrated plot
reiterate her mother's anviety about telling. Her uneas, voice breaks into an early episode
that focuses on Mui Lan, demanding: "Why do I need to make this ancestress the tip of
the helling storm [. . .]. Why do I need to indict her"(3 1)? Morgan cynically dismisses
Kae's desire for authonhip. asking: "What for? That's not very pnstine chinese!
Remember if nobody speaks of it, then it never existed(l61). Even Kîe admits: "I have a
misgiving ihat the telling of our history is forbidden. I have vidated a secret code'(1 80).
Beauregard suggests that "By presenting the insularity as to some degree consensual, as
something to which the women in the Wong farnily have at some level agreed. Lee shifis
the tems of oppression from domination to hegemony. And by scripting an element of
consent into the narrative. Lee creates a space from which to dissent"(65). Beauregard's
emphasis on the novel's confrontation with a cultural (or at Ieast familial) injunction of
reticence ultimately reproduces Chao's contention that Lee is privileging voice over
silence. even while admitting intemal culpability. In her study of the modes of silence that
appear in the work of various Asian North Amencan w~iten.King-Kok Cheung points out that because "attitudes toward Asian and Asian American reserve have been mostly critical or patronizingF'(2),the Asian Amencan and Asian Canadian comrnunities "are tempted to dispel stereotypes by repudiating silence alt~~et.her"(l).~Cheung argues that the critical cornmonplace that "Language can liberate, but it cm also coerce. distort. and regulateW'(20)is at odds with "reductive interpretationsW(20)of silence. In Disap~earing
Moon Cafe, the reluctant narrators sometimes engage in narrating acts, distinguishable from the genealogical fabrications of Mui Lan and Fong Mei in that they are explicitly voiced. that are as problematic as the effects of customary silence.
As revealed in my poetics of genealogy, and as 1 will take up more extensively in my examination of blacDonald's work, the genealogical plot is perilously subject to the power of the curse. a force rhat perverts the features of genealogical blessing or injunction. Disaowaring Moon Cafe is littered with curses, from the cooks at the cafe who. after breaking some glass, curse each other "for causing such a bad omen. and it still moming"(3-l). to Fong Mei's sister's warning about the curses of the ancestors (46).
Mile such indiscriminate condemations lack the formality and apparent force of Mr.
Mahmoud's cune of his daughter's womb (ffiees 17), Lee is clearly concerned with the potent effects of speech acts. Before Mui Lan is able to entangle her son in genealogical fabrication. she must explicitly distance her daughter-in-law from the Wong family plot.
Mui Lan proclaims to Fong Mei: ".Her male offspnng guarantees the daughter-in-law's position in the family. You are barren and thus may not be accredited with one"(57). This speech act succeeds in its object, for "As far as Mui Lm was concemed Fong Mei was a dead person'-(58). During her contemplation of Mui Lan's powerfbl unerance. Kae wonders '-about the volatile lunacy that wasn't my great-grandmotherosaione. but lurks in our peasant background, in our rustic languageY'(63),hinting at the gmentional gulf between the effectiveness of certain types of speech acts. As he observes the ruthless water tortue of Foon Sing by the brotherhood of fust-generation "sojournen" who dominate the Benevolent Association, Gwei Chang is aware that he "could have stopped it. One word fiom his mouth would have absolved them al19'(t 18). Gwei Chang's final word on the matter of Foon Sing, which comes in the form of a single declaration, has the dramatic effect of enacting a generational shifi, whereby the insuiar clique of "coolie generals"(227) are told to make way for "a whole new set of Chinatown leaders"(227).
The consequence of Gwei Chang's declaration is that "he lost a fifelong f'riend. a brotherhood, an entire way of lifeV(227).
Kae's speculation about *.the volatile lunacy" that '-lurks" in language is connected to the novel's representation of the uncontrollability of voice as it is manifested in explicit speech acts and also as it is produced by gossip. Hutcheon notes that "some feminist writers [. . .] argue that a tmly female writing should be modeled not on linear. rational. male discourse [. . .], but on gossip, 'bavardage' - doser to the oral texture of convenation"(5-l). Lee. who is obviously fascinated by female communities. describes
Mui Lm's craving for gossip: "She missed the daily sweep of wvoman-talk from moming till ni@ [. . -1. Without her society of women. Mu Lm lost substance"(25-6).The frabgnentation of '-Feeding the Dead: 1986 is a narrative attempt to restore the "lost substance" of the familial ghosts. Its intermingling of voices induces Hermia to ask: "'Do you mean that an individual is not an individuai at dl, but a series of individuals - some of whom corne before her. some &er her?w'll89). Mui Lads romanticization of b~oman-talk."however. is countered by her equaily extravagant repudiation of any type of gossip that works against her: "Nowadays people were just plain malicious! Gossip!
Chinatown was always full of gossip. Her own restaurant reeked of it. Too many idle loafers! She of ail people should kmw"(26). Mui Lm's paranoia about the gossip regarding her son's childlessness appean as powerfid as her interest in the "golden chain;' as she warns Choy Fuk to *stand up for the family name [. . .]. People over here delight in vicious two-faced gossip"(36). Choy Fuk himself is addicted to gossip: "For a few moments of dirty-rninded jocularity with his drinking pals, he had revealed just enough to capture their attention [. . .] of course, the mystery was easily unraveled; Choy
Fuk enjoyed his notoriety too much to stop swaggenng"(l03). He dupiicates his mother's fears regarding the chatter of Chinatown, whining: "How can 1 stop those many-mouthed birds from spreading rumours? How cm one keep a secret in such a place"(103)?~Choy
Fuk's gossiping. coupled with his own terror of it. ultimately necessitates another clandestine '-knotting" of the genealogicai plot.
Disappearine Moon Cafe's fluctuating depictions of tk effects of both voice and silence form the background for Kae's writing her family's genealogical plot. And yet. for al1 of Kae's professed concerns about the 'volatile lunacy" of speech or the "secret codes" of silence. her status as a writer figure, not to mention the novel's inclusion of reluctantly and yet repetitively narrated tales, would appear to signai Lee's vaiorization of the teller. While Cheung investigates how writen like Mwine Hong Kingston and Joy
Kogawa wite various kinds of silence. both d de sir able" and "enablingo'(20). the excess of telling in Lee's novel reinforces its postmodem concern with the interrogation of authority. Km's initiai desire for a familial "mastei? narrative is reflected in her anxiety about role-playing: "Al1 my life 1 saw double. MI 1 ever wanted was autlienticity; meanwhile, the people around me wore two-faced masks, and they played their lifelong rdes to artistic perfection"(l28). While Goellnicht comments that "The duplicity of that terni 'authenticity' is brought into focus here: Kae seeks emotional 'authenticity' or honesty from her fmily"(3 14). it should be added that Kae's desire for absolute
"authenticity" is abandoned in her own embracing of the role of the writer. Like other postmodern fictions, Disaowarin~Moon Cafe "depends upon a recognition of the complex 'discursive' situation of literature"(Hutcheon 16), whereby the inclusion of a narrating figure exposes the capriciousness of the narrative process. The progressive breakdom of various structural rules regulating Kae's narrative, such as the rules of focalization. signals the increasing preeminence of the question. "How many ways are there to tell a story"( 185). and the increasing irrelevance of the answer. Kae's confident assertion to Chi that '--in the end. entire lives are nothing but stories"'(209) is wonderfully coupled with her avowal to Hermia that she would rather *-live"a great novel than write one (7 16). Thus. Lee's celebration of the teller is not pnvileged over those aspects of
"living" that may be reimagined and retold. or may simply remain untellable.
Of The Told:
In an interview with C. Allyson Lee. SKY Lee comrnents on how she began to develop Disaooeannp. Moon Cafe: "I remember after 1 graduated from University 1 started doing the research. and 1 wanted to focus on this murder case. the Janice [sic]Smith murder case [. . .] through the Asian-Canadian Wnten Workshop - when we started exchanging ideas - 1 developed the venue for this murder story'~(Si1vera387). The designation of the novel's genealogical plot as a 'venue" for her to examine the 1921 murder of Scottish nunemaid Janet Smith, and the ensuing investigation, reveais Lee's concem with the witing of hiktory. My readings of Tobin and O'Toole have revealed the associations between the features of genealogy and those of the linear, realist novel
(Tobin 6). and between genealogical plotting and fictionalization (O'Toole 5). It is also
(paradoxically) tme that the conservative genealogical imperative operates in much the same way as the traditional historical chronicle. The genealogical lists of Genesis, as
Westermann argues. work as "a transition between the creation of the human race (W. l-
2) and human history" and exhibit "The beginning of human history in the flw of generations"(J0). Of course. Foucault and Hayden White, among othea, have taught us much about regarding the historical chronicle as another type of narrative construction. a fact that mitigates the singularity of the relationship between genealogy and history. Still.
Lee's references to historical events. as well as her self-proclaimed use of the Janet Smith trial as a narrative anchor. necessitate a closer look at her use of historical material and its interaction with her genealogical plot.
As noted above. Chao's focus on Lee's historical recovery work takes precedence over her examination of the "literariness" of Disapwarine Moon Cafe. Chao begins her examination of the novel with a clear indication of analytical intentions:
The title of the novel. which is the name of a family restaurant. signifies
the sociohistoncal setting in which Chinese were relegated to the service
industry [. . .]. Using a traditionai PrologwlEpilogue structure. Lee frames
a historical period fiorn 1892 to 1939 through the memories of Wong
Gwei Chang, one of the comrnunity's leaders. Wong Gwei Chang. who
dies in 1939. eight years before the Chinese Exclusion Act was revoked. does not have the opportunity to testify to the experience of the Chinese
bachelor labourer generation [. . .]. Moreover by ending Wong Gwei
Chang's memory in 1939. the writer sends out a message that the
carnpaign to reclaim Chinese Canadian history is long overdue. (93)
Chao's ambition to situate the events depicted in Disappearing Moon Cafe in their historical context is both an admirable and a necessary undertaking, and one that is also taken up by Goellnicht as well as Beauregard, who argues that "Lee carefully sets the action of her novel just aAer key moments in Chinese Canadian history. and by doing so she engages with the problem of narrating a history of resistance in the face of labour exploitation and various forms of legislated exclusion"(62). However. as Vautier argues, the 'New World Myth" is produced out of the "Tension [that] is first generated by the obvious conflict brtween historical reality and novelistic ficiion8'(34); Lee's postmodem sensibilities interfere with her supposed project of recovering "me historical reality"
(Chao 93). Further. as Cheung points out. the critical insistence on the historical *'truth" of novels by Asian Nonh Americans is its own son of stereotyping: "Though these authors share other women witers' skepticisrn about laquage and received knowledge and cal1 attention to their own fictionality. the majority of critics regard the works as either mirroring or obfuscating Asian American realities"(1l-2). Cheung notes that
"Precisely because Asian American history has so ofien been eclipsed or manipulated. readers tend to look to biological insiden for 'authentic' accountst'(12). "Authenticity." as 1 have already observed. is a particularly fraught concept in a genealogicai plot that revels in its various levels of fabrication. Lee's daim that such plotting operates as a
"venue" for her account of a historical event shodd engage our misgivings about her writing of history, as well as our misgivings about critical responses that rnisconstnie
"revisions of the pastt for "definitive history"(Cheung 12)? In my examination of Lee's writing of the Smith case, not only 411note her fictive reimagining and reframing of historicai events but also the way such reframing reflects back ont0 the process of fiction- making. For. as Hutcheon notes, the process of histonographic metafiction 'Viematizes its own interaction both with the historical past and with the historically conditioned expectations of its readersT'(65).
The details of the Janet Smith murder case are given their most thorough rehearsal in Edward Starkins' Who Killed Janet Smith?, which uses court proceedings and newspaper articles to fashion a suspenseful "true-crime" narrative. While Lee does not comrnunicate her method of researching the case or name her own source material. Who
Killed Janet Smith? is referenced by such chroniclers of Chinese Canadian history as Kay
Anderson and Paul Yee. who bases his synopsis of "The Janet Smith Mystery." included
in Saitwater Citv. on Starkins' account (Yee 76-7). Further. Earle Bimey's bnef description of the case. recalled from his days as a reporter for The Gazette, follows the
same trajectory as Starkins' book. The obligatory procedure of research is reinforced by an episode that immediately precedes Disao~earhe;Moon Cafe's figuring of the hiaoricai events. an episode in which Morgan forces Kae io listen to the products of his own study of the murder. Chao herself does not make reference to Starkins' book. or to any other
witer's version of the story other than the one Lee includes in the historically situated episodes of the novel: even Morgan's tirade is lefi unexamined. Her simplistic endorsement of the novel's representation of the Smith case is not ody the most glaring evidence of Chao's critical blind spot but is itself a type of revisionism. as it evades those elements of Lee's depiction that do not "celebrate [. . -1 the power of community" or
"underline [. . .] 'the collective self' as a shared histoncal identity for Chinese
Canadians"(Chao 95). In fact. Lee's refiguring of the Smith case functions as a critique of
Chinatown. As is the cas2 for her writing the geneaiogical cnsis of incest and her portraya1 of ethnocentrism, Lee is not content to lay responsibility exclusively at the door of extemal pressure and policy. A comparison between Disap-marine Moon Cafe's and
Starkins' version of the Smith case, as it is recounted in his own book and as the events are picked up by Yee, will demonstrate this.
Yee's synopsis of "The Janet Smith Mystery" focuses on the following details:
Wong Foon Sing's discovery of Janet Smith. dead from a gunshot wound to the head, on
July 26th. 1924: the violence of the initial interrogation of the Chinese houseboy. and his scapegoating for the crime: Wong's disappearance dunng the trial and his subsequent accounts of being beaten and tomired by men in white robes; the indictment of twelve people for Wong's kidnapping, including "operatives of the Canadian Detective Bureau, several members of the Point Grey Police Force. and three members of the Scottish societies"(76-77). Finaily. Yee notes that "When Wong came before the grand jury that fall. the juron found insufficient evidence against him and released him"(77).
Significantly. Yee's othenvise thorough summary omits the participation of two Chinese men in the initial interrogation of Foon Sing (Starkins 58-59}. Still. Yee's synopsis is consistent rvith both Starkhs' book and Birney's recollections in its emphasis that "it was obvious [that Foon Sing] wasn't a murderer at dl. but a poor beaten-up Chinese houseboy sornebody was trying to framè0(Birney1 8). Lee's dual accounts of the Smith case, both the extemally narrated version and Morgan's rendition. are striking in their contrast to this general consensus; they neither assert Foon Sing's innocence nor register his protracted mistreatment by the white community. In fact, the only interrogation and torture that Lee depicts is Foon Sing's abuse at the hands of the Benevolent Association. ostensibly to assure that Foon Sing perform well during the inquests, the trial and any other son of questionhg that might arise: "he learned the version of the one and only story that he was to repeat rather quickly, even under tortwe7'(219). For her characterization of Foon Sing, Lee has scant information to work from; as Starkins notes,
"among the hundreds of articles that would eventually be written about Wong, only one contained a physical description of the man [. . .] 'He is of the modem. educated type. dressed in styleo"(94).Again, Lee chooses to manipulate the historical details to their most negative conclusion. associating the houseboy with the ')loimg, hostile loners [. . .j who'd just as soon tell you to go die! [. . .] As soon as they got off the boat, they were al1 out for a good time and easy money"(80).
Lee's unfavourable representation of Chinatown has met with some criticism.
Mile Maria Noëlle Ng allows that "Disa~oearingMoon Cafe is a ground-breaking
work." she perceives its writing of Chinatown as a case of "wallowing in [a] nostalgie
recapitulation of what the white community has done to the Chinese"(l64). Ng is especially critical of Leek figuring of the Benevolent Association's interrogation of Foon
Sing. arguing that its *-imagesare negative: patriarchal. pamnoid, potentially violent.
illegal and, as the scene develops. deeply rnisogyniaic" (1 65). There is some tmth in Ng's
assertion that "Lee's Chinese men fit a pattern established by western writers like
Somerset Maugham and films like Polanski3 Chinatown"(l66). Lee's designation of
Gwvei Chang as "Boss Wongu(l 13) is as self-aware as the description of Mui Lan as '*a cruel court eunuch in an oped7(57), as I will explain be~ow.'~Ng's basic quarrel with
Lee's novel is that these "stereotypical representations"(l67) do not "contribute to a nuanced awareness of curent (or even pst) Chinese Canadian immigrant culture"(168).
Ng's analysis, to my min& suffers fiom an intemal contradiction. On the one hand, she is critical of the "nostaigic recapitulation of what the white comunity has done to the
Chinese"(which does not really apply to Lee's novel). On the other hand, Ng condemns the negative portrayais of histoncal Chinatown as being "'quite alien to recent immigrants"(l64j, forcing her to "explain to [her] students that these charactea are not at al1 representative of Chinese Canadians then or now"(167). Ng seems to have missed the novel's own depiction of the very sort of cross-generational scrutiny she champions; as
Morgan reports to Kae, "'seventeen yean after the race riots of 1907. [Chinatown] had become quite the thriving, respectable little establishment. The streets were clean. Mostly paved. They even had street lamps"(68). As argued above. one of the most important functions of Disa~pearineMoon Cafe's stnicture is that it allows repetitive. yet contradictory. readings to engage wvith one another. Whereas Chao does not want to see
Lee's negative images, Ng wants to contain hem as examples of Lee's lamentable
'~endencyto self-exoticize'y 165). Lee signals her awareness of these sorts of cnticai bises in Morgan's criticism of oung Kae: "for a supposedly intelligent girl. your thinking is awhilly one-dimensiona11(69).
Unfortunately. Ng leaves unexpiored the effect of Lee's "stereotypical representations" of Chinatown. as well as how such stereotyping modifies the way we read the novel's representation of histoncal events. Huggan sugests that Kae's concern with "ihepeople around [her who] wore tsvo faced masks" is -'addressed. in Disa~pearing Moon Cafe, by providing a senes of contendhg - often contradictory - narratives. None of these narratives is authentic, or complete, or even reliable: none cm be traced back to a single source, or to an identifiable point of originW(41).Among the histones that Lee mobilizes is the history of the ccliurd representation of Chinese cornmunities by
Westerners, fiom Kae's desire to "cack[le] 'Charlie Chan! Cat-and-mouse and rnothers!."(22) in the face of her mother's mysterious examination of baby Bobby. to
Morgan's comic recitation of the early twentieth-century conception of the Chinese as
"filthy minded, slant-eyed vermin [. . . with] ten-inch fingemails''(67): from the parodic association between Kae's aunt and the eponyrnous heroine of the 196 1 film The Worid of Suzie Wong (Beauregard 65) to Kae's vision of "an enticing movie poster with a title like Temple of Wonped Women, in romantic script: 'They were fidl of ornament. devoid of truth!"'(209). By invoking this litany of cultural clichés, Lee further demonstrates the ease with which histoncal or genealogical playen are cast in hackneyed roles. as well as the seductions of inhabiting them. To thoroughiy play her part as genealogical fabricator.
Mui Lm cornes to believe in her husband's almost legendary power and in the integrity of her own operatic mask. To address the way role-playing and fabrication are reproduced by succeeding genealogical plonen. Lee. ofien by way of Kae. reads the older cultural refercnces through the lens of popular culture.
Lee's "New World Myth'. is concemed not only with how the Chinese Canadian emerges out of the legends of bone-hunting in the Gold Mountain but also with the clichés that circulate wiùun the community. Kae begins her narrative by adrnitting that "1 thought that by applying attention to al1 the important events such as the births and the deaths. the intricate complexities of a farnily with chinese mots could be massaged into a suant, digestible unit"(l9), a conviction that is demolished in her writing of her family's geneaiogical plot. This is not to suggest that Lee considers the writing of a family's history to be a worthless or futile exercise. Rather, the genealogical plotter should always remain aware that in retelling family history she or he is working within a tradition of fabrication and that ail attempts to advance one version over another, to establish a sole
"golden chaint, may prove dangerous if also beautifid. Lee's encounter with the knotting of multiple histories is like the encounter Gwei Chang, Lee Chong and the bones of their
"uncles" have with Kelora's capricious river: *Sometimes the river was calm and giving; sometirnes it knocked their senses askew [. . .]. Sometimes the river was fretfil. contorting back on itself. treacherous. Other times, the river sprawled and meandered through pastures and rich flatlands; they glided dong its shim~eringreflections [. . .]. At the end of their journey. they walked away transformed~18). Certain readings of the relationship between Kae and Hermia, such as those of Guy Beauregard and Donald Goelhicht, contend that the final event in the novel's timeline depicts "Kaewsfleeing Canada and her husband to live with her lifelong Chinese Canadian fnend Hermia Chow in Hong Kong, a symbolic famiiial 'retim' to China"(Goe1lnicht 3 14). Both cntics argue that such a chronological ending is "highly problematic"(Goel1nicht 3 15). as it appears to deny "a space for Chinese Canadians in Canada [. . .] (where is the space in Canada for Kae and Hemlla's same-sex relationship?)"(Beauregard 66). While I agree that Kae does af5ian imminent "joumey"(21 O) to Hong Kong, her Febniary, 1987 letter to Hemiia, in which she provides details of her arriva1 in Hong Kong (216), hardly suggests a permanent move to China. It is Hermia's telegram that playfully proposes that they ''LM HAPPiLY EVER AFTER TOGETHER"(2 1 6). Further. the numerous lesbian characten that are unproblematically ponrayed in BelIflancer seem to disprove any anxiety about Chinese Canadian same-sex relationships that Beauregard perceives. ' 1 raise Joy Kogawa's representation of the Aboriginal figure in Obasan as a point of cornparison because of the critical debate surrounding it. Frank Davey has cnticized Kogawa for "seek[ingl some pure traditional Indian culture," which he sees as "an anachronistic and rnuseum-like god"(60-6 1). Vautier disagrees with Davey. reading Kogawa's collapsing of Abonginal and Japanese experience as "an exploration of multiplicity in myth"( 179). ' As Vautier contends. *.the narraton' drive to affirm their version of the past (-it happened this way') contlicts with their and our awareness of a fùndaniental epistemological uncertainty about ever really knowing the past9'(34). 4 Moses and Aaron are the grandsons of Abraham and Chaim, respectively. The "ghostly" aspect of bis repetition is enhanced by the fact that Abraham mistakes the boys for each other (334-35). -C Such episodic juxtapositions are Lee's most common method of stmcturaily ernphasizing thematic repetitions. For example, Lee emphasizes the theme of power struggle in her juxtaposition of scenes between Mui Lan and Fong Mei; between Morgan and Kae. and between Foon Sing and Janet Smith. 6 Rita Fetski's point about the primarily "content-based aesthetic [which] is [. . .] unable to account adequately for the 'literariness' of texts"(28) is considered further in my chapter on &-Marie MacDonald and in my conclusion. 7 From its earliest reviews. Lee's novel has been perceived as comtering the force of silence: Karen Romell quotes Yee's declaration that Disa~warinnMoon Cafe "'will lead the way for other Chinese Canadian witers to break the code of silence'"(Romell 59). Bennett Lee notes that the tem many-mouthed birds -'cornes from a Chinese expression used to describe someone who talks ioo much"(7). He suggests that the contributors to the Many-Mouthed Birds anthology "are breakhg a long and O fien self- imposed silenceœ'(8). It should also be noted that, whereas Obasan's prefatory materiai includes Kogawa's remarks that "Although this novel is based on historicai events, and many of the persons narned are ml, most of the characters are fictional"(i), Lee flatly asserts that "Al1 of the characters and experiences depicted in this book are fictionai"(i). 'O Both Huggan and Bennett Lee make note of Lee's allusions to traditional Cantonese opera (Huggan 38, n I 1, Lee 4). Aon-Marie MacDonald's Fall On Your becs and the Hermetic Genealogy
Mrs. Luvovitz looks east at the horizon and remuids herself of what she has leamed: that nothing in life is not mixed. (Fall On Your Knees)
Dream: In the sea there lies a tremure. To reach it, [the dreamer] hac to dive through a narrow opening. This is dangerous, but down below he willfind a cornpanion. The dreumer iakes ihe plunge into the dark and discovers a beautrful garden in the depths. (C.G.Jung. Ps~choloevand Alchem~)
The way 1 think about the book is that something is trying to be bom. (AnnoMarie MacDonald. interview)
Limbo and Alchemy
AM-Marie MacDonald concludes her interview with Eva Tihanyi with a description of how the process of writing Fall On Your Knees began:
1 started with a room in a house and the name of a character and a face. 1
lived for a long time with those very small components until 1 was allowed
to Ieave one room of the house and see that there was an attic - of course
there*sgot to be an anic! It was a long time before 1 was allowed to leave
the house and find out where we were. (23)
The novel's prologue is similarly made up of gœsmallcomponents,?' as the narrator describes a series of photographs. giving piecemeal introduction to Capc Breton in the early twentieth century. to a house on Water Street. and to the memben of the Piper family that are the focus of the story. The prologue's opening sentence, "They're al1 dead now"(1). esiablishes a tension between the absence of the "dead" and the presence of a narrative of "now," and is the first indication of the novel's representation of various types of limbo. The title of the prologue, "Silent Pictures," denotes the temporal entraprneni of characters who can no longer speak for themselves, while the pichire of
Mercedes "saying Shshsh(3) captures the indetecminacy between saying and not saying. nie picture of Materia. the matriarch of the Piper household, shows her "half in half out of the oven"(2), dressed in mourning for her daughter Kathleen and, as it is in this
position that she dies. for herself. The narrator explains that the picture of James,
Materia's husband. shows hirn asleep, "not dead9'(2),and goes on to mention such
unfinished or absent pictures as those of Ambrose. who died soon after he was bom; of
Kathleen. and of Other Lily who is "in limbo [. . .] that's why this picture of Other Lily is
a white bIank"(2). The picture of Frances. sister to Kathieen and Mercedes, presents her
as a slippery figure that has evaded the confines of a photograph. The photograph of
Frances is a "rnoving pictureg9(3).foretelling Frances' devotion to the world of silent
movies. More signi ficantly. the suggestion that while "she's not in it yettY3), Frances
might very well break the surface of the image of the creek and "stare slraight at usF(3)
reiterates the novel's concem with the tension between absence and imminence.
especially the tension between silence and saying.
MacDonaId's engagement with various kinds of tensions, with the condition of
being in betwren. counters significant aspects of the conservative genealogical plot.
especially as it has been associated with the structural iinearity of a narrative. Tobin
explicates her idea of the "genealogical imperative" of narrative by comparing the
binding relationship children have to their fathea to the hction of time in the novel. She
notes that Temporal mteriority thus acquires a rnetaphysical priority. prestige is affixed to the point of ongin, authonty resides in a claim to antiquity"(l1). The conservative genealogical plot is thus thematically and stnicturally predicated on the rudiments of
Genesis' patrilineal genealogical lists, emphasizing sequence, continuity and wholeness.
Meir Sternberg further observes that "On the narrative surface itself, Genesis unobstrusively ushen fathers out ahead of time in order to give their sons a clear nui, as persons and inheritors. till their own tum cornes to exit fiom history"(1 18). Again, the format of ihe patrilineal list. the features of which "privilege tirne over space values"(Stemberg 1 17), is a continuou and rapid reiteration of the authonty of origin.
The rapidity of reiteration. together with the simplicity and uniformity of the "begat" pattern. adds the effect of predetermination to the format, the effect of an inevitable tram fer of power.
In Goodnieht Desdernona t Good Moming Juliet), MacDonald initiates her challenge to the idea of inevitability by way of Constance Ledbelly's thesis which speculates about the comic features concealed in Othello and Romeo and Juliet:
Of al1 Shakespeare's tragedies. 'Othello' and 'Romeo and Juliet' produce
the most ambivalent and least Aristotelean responses. In neither play do
the supposedly fate-ordained deaths of the flawed heroes and heroines,
seem quite inevitable [. . .]. In boih plays, the tragic characters, particularly
Rorneo and Othello. have abundant opponunity to Save themselves. The
fact that they do not Save themselves. [sic] tends to characterize them more
as the unwitting victims of a disastrous practical joke - rather than the
heroic instruments of an inexorable Fate. ( 15) The bulk of the play's action, as well as its resolution, questions the idea of Fate:
Desdemona is assured a good night's sleep. Juliet awakens to greet a riew day and
Constance. whose fountain pen has turned to gold. becomes the Author of her own text.
The symbolic emphasis on authonhip. while related perhaps to the Unminent completion of Constance's dissertation, is associated mostly with self-authorship. The Chorus'
Epilogue alludes not to material changes but to the "alchemy of ancient hieroglyphsl
[which] has permeated the unconscious rnindY'(87).Thus, it is not the undoing of the
actual machinery of Fate that transfomis the tragedy into comedy, but that perspective is
privileged over action. The three heroines of Goodnieht Desdemona (Good Moming
Juliet) leam to see their stories differently and agree 'ITo [ive by questions, not their
solution:" to celebrate "confusion" over '*cenainty"(85). This focus on the power of
perspective. on the theme of compet ing interpretation and authorship signi fied by
Constance's golden Pen. looms large in al1 of MacDonald's work.
Whereas SKY Lee's challenges to the force of predestination were signified by
the cycles and juxtapositions of her episodic narrative. MacDonald creates spheres of
action in her narratives that are removed from the sphere of redism. In Goodnight
Desdemona (Good Mornine Juliet), Constance is sucked into the worlds of Othelio and
Romeo and Juliet via the nbbit hole of her wastebasket (28). and it is wivithin this
"warp"(28) space that she gains knowledge about her own identity. MacDonald retums to
the device of the **wup"space in The Aiab's Mouth, which features ghostly visitations.
nightmares and a trip to The Undenvorld. and in Fa11 On Your Knees. which is filled with
references to spaces that allow for otherworldly experience. in The Atuc. The Pearls. and
Three Fine Girls. a play cotlectively created with Jennifer Brewin. Leah Cherniak, Alisa Palmer and Martha Ross, the alternative sphere of action is the condition of childhood that haunts the Fines' attic. MacDonald's various '%a$' spaces are types of limbo in which the neglected period of indeterrninacy between cause and effect may be extended and explored. Although the passage into and release from limbo occur in time, the condition of being in limbo is associated more powerfûlly with space. Limbo is the place where unsettled plans. persons and souls abide. MacDonald's many references to the condition of limbo illustrate her desire to intempt the force of temporal linearity and its association with the idea of inevitability.
Before moving on to a more detailed examination of how MacDonald constructs the attic as a type of limbo. 1 would like to suggest another way of thinking about her method of revaluing space over time. The references made by the Chorus figure in
Goodnieht Desdernona (Good Momine Juliet) to "Swift Mercury, that changing e1ement7*(14). and The alchemy of ancient hieroglyphsW(87)signal MacDonald's appeal to alchemy. Like Robertson Davies before her. MacDonald oflen uses the precepts of
Jungian psychology as a rudimentary mythos out of which character types are created and according to which the story unïolds. In particular. MacDonald is fascinated by Jung's notion of the unitary self that is held together by a fusion of opposites. as well as the attendant symbolic images used in Jung's alchemical studies. The name Constance
Lecibelly refers to --the heaq metal which the alchemists believed could be transmuted into pure silver or gold"(Abraharn I 15). Pearl Maclsaac of The Arab's Mouth is the next in MacDonald's series of pretematural figures who have symbolic value within an alchemical system of interpretation. The "pearl" in her name stands for the "sign that the matter of the Stone has reached ablution. during which nage the matter is washed of its impurities"(Abraham IJZ).' As for the Piper women, Materia's name is a direct reference to the prima materia of aichemy. which Jung pinpoints as the "primordial matnarchal world which [was] overthrown by the masculine world of the father"(Psvcho10~par.
26). Even the final pairing of saintly Lily with world-weary Rose is a version of Jung's coniiinctio, in which a symbol of purity is linked with a symbol of wisdom (Abraham
1 17. 173).
MacDonald's references to alchemy are more than a key to her characten. It is
Jung's proposition about the unconscious mind's endeavor to achieve a unity out of polarities that she thernatizes. Her celebration of "conhsion"(Goodnighi 85), of the fact that. as Pearl declares. "There's more than one answer to every question"(77) is in keeping with the alchernical occupation with enigma. David Meakin argues that, "From the outset. alc hemy plunges us into the realm of paradox9'(1 1 ). His analysis of how writers have employed the '-sel f-re ferential system" of alchemy acknowledges the modern and postrnodem appeal of a system that "[defers] tangible and verifiable truth ofany kind"(29). Meakin goes on to Say that "initiation appears in practice [. . .] as something
Iess than mystical illumination - at best it is an endless process"(29). As 1 will demonstrate below. MacDonald's writing of the genealogical plot produces tenuous patterns and imminent tales. For al1 her attachent to the idea oT possi ble unity. manifested in her devotion to nddles that run throughout her work. she is ultimately cautious about exclusive solutions.' Jung ac knowiedges that, despite the goal of the unified self. the experience of contradiction and paradox "is one of our most valuable spirituai possessions"(Psvcholoev par. 18). Likewise. MacDonald's work is grounded in the principle that. as Constance proclaims. "Life is .. . a harmony of polar oppositesJ with gorgeous mixed-up places in betweenm(85).It is this principle that guides MacDonald's writing of a genealogical plot that indulges in paradox and tens.ion, as is revealed in her exploration of certain motifs. Her interest in the Gothic formula of hiding secrets in the attic reflects hcr concem with the tension between time and space values. Her rewriting of various twin tales allows her to explore the tension between truth and falsehood, as well as the tension between the two axes of genealogy. And her subversion of the cune motif reveals the paradoxical bond between control and chaos, as well as the unruly force of the principle of genealogical inj unction.
One of MacDonald's favourite "places in between" is the attic. cspecially in its function as a place to hide secrets. Her use of this forrnula shows her debt to the Victorian
Gothic novels. especiaily the work of Charlotte Brontë. While I am interested in
MacDonald's subversion of Gothic motifs, especially as this subversion relates to her rewriting of the conservative genealogical plot. the Gohic is only one of the traditions that she manipulates. Jemifer Andrews argues that, while -'Fa11 On Your Knees could be mistaken for a Gothic novel,"(7) it is actually more of a magic realist work. In Melanie
Stevenson's discussion of MacDonald's exploration of race. she suggests that Fall On
Your Knees includes a parody of Othello. My own exploration ot'MacDonald-s witing about twins will refer to Shakespeare. the Bible, and an alchernicd system of interpretation. Like Davies. MacDonald is a scavenger of tradition and genre. Her work is a ws Hermericm (Hermetic vessel) filled with various transmuting elements; it is like "a kind of matrix or uterus from which thefilficsphilosophoncm.the miraculous Stone. is to be bom"(Psycho1oev par. 338). Thus, her thematic focus on "mixed-up places in between" is amplified by the eclecticism of her allusions and by the shifting generic models that she makes use of.
My motive for focusing on MacDonald's reworking of ihe aformentioned Iiterary motifs requires some explanation, as a discussion of the genealogical plot might just as easily (and perhaps more self-evidently) have focused on ethnicity, gender, sexuality and the effects ~fincest.~Frequently, the critical conversation about MacDonald's earlier work tackles such "real" political issues. Although both AM Wilson and Shannon
Hengen take MacDonald's inversion of the tragic genre in Goodniht Desdernona Good
Momine Juliet) as their critical point of departure, their concems are pnncipally political.
Wilson hones in on the depiction of Constance as a female academic in a Canadian university and asserts that "MacDonald's revision is a political act which empowers women through the figure of Constance Ledbelly. who is doubly colonized as a woman and as a Canadian'(4). Hengen also concentrates on the significance of Constance's profession. reading the play's "triurnphant" ending against the "academic climate of southem Ontario of the 1990s"(102). The upshot of this critical focus on Constance as an actual depiction of a Canadian female academic is a gathering hesitmcy about the comic elements of the play. Despite her initial premise of examining MacDonald's challenge to the hierarchical form of tragedy. Wilson does not interrogate the function of the play's comedy. except to dismissively allude to *'thebad puns and the general atmosphere of fun somewhat akin to an dl-girl pajama party"(l0). And for al1 of Hengen's introductory discussion about the profaning power of *?hecomic carnivalesque"(97). her aatement that "perhaps in a still more subversive ferninist comedy [Constance] would marry a woman of colour (a dentist?) and become Queen's University Principai"(l02) is not only a bizarre equivocation of the play's actual contents but also an apology for the fact that
Goodnight Desdernona (Good Mominp Juliet) is a very hiMy, very commercially successful play. Wilson and Hengen's analyses of MacDonald's play are subject to the sarne sort of blind spots that hamper Chao and Ng's work on Disa~warineMoon Cafe.
My own abiding concern with the poetics of the genealogical plot has led me to give priority to the literary. to observe how political content is stnicturally and thematically organized. 1 agree with Rita Felski's assertion that "A feminist textual theory cannot simpiy move from text to world: it rnust be able to account for the levels of mediation between literary and social domains"(8).
Thus. the attic. as it is depicted in Fail On Your Knees. as well as in The Arab's
-- -- Mouth. functions as a space that both cancels out the structural and thematic imperative of temporal continuity and undermines the force of genre. The nanator of Fall On Your
Knees drops the first hint regarding the significance of the Pipen' attic early in the story:
"James and Matena moved into their big two-story white hehouse, with attic. a month later. But just because it was new, doesngtmean ii wasn't hauntedY(l8). This pointed reference to the attic. as well as the rnetonymic comection made between its merely spatial and its paranormal function, conjures up the role of the attic in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic literature. MacDonald's handling of the attic invokes the tradition of wornen &-riters who wote Gothic fiction, as well as the ensuing feminist criticisrn that investigates the genre's depiction of the pauiarchal suppression of female sexuality. in The îvladwoman in the Anic. for example. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar consider the implications of the physical and social constricticïs placed on nineteenth- century women writers for the fashioning of space within their work:
anxieties about space sometimes seem to dominate the literature of both
nineteenth-century wornen and their descendants. In the genre Ellen Moers
has recently called "fernale Gothic," for instance. heroines who
characteristically inhabit mystenously intricate or uncornfortably stifling
houses are ofien seen as captured. fettered, trapped, even buried alive. But
other kinds of work by wornen - novels of manners, domestic tales. lyric
poems - also show the same concern with spatial constrictions. (83)
Gilbert and Gubar's discussion of lane Eyre reflects the dominant psqshaanalytic argument of their work. They argue that while the "inexplicable locked rooms guard a secret" that is admittedly significant in terms of the novel's plot, the syrnbolic value of
Thomfield Hall's attic is associated with Jane's consciousness, and "soon becornes a complex focal point where Jane's rationality (what she has learned from Miss Temple) and her inationality (her "hunger, rebellion and rage") intersectV(348).MacDonald's use of the attic image invokes and challenges Charlotte Brontë's marking of the attic space as a storehouse for the pst, as well as such popularly established conceptions of the attic as the synbolic subconscious self.
For al1 of Charlotte Brontë's interest in the Gothic attic, no doubt culled from her readings of h RadclifFe and Horace Walpole. her representations of attic spaces. like her portrayals of ghosts. are more insistently realistic than is generally suggested. ln both
Jane E?e and Villette. the seemingly haunted anics. as well as their mystenous occupants. are finally represented in terms of their substantive function. In the case of Jane Eyre, Bertha Mason is not a ghost or a monster, but a real, if thoroughly unfortunate, woman. In Villette, the ghostly nun turns out to be Ginerva Fanshawe's lover. whose use of the attic to gain access to his lady causes Lucy Snowe many a scart.. Brontë's construction of the attic. however, is explicitly metaphoncal in terms of its role as a storage place, particularly as a repository for the secrets of the pst. During Jane's first complete tour of Thornfield Hall. she observes that the attic rooms themselves are filled with old fùmiture? like a museurn, and that -"A11these relics gave the third story of
Thomfield Hail the aspect of a home of the past: a shnne to memoryW(l13). When the host of the inn describes the fire at Thornfield Hall to Jane, during which the "secrett' of
Bertha is buried forever. he declares that "hardly any of the fumiture could be saved"(4 15). In Fa11 On Your Knees, the hope chest in the Pipenoattic operates as a
"shrine to merno-." It retains the smell of cedar that represents "theOld Country"'(25) to
Materia and. as Mercedes notes, is a useful storage place for su& items that are as impossible to throw away as they are to use: "The hope chest is a good place to store things like the ruined Old-Fashioned Girl because the attic is separate fiom the rest of the house. In a state of perpetual quarantine"(258). The novefs final reference io the hope chest. in which Lily intends to dispose of the family baptismal gown only to discover the partially decomposed body of Trixie (446). serves the sarne function as the fie- devastation of Thornfield Hall's furniture. The smell of death finally puts the pst to rest and helps release the repository of ruined objects from their purgatonal state.
Before rnoving on to a more detailed analysis of MacDonald's representation of the attic. 1 would like to discuss the allusions made to this image by Robertson Davies, not merely because he represents another Canadian imagining of the anic. but because of his influence on MacDonald's work. Elizabeth Harvey begins her analysis of Davies'
Rebel Aneels as a fonn of cultural memory with an explanation of the Renaissance understanding of literary digestion: "Literary digestion incorporates what is extemal or foreign aid breaks down this integral form, assimilating it so that the othemess of its former identity is subsumed within the new form it acquires"(92). Harvey examines the process of literary digestion as it relates to the motif of "filth therapy" that rwis throughout Davies' novel. She suggests that Mamusia's explication of the bomari, whereby stnnged instruments that have lost their voice are wrapped in lamb's wool and laid to rest in copper kettles filled with hone's dung (Davies 1jM6). "thematizes the modem Canadian novelist's relationship to the burden of the inherited literary tradition, since it exemplifies the digestive transformation that produces a revitalized 'voice"'(93).
Many of MacDonald's interests, from her exploration of Jungian psychology and concem with the topic of identity formation to her attachrnents to both the world of Canadian theatre and the sensibilities of Victonan literature. represent a gentle "digestive transformation?' of the tradition that Davies represents. Various critics have accused
Davies of being unremittingly elitist. suggesting that the ecleçticism of his subject matter functions as a type of smoke-screen for his conservative doc~ine.~While my irnmediate project is not to dispute this argument, 1 am unconvinced that his novels are such entirely closed ideological and aesthetic systems as some critics contend. His observable influence on a writer like MacDonald reveals his place in a Canadian Iiterary trajectory that is continuously reinventing literary foms and themes. A cornparison between
MacDonald's attics and Davies' treatment of the Gothic attic in MatkBred in the Bone
\.tilt demonstrate this. Like MacDonald's novel, What's Bred in the Bone is a multi-generational tale which seeks to explore the intluence of family. and in particulai the effect of family
"secrets," on the formation of identity. One of the central images of Davies' novel? and one which provides much of the impetus for the final section of the Cornish trilogy,
Lyre of Orpheus is a depiction of the Comish geneaiogy as it is portrayed in Francis
Cornish's allegorical painting, The Marriage at Cana." Like Mercedes' finai family tree, as well as the hieroglyphic family portrait sculpted by Régine MacPhail in The Arab's
-9Mouth Francis' genealogical representation not only affirrns alliances of blood and their silent influence but also discloses certain facts about the farnily which have ken
previously obscured. In homage to the work of Charlotte Brontë. both MacDonald and
Davies have hidden these family secrets in the attic. The Piper attic is the scene of the
double event of Kathleen's death and the birth of Lily and her twin brother Arnbrose; the attic of Belle Moral, the MacIsaac homestead in The Arab's Mouth. serves to confine yet
another secret twin. the unforninate Claire: and finally. in the attic of St. Kilda Francis
Comish discovers his mentally and physically impaired older brother. Francis the fust.
who is affectionately, and somewhat bathetically, referred to as "The Looner."
A notable difference between the work of MacDonald and that of Davies, a difference that has repercussions for the revelation of secrets and genedogicai renderings.
is the marked variance of their focus. For while What's Bred in the Bone may investigate
the influence of family, it is not principdly a story about the Comish family. As is the
case for most of Davies' novels. the predominant organizing principle is the story of an
individual. While Davies' use of the trilogy. as well as his occasional experiments wîth
the frarne tale. allows him to explore the idiosyncrasies of perspective, on the whole his work diffea fiom MacDonald in that her focus is more dispersed. Her plays and her novel are al1 ensemble pieces, and there is very linle sense of leading and/or secondary playen.
What's Bred in the Bone, on the contrary, is focused on the life of Francis Comish, as is
made explicit by the Erame tale of Francis' Daimon Maimas and the Lesser Zadkiel. Thus.
like Bertha Mason before him, the Looner is stored up in the attic like so much old
fumiture and is restricted fiom escaping his single plot hction.
In many ways, the figure of Francis the fim is a parody of Bertha. Whereas the
revelation of the existence of Rochester's first wife is deferred until it actually intermpts
the marriage ceremony between Rochester and Jane. Francis is able to discover the secret
of St. Kilda's attic by walking upstairs in his pajamas (1 56). Further, Brontë's
construction of the "rnadwornan in the attic," whether you read her as Jane's dark double
or as the embodiment of colonialist anxiety, is of a dangerous aqd monstrous figure, as
compared to the Looner. who is merely benigniy grotesque in appearance. The death of
the Looner by self-inflicted "drownding"(233), which Francis only hem about yean after
the fact. is thus a parody of the fiery and catalytic demise of Benha. The grounds for
Davies' parody may be examined by way of what Patricia Monk has determined as the
Jungian "infrastructure" of his fiction (19) and the role it plays in the constmction of plot
whereby the events presented in the story signi& primady in tems of a retrospective
narrative. As the very title of What's Bred in the Bone suggests. the events of the novel
are organized by Davies into a story of Jungian individuation; as Francis realizes
moments before his death. "even things that he had oRen wished otherwise [. . .] were
part of a pattern not of his making"(522). Daviesoconstruction of the Looner as a
diminished version of Bertha makes explicit his purely functional role. as even Francis
considers his older brother in psychologically utilikuian terms. When the more Gothically inclined Dr. J.A. Jerome asserts, '+ 'That thing in the attk rotted St. Kilda' "(456), he is contradicting Francis' conviction that the Looner is %e secret, the inadmissible element which, as he now undentood. had played so great a part in making him an artist"(459).
Davies' bathetic manipulation of Brontë's motif whereby the madwoman of the attic is thoroughly tamed, however. is countered by MacDonald's handling of the attic and al1 its accompanying secrets as something more than a mere device to direct the logic of the plot.
At fint glance. it appears that the attic of Belle Moral in The Arab's Mouth retains most traits of the Gothic. For the majority of the play. its mysterious contents are inaccessible to both the audience and many of the play's characten. and it is eventuaily revealed as a prison for a "mad" creature. who is both manacled and hooded (73). In the final scenes of the play. however. MacDonald takes the audience inside the attic only to reverse these Gothic conditions. The creature in the attic is ultimately proved to be quite sane: as Pearl asserts. "Claire is not mad. She's angy"(77). In tne end it is Claire who inherits the farnily home. In Fa11 On Your Knees, the conventions of the attic formula are fùrther exploded as is immediately evidenced by the room's relative accessibility. Despite the fact that the attic is metaphoricaily developed as a space of limbo or "perpetual qumtine"(258). it is both available and put to use by the whole family. In contrast to
Bertha and the Looner. the multiple secrets that are contained in the Piper attic do not operate merely as catalysts for change in a larger narrative. nor as discrete metaphorical units that are subordinate to other themes. The noveïs most significant attic scene, which occupies al1 of Book Two. chronicles Kathleen's death and the births of Lily and Arnbrose. This scene, however, does not function as the climax of the plot but is only one of the myriad crises depicted; the "secrets" that are initiated here manage to escape the confines of the attic space. Not only is the truth about the father of Kathleen's babies deferred until the last section of the book, but the secret of Lily's nvin brother becomes not one but a series of stories that Frances tells Lily.
As a limbic/ hermetic space, the Piper attic allows for the probing of secrets in such a way as to supplement the function of secrets in the linear plot. MacDonald's modification of the Gothic attic reveais her interest in exploring the qualities of mystery rather than simply fashioning a solution. Jung States that "thealchernical opus deals in the main not just with chemical expenments as such, but with something resembling psychic processes expressed in pseudochemical langage (Psvcholog par. 342). The point here is that alcherny is as rnuch a psychic as a physical process: it is as concemed with imer change as it is with outer. Through "projection.'? the alchemist's imer transformations were "experienced [. . .j as a property of matter"(Psvcholoq par. 346). whereby psychic change had the effect of changing fom even as form had the effect of changing the
psyche. The paradox of these dual processes is reflected in MacDonald's construction of
the Piper attic as a space that is the site of physical and psychic transf~rmation,as well as a transfomiable place.6 The attic contains Materia's -&OIdCounuy"(90). It also holds the
image of Kathleenosbody which James permanently remembers as "an overdone.
tasteless. rnelodrarnatic painting"(l43) and which little Frances tums into a "cave"
painting which she '-will forget almon irnmediately. but [. . .] will never get over"( 1-16).
For Mercedes. the attic is a non-room that she instinctive- avoids, except as a storage
place for '.ruined" things ((258); for Frances and Liiy. it is the best place for playing and storytelling. And, as much as each character conceives of the attic space differently. they al1 becorne different versions of themselves within and because of it.
Twin Taies
Slippery Frances is consumed by her role as the Piper family's retainer of secrets and stories. Frances plays this role until the end of her own life, when she %es her last sprint of energy to pry [Mercedes'] hands away, and to speak the words"(557), words that her older sister has consistently tried to hush. Her capacity as storyteller is initiated in
Book Three of Fa11 On Your Knees when. during her mother's fimeral, Frances is stricken with an attack of the giggles. .As she convulses behind her hands, expecting to be punished any moment by her father. she is surprised instead by "a gentle pat on her head - her father's sympathetic hand. her sister's offer of a sodden hankyW(142). Frances realizes that both James and Mercedes ihink that she is crying:
Frances learns something in this moment that will dlow ber to survive and
function for the rest of her life. She finds out that one thing cmlook like
another [. . .]. In this moment. fact and tmth become separated and
commence to wander like twins in a fairy-tale, waiting to be reunited by
that special sorneone who possesses the secret of telling them apart. ( 142)
The reference to twins marks one of MacDonald's most insistent motifs. which is perhaps related to her background in theatre and. in particular. her experiencer with Shakespeare's plays. As opposed to a prevalent theatrical use of twins which. in service to the larger plot of mistaken identity. is predicated on the condition of sarneness, MacDonald's representations of twins emphasize profusion and the singularity of identity. The prerequisite sameness that defines the twins of The Comed~of Enon and also Viola and
Sebastian of Twelfth Nieht is only proved to be an illusion in order to facilitate heterosexual pairings (which are in themselves similar to one another), and thereby fulfill a conservative comedic code. MacDonald's twins, however, are never sübsurned into a new pairing of heterosexual marriage: their siagularity, even within the twin relationship. is a mode1 of the way in which MacDonald's work unsettles both genenc expectations and conservative social categories.
While Kathleen's twins, Ambrose and Lily, are initially depicted as "male and female segments joined at the belly by a common mot system," their independent existence is imrnediately stressed: "They become babies just in time: slick bloody. new. wailing. squinting. furious. two"( 136). After Ambmse has died, however. his separate existence becornes bound up with Frances' discovery about truth and falsehood. which is actually a discovery about the instability of the line that separates the two. When Frances takes on the responsibility of telling Lily about both Kathleen (uid Ambrose. she is simultaneously testing the power of stories both to bring into being and to controvert various possible realities. Ambrose's profiigate existence is thus an elaboration on the role of the secret twin in The Arab's Mouth. In this play. MacDonald depicts the fallout from the death of the Maclsaac patriarch. Ramsay Maclsaac who. like James Piper, is convinced that his children. Pearl, Victor and Claire, are degenerating as a resuli of a flaw in his wife (Arab's 29-30). In the twins Victor and Claire "Maclsaac" (son of Isaac).
MacDonald revisits and revises the biblical story of Jacob and Esau. the twins who competed for supremacy even within their mother's womb. Claire's red. fÛqears link her with Esau. also bom red and hairy. and yet MacDonald's 'Victof' is quite content to impart his inheritance to his sibling. While the cut on Ambrose's ankle associaies him with ~acob?MacDonald again undermines the biblical story of inheritance both with her depiction of a gory Caesarean. and with the narrator's report that the position of the twins
'\vas pure roulette. The pair had ken revolving counter-clockwise in the chamber for weeks before their birth was triggereâ"(136). In her rewriting of the biblical story of genealogicd primacy. MacDonald marks Claire and Ambrose, respectively. as the sites of challenge to physical and metaphysical constructions of Iegitimacy and truth.
MacDonald's modulated application of the twin image may be examined by way of the distinct categories of the anomalous vernis the ambiguous that Mary Douglas develops in Puritv and Danger. In her introductory discussion about cultural regulations regarding pollution and their association to socieial systems of classification. Douglas establishes both the difference between ambiguities and anomalies. and the "various
[cultural or systemic] provisions for dealing with arnbiguous or anomalous eventsW(40).
The anomaly is simply that which is out of place, while the ambiguity is that which has more than one potential interpretation (38). The Arab's Mouth is concemed with anomaly. as is reflected by the play's many references to theories of biological evolution and its focus on Claire3 physical deforrnity.
From the very begiming of the play. Aunt Flora warns Pearl: "It's not natural to look too closely at nature's mistakes. You might look at something and find you can never look away again. The evil eye dwells in that which is unnaniral"(l1). As Douglas asserts. the wa)s in which cultures manage the existence of anomalies is ofien predicated on physical control(40) and on the development of laws and regulations: "oanomalous events may be labeled dangerous [. . . as th]helps to enforce conformity"(40-ll). Douglas' claim is reflected in the play by the authoritative chancter of Dr. Reid and his stance on the evolutionary process: "Variety is desirable only insofar as it is usehl. If, on his great ascent, man does not cast off his animal origins, he can oniy revert. Back to your disordered nightmare world. Back to the beastV(45).MacDonald's rebuttal to this narrowly "objective" position is, of course. the final portrait of the Macisaac family, which Pearl declares she "shall submit [. . .] to 'The Edinburgh Journal of Rules and
Exceptions'"(79), and whose title, "Aonaibh Ri Cheile" means "unite"(79). Thus. the anomaly, which is ultimately depicted as decidedly corporeal, is neither eliminated nor absorbed into a semblance of uniformity but is, in fact, affmed. Claire's relationship to the rest of the family. including her twin brother Victor. is marked specifically by her difference; the stage directions to the play point out that, when she stands to take her place in the tinal family photograph, "Her red enr s~undsstraight up. She looh very prerq'(78).
Whereas Claire is represented as an anomaly. which sets Victor's unique qualities into funher relief. Lily's twin Ambrose is represented in terms of arnbiguity. Not surprisingly. Frances takes Lily into the limbic attic for the series of ceremonial tellings about hbrose. It is in this space of indeterminacy that Frances refines the "rnoving pictures"(3) of her shi hing memory:
They are seated on the floor. cross-legged before the hope chest. This was
Kathleen's room. eh, Frances" always must be said, and the response,
.*That's ri& Lily, this is where she died." before they cm gei on with
whatever garne Frances has in mind. This liturgy serves to honour the story that no longer needs repeating. The story that Frances told Lily so
long ago and so ofien. (203)
As Douglas maintains, while the anomaly may be physically dominated, the managing of ambiguity relies on the hinction of interpretation (40), a fact reflected in Fa11 On Your
Knees by way of its emphasis on storytelling. Arnong Frances' stories about Kathleen and
Ambrose is her account of the orange cat who sucked Ambrose's breath away and was later drowned in the creek by James (205); her avowd that Arnbrose and Lily's father "is a black man from the Coke Ovens in Whitney Pier7'(249),and her fantastical descriptions of Arnbrose as Lily's guardian angel and nightly sentine! (268-69). Her stories, however, are not merely a "game" invented to entertain and tem@ her younger sister. As the narrator asserts. "Frances needs to Say a story out loud to divine how much truth nins beneath its surfaceW(321).Her storytelling functions as a type of talking cure to help her recall the events surrounding the night of Lily's birth, including the first instance of her father's sexual abuse.
The curative capacity of Frances' severai constructions of Ambrose recalls
Douglas' claim that ' Functions as a means to conjure fiction into fact. As the name stenciled on the side of his car, "Leo Taylor Transporty'(321),suggests, Leo becomes a type of material conveyor for the reunion of the discomected twins8 Mer Frances' first conversation with Leo, she "knows now what it is she must accomplish for Lily7'(336); with the birth of AnthonyIAloysius, Frances rituaily and symbolically succeeds in 3elling'' Lily's ambiguous twin brother back into existence. The twins of The Arab's Mouth and Fa11 On Your Knees are also conceived in terms of an alchemical system of interpretation. MacDonald has stated that, in writing Goodnkht Desdemona (Good Momine luliet), she was writing -'a Jungian fairy taleW(Much& Rudakoff, 14 1). and in writing her twin tales she is doing the same. As 1 will explore more fùlly in my section on curses, the alchemical frarnework for The Arab's Mouth is Jung's "The Personification of Oppsites." which explores the story ofSol and Luna and their "chymical marriage"(Mvsteriurn par. 104). As is reflected by his arnbiguity. Ambrose is a version of Jung's Mercurius and is less significant in terms of his initiai link to his twin than in tems of how his profligate existence affects the family? Jung begins his lectures on "The Spirit Mercurius" with a close reading of the Grimm fairy tale The Spirit in the Bonle,'' a reading to which MacDonald refers extensively in her pohaya! of Ambrose. Jung is first concemed with the fact that thc por woodcutter finds the bottle containing Mercurius at the base of a tree, as "Trees. like fishes in the water. represent the living contents of the unconscious~~~Alchemica1par. 24 1). Mer retrieving drowned Ambrose fiom the creek, Frances helps James bury him at the base of the scarecrow. whose stake is turning into a tree (1 57). Frances thinks to herself: "Imagine if you bad a tree growing inside you"(157), signaling Ambrose's function as a symbolic purveyor of the fmily tree. Even Jung's supplementary reference to "fishes in the watei' is picked up by MacDonald, both as a part of Frances' "cave" memory of the night, in which she recalls catching a fish with "a thin blue stripe"(1 SI), and in a dream that Lily has about Frances standing in the creek with a "bright blue fish that's flicking and swimming about her ankies"(223). Ln another drearn, Lily sees Ambrose as terriQing "Water-Marf'(226); this drearn not ody alludes to Mercurius' common association with water (par. 235) but, more significantly, to his sometimes terrible nature. Jung notes that while 'lhe fairytale and alchemy both show Mercurius in a predominantly unfavourable light"(par. 289), it is more useN to think of Mercurius "as aprocess that begins with evil and ends with good0'(par. 276). The transmuting element of Mercurius, his relationship to the question of morality, is the most important aspect of MacDonald's Jwigian "fairy tale." in her fairy tale. Ambrose is conceived as a result of an incestuous rape: his existence is bound up with "evil". Like the nasty spirit fiom Grimm's tale (par. 239). Ambrose causes havoc after he is released fiom the vas Herrneticztrn of Kathieen's womb. His birth causes the death of his mother and leads to the suicide of his grandrnother, as Materia succumbs to the guilt she feels for dlowing her daughter to die in childbirth (1 38). AAer he is buried, Ambrose continues to haut Frances and Lily, and his rebirthing entails the deception of Leo Taylor. Even Mercedes participates in Ambrose's negative energy. making up the stop of Aioysius' death for the sake of Christian propriety and her own selfish need to maintain her connection to Frances (437). And yet. this fairy tale is equaily about Ambrose's good energy. about his role as a psyhic healer whose remas Anthony revitalizes the family story. Jung notes that Mercurius eludes the persona of &-the[Christian] devil [. . .] thanks to the fact that he scorns to cany on opposition at ail costs"(par. 295). Anthony is a representative of MacDonald's discomfort with the framework of absolute moral dichotomy in that "He can't see differences. Only variety"(563). MacDonald tests this most crucial aspect of her Jungian fairy tale by explicitly evoking evil, especially in her characterization of James. The Piper patriarch does not behave well; he is tyrannical. racist, violent, and sexually abusive and it is tempting to dismiss James as just a Gothic villain (Andrews 7). Stevenson in particular is unwilling to see James as anything but a 9inister father-lover figure"(42). But, while her observation that the fuial family tree embraces Rose is correct, Stevenson's assertion that the tree has forced "bigots like James and Mercedes out of the way"(5 1 ) misses the novel's point entirely. MacDonald's exploration of evil does not seek to condemn or ostracize: she is as interested in how "the devil" May be forgiven as in how helshe operates. The nasty energy of Ambrose/Mercurius has many guises and. accordingly, %e deMI" shows up al1 over Fall On Your Kneej. Materia names James as the devil when he refuses to baptize Kathleen's babies (l45), although even she cm dso see the goodness of 'zhe essential Jamest'(160). Kathleen recognizes the devil in Rose's mother Jeanne (518). while Mercedes cmot decide whether Lily is a saint or whether she needs to be exorcised (448). Finally, Frances is convinced that she herself is the devil and most inhabitants of New Waterford including her father. agree. Like the tale of Mercurius. the fairy tale of the devil can be told in many ways: as Lily lems from Frances. "nothing is more unreliable" than story (270). Yet. like Mercurîus, such sones act as "mediaton" (par. 283) that help '70 hed the split in ourselves"(par. 295). Frances' role as the novel's storyteller, then, does not go unchdlrnged. Not only are Frances' several tales contained with the larger narrative of Fall On Your Knees, but Book Eight of the novel, entitled "~ejira,"'* is the muchdeferred diary of Kathleen, which traces the development of her relationship with Rose. Fruther, the ultirnate author of the Piper farnily tree is Mercedes, whose mode of storytelling diverges completely from that of her younger sister as I will show below. Finaily, the imminence suggested by the prologue's "moving picture" of Frances recurs in Lily's role as yet another teller of the farnily history; in the closing sentence of the novel, Lily says to Anthony: 'kit down and have a cuppa tea till I tell you about your mothei'(566). This profusion of narratives challenges the predominance of the vertical axis as the organizing principle of the conservative genealogical plot by undermining this axis' characteristic soleness. To introduce her discussion of how the "formal imperatives" of genealogy function in Buddenbrooks (60-61), Tobin notes that the narrative stnicnire of Mann's novel. whose story is "patently a matter of fathers and sons"(54). is logically configured along the same lines as the privileged fathedson relationship. Whereas Mann's vertical genealogical plot is organized according to the fathedson "dyad'(60). MacDonald's plots make use of the horizontal axis of siblinghood. The relationship figure of the horizontal tnad of siblinghood is evident in Goodnight Desdernona (Good Morning Juliet), which focuses on a symbolic sisterhood of women who share the same birthday. and in the final farnily portrait of The Arab's Mouth, which depicts the three MacIsaac siblings and their aunt. The various fgmilial configurations of Fdl On Your Knees also emphasize the horizontal tnad for. dthough there are four Piper girls, the death of Kathleen at Lily's birth allows MacDonald to retain the triad of siblinghood throughout the novel." Even the three Fine sisters. although separated by space, are uitimately connected by "an identical tiny strand of pearls"(94). As I noted in my poetics of genealogy, the horizontal genealogical axis has the features of relationality, suspension and dispend, features that will corne into conflict with the *'imperatives" of the vertical genealogical axis. MacDonald's novel does go so far as to represent the features of the conservative genealogy at work. The starkest contrast to Frances' mode of telling is that of her older sister. Mercedes' main project during the narrative is to write the family tree, an item which starts out as "A dry diagram covered with mostly the names of dead Scottish peopleV(199).Throughout the novel, Fmcesoactions, fiom her rudeness at the dinner table to her drinking and prostitution at the speakeasy, explicitly mark her as "bad," especially in contrast to Mercedes' equally explicit "gwdness," which is noted by most of the inhabitants of New Waterford (253). nie sisters' respective strategies of telling initially appear to be a consequence of this moral disparity. On the one hand, with regard to Frances' aforementioned discovery about the twin lives of truth and fdsehood, the narrator suggests that. "Some would simply Say that Frances learned how to lie"(142). On the other hand, the very first representation of Mercedes in the novel's prologue discloses that the most prevalent tale that she tells. when she chooses to tell at dl, is the decade of the rosary. In keeping with MacDonald's tendency towards profusion, however, this superficial divergence in the characterizations of the sisters is oflen undermined. Whereas James rnay be able to look at his children and see. "My good daughter. hiy bad daughtef'(260). the development of the thematic anributes associated with Mercedes and Frances upsets this authoritative and closed moral distinction. In the section entitled The Old French Mine,'' there is a scene in which Frances provokes Lily into destroying several of Mercedes' possessions, including the prized doil "The Old-Fashioned Girl" and Mercedes' beloved copy of Jane Eyre. in which the sole and chenshed picture of Kathleen is kept. On the one hanci, the scene is develojxd as a precursor to Frances' provocation of her father which occurs later in the chapter, and which results in one of James' routine beatings of his "bad" daughter. On the other hand, the scene makes visible severai of the thematic attributes that characterize Mercedes, especially those connected to the issue of Victorian values. MacDonald's debt to Victorian literature is not oniy evident in her use of the attic motif but also in her general propensity towards the genealogical taie itself. As Sophie Gilmartin argues, "If the Victorians partly defined themselves and their age as king in transition, they aiso defined themselves by their traditions, and particularly by the traditions surroundhg ancestry and the farnily pedigree"("Tmsiiion" 16). Thus, the "foundling" novel of the eighteenth century. with ils implicit doctrine that "blood will out," continued to influence writers likc Dickens. Hardy. and the Brontë sisters to the extent that 'rhe intricacies of the family tree became the crisis of plot and subplot" (Gilmartin 1997 17). MacDonald's allusions to Victorian literature. however. ofien mark her renunciation of certain of its ideological prernises. The fact that Kathieen's birth coincides with the begiming of the new century (3 1) explicitly marks the novel's focus on the replacement of Victorian values by Modem ideas. although both Kathleen and Mercedes are initially associated with the previous century. Thus. "The Old-Fashioned Girl" is a metonym for Mercedes herself, while her copy of Jane Eyre contains and preserves a particular image of her older sister which she resists letting go of even when the contents of Kathleen's diary are revealed to her. In The Su~pressedSister. Amy Levin suggests that the codiciing factors of a corn petit ive mamage market and the nineteenth-century vaiorization of "harmonîous relationsF(18) between women result in sister-plots that are predicated on the conflict betwern polarization and repetition of character. Like the twuis in Shakespeare's comedic plots. "the existence of sisters generates tension as the reader seeks to understand how something can be at once similar and differentY'(20).In keeping with the prevailing plot structure of what Levin defines as "a pair of opposite sistersW(20),Mercedes' possessions are destroyed by her "Modem" sisters, Frances and f il^." The chernatic focus on Mercedes' Victorianism, however, nins somewhat counter to her amibute of c'goodness," a fact that cornplicates her fimction as the writer of the family's genealogy. From her infancy, Mercedes is a "good baby, following everything closely with her brown eyes. sleeping when she oughtF(64). This early emphasis on her eyes is associated with her later representation as the sister who willfully "sees no evil." The chapter bearing the title "See No Evil" recounts Mercedes' activities on the night that Lily and Arnbrose are bom. the night which starts *'theprocess that will eventually turn [her nerves] into steel [. . .I. Sirong enough to support a building or a familyt(155). Unlike her sister Frances. Mercedes does not allow herself to survey the carnage contained in the attic: "Mercedes can resist. She can hold out against trouble, against curiosi~,someone has to"(l55). Her strength. however, is predicated on her reluctance to see, and in particular. to see "evi1.O. When confionted with the image of her father ma~batingwith Frances on his lap. Mercedes willhlly misreads what she sees, deciding that Daddy just "needs his other little girls dl the more now''(168). Furthet. Mercedes is mechanically attached to such convenient fictions as the story that Kathleen died "peacefully in her sleep"(258). Just as the mended Old-Fashioned Girl '5s daintily holding up her own head of ringlets to the sun while the insensate yellow parasol is implanted in the empty neck like a flag"(257). Mercedes' ability to "support" her family necessitates a refined sort of bl indness. This "support," as it is represented by Mercedes' carefbl construction of the family tree. is depicted in very much the same terms as those that circurnscribe the conservative genealogical plot. Mercedes' methodology for fashioning the tree is both decisive and dispassionate: Whenever she has a new entry - whenever she has had the precious time to dig a Iittle deeper in the Sydney libnry, or on those rare occasions when she has received a long-awaited reply from the provincial archives in Clali fa?< - she carefully unrolls the large scroll of special paper on her desk. She fistens dom the corners. takes out a pencil and a derand neatly draws a short vertical line beneath one of several long horizontal ones, under which she inscribes the latest name. And there it hangs, quietly suspended like a piece of desiccated fmit. (207) The names on her tree are **quiety.and dried out: nothing about them is able to threaten the authority of her representation. Further. the focus of Mercedes' prototypical family tree is the vertical patemal line. as "She plans to surprise Daddv with it. He never talks about his family except to say they al1 died"(207). And while Kathleen has long before discredited hcr Iittle sisters' childhood illusion that Materia's parents dwell in a fairy tale version of "the Old Country"(1 Il). Mercedes' tree does not attempt to corne to terms uith her mother's side of the family. Mercedes' chart also censors instances of familial anomaly and ambiguity: when Lily asks about such a liminal family member as Other Lily. Mercedes explains that her unbaptized state does not allow her a standing in the family tree. As for Ambrose, his existence has yet to transcend Frances and Lily's imaginative world and can find no place in such an "objective" document (208). Finally, in keeping with Mercedes' resolution to "see no evil," Lily's position on the family tree rejects the fact of her tnie parentage and, as Mercedes maintains, is "nght here on the sarne line with me and Frances and Kathleen, God rest her soul"(208). The orderly focus of Mercedes' genealogical representation is threatened by sexuality, and in particular incestuous sexuality. for as Tobin remarks, *.the asexuality ofeach generational member guarantees [. . .] that details will not touch"(73). Thus, not only is the hiihanging from Mercedes- tree devoid of vitality, but the "sto jothat is told by her genealogical representation is narrowly objective and exclusively retrospective. As hkrcedes explains to Lily. "lt leads into the past. It tells us where we came fiom. But it doesn't tell us where we're poing. Only God knows that"(Z07-OS). Curses Mercedes' constant references to God and the rituds of Catholicism mark a recuning theme in MacDonald's work. In Goodnid~tDesdernona Good Momine Julietl Constance Ledbeliy admits that her bgfascinationwith mystej'(24). as Professor Night derisively puts it. is a consequence of her Catholic heritage: "1 canothelp it. I'm a fallen Catholic. Il's lefi me with a streak of ~hodunit"'(24).'~This issue of the cryptic. almost alchernical. element of Catholicism is followed up in The bb'sMouih, embodied in the representation of Régine MacPhail. mother of Pearl and the twins. as both a seemingly incorporeai nun and the enigmatic sculptor of the hieroglyphic family portrait. The ponrayal of Catholicism in this play. however, is convasted with a rather damaging representation of Sconish Protestantism, reflected by the terms and justifications contained in Ramsay Maclsaac's will: 1 was born heir to sound Protestant traditions, but in a moment of weakness 1 squandered my seed upon stony ground and sullied the Maclsaac bloodline in an unholy alliance with the papist, Régine MacPhail [. . .I. To this end do 1 disinhent my son. Victor Maclsaac. Upon my daughter, Pearl, whose parts recommend her as a true Maclsaac, do 1 bestow Belle Moral and al1 my worldly goods. With one condition - that the sins of the mother not be visited upon the daughter - it is my will that she remain childless. (29-30)''' The refcrence to the MacPhail family motto at the end of The Arab's Mouth, as well as the play's conflating of the mysteries of Catholic ritual with Gaelic faery lore, suggest a charnpioning of Catholicism in the face of the sevecity of Protestantism. Fa11 On Your Knees, however. is much more critical of the consequences of Catholic piety. The fint intimation of this critique is MacDonald's portrayal of the Mahmouds' handling of the elopement of their daughter Materia with James. Not only is James forced to convert to Catholicism "in exchange for his life9'(l 7). but Mr. Mahrnoud decrees that hhteria's existence be eliminated from the household: 9hewas dead to hem al1 fiom that da? forth"( 1 8). Materia's own fanatical devotion to her faith is given a fairly neutral tenor: like Régine. she is often confiated with a figure from Gaelic legend. As Mrs. Luvovitz maintains upon hearing Materia singing on the night of the birth of Lily and Ambrose. "Hard not to think 'banshee' - sometimes they wail. sometimes they weep or just sing softly. but their message is always the same: someone will cross over"(1 6 1). Materia who from the moment of her enforced Catholic marriage to James exists in a son of limbo as a consequence of her father's fatal decree, is given explicit thematic significance as an wbomen"(27-Z8).and as a dark tropo os.'^ When Teresa Taylor makes her visit to the Piper homestead. "where she anticipates a rare look at the severed branch of the Mahrnoud family tree," she is greeted by Matena who "has a pair of stained scissors in her hand(l20). These are the same scissors that are used to end Kathleen's life and to bring Lily and Ambrose into the world (135). Because Materia's Catholicism, however fervent. is constructed in tems of its relationship to myth and mystery, McDonald's depiction is not simply morally indeterminate but tends towards approbation. Mercedes' Catholicism. on the other hand. is represented in fairly damning terms, a fact which is made explicit as it affects her attitude towards genealogy. 1 have suggested above that Frances' stories not only have a healing function but are also so instrumental in determining her perception of reality that she endeavors to direct the exterior world so that it hmonizes with her interior conceptions. And just as Fmces works to create fact out of fiction. so too does Mercedes' religious conviction lead her to try and alter the shape of her family's plot. In The Arab's Mouth. Dr. Reid and Pearl engage in a discussion about the evolutionary tree. which Pearl asserts is "still rapidly branching off '(45). Dr. Reid contends that "A tree must be pruned to preserve its health" and that the gardener of this tree is "Man. of course"(46); in the chapter of Fa11 On Your Knees entitled "The Family Tree." the narrator declares that "Mercedes is the gardener of the family"(2 17). Lyndy Abraham notes that the garden is an alchernical symbol for -'the matrix in which the alchernical plant or tree grows, blossorns and cornes to fhition1'(83). Further. in his analysis of a drearn in which "the dreamer takes the plunge into the durk and discovers a beautifil garden in the depths", Jung indicates that the garden is a symbol for 'rhe self '(Pqcholopy par. 154-55). Mercedes' persona1 fairy tale is about her fmght role as the family gardener and the process of her initiai denial and agonizing recognition of the hillness of her family0stree as well as her place in it. In appearance, Mercedes most resembles her grandfather Mahmoud, as Fiances notes on one of her nocnimal visits to the forbidden home: 'rhere is something of Mercedes in the angles of Mahmoud's body. his carriage and immutable spine'Y3 17). Mercedes assumes the immutable law of her Catholic grandfather and, out of the wne fez of miscegenation that resul ted in Materia's banishrnent from her parental home, succeeds in temporarily pruning the Piper family tree. Mercedes' rationale for placing Frances' baby in an orphanage is in keeping with her perception of the edicts of the Catholic church: "Illegitimacy is a temble but invisible blot. whereas rniscegenation cannot be concealed. Neither mother nor child deserves to live thus doubly stained. Such is the charitable viewV(393). Thus. over and above her desire to "see" her farnily in a way that denies Lily's true parentage. Mercedes is detennined to remove the "stain" of Frances' mixed-race child from her family. It is only after her beloved Frances has died that Mercedes realizes that. in her zealous adherence to CathoIic rituai and to strict social mores. she has lost both her hope and her faith (560). Yet. her role as û gardener saves her from her despair der losing God and Frances, whom Mercedes thinks of as the .'garden enclosed [that] is my ~istei'(jjj).~~At the end of her fairy tale. Mercedes conjures up the alchernical "rose garden" which "symbolizes the attainrnent of wisdom and i~er knowledge"(Abraham 85). MacDonald's portrayals of the destmctiveness of religious piety are ofien conflated with her exploration of the Gothic motif of the family curse. As a perversion of the energy of blessing, the curse includes al1 of the features of the principle of injunction The force that prompts the genedogical injunction is typically the force of authority. and the recipient of the blessing or cuise is irrevocably bound by its terms. The principle of injunction is associated with Judith Butler's notion of perfomativity in that, like the cornpulsory repetition of gender noms, the genealogical injunction enforces reiterative practice. Moreover. as 1 suggested in my poetics of genealogy. the genealogical injunction is associated with the process of fabrication. whereby the "keepers" of the genealogical plot. those whose interests it serves, will manipulate conditions so as to participate more directly in the energy of a "blessing." A biblicai example of genealogical fabrication is Rebekah's deception of Isaac so that her favoured child. Jacob. may receive the blessing of the first bom son instead of his twin. The terms of the cune also operate as a ritual act of authonty. As Douglas notes. "Not any one can reach out for a curse and apply it arbitrarily. A son cannot curse his father: it would not work if he tried"(106). Further, the curse. especiaily in its capacity as a subcategory of a culture's pollution iaws (Douglas 1 1 3- 14). is usually a marker for a preexisting irnpurity or taint. Another Canadian treatment of the Gothic curse. one that will bring MacDonald0s handling of the motif into focus. is in John Richardson's Wacousta. The alternative title of Richardson's novel. --The Prophecy." alludes to the cune that Ellen Halloway places on the de Haldimar family on the occasion of her husband's executioii: Yes. Colonel de Haldimar, a prophetic voice whispen to my soul. thai even as 1 have seen pensh before my eyes al1 I loved on earth, without mercy and without hop, so even shall you witness the destruction of your accrirsed race [. . .] here shall their blood flow till every vestige of his own is washed away; and oh, if there be spared one branch of thy detested farnily. may it only be that they may be reserved for some death too horrible to be conceived! (1 56) The force of Ellenwscurse is absolute; the whole of the de Haldimar farnily perishes. with the temporary exception of Fredenck de Haldimar whose death is reserved for Richardson's The Canadian Brothers. or A Proohec~Fulfilled. The pst-curse plot of Wacousta emphasizes not 'Vhat" happens in the story, but merely "how" it happens. as is demonstrated by Richardson's persistent use of the confession in his narrative. Although Wacousta's plot is full of imrnediate and intense action. many of the story's most significant details are expressed diegeticaily rather than mimetically. Such homodiegetic recountings as Frank Halloway's confession. Madeline de Haldimar's surpnsingly itemized account of the massacre at Fort Michillimackinac. and Wacomta's prolonged chronicle of his formative relationship to Clara Beverly and Colonel de Haldimar are conspicuously abundant. ln contrast, those incidents that are most explicitly a consequence of Ellen Halloway's curse are given scant attention by the heterodiegetic narrator. Wacousta's slaying of Charles de Haldimar is barely articulated. as the narrative skips from Wacousta's declaration. Thus. Ellen. do 1 avenge your husbandgsand my nephew's deathV(494).to his renewved pursuit of Cl- without having recorded the actual death blow. nie description of Wacousta *-[bloundingover the ill-fated de Haldimaf0(495)mirrors the way in which the narrative represents the incident. an anomaiy in a novel that revels in the gory detail of al1 manner of slaughter. The structure of Wacousta, with its reliance on the device of retroversion" and its meager accounts of certain deaths, reflects Richardson's appeal to tragedy and the inevitable performative force of the curse. In keeping with the rules of tragedy, the curse on the de Haldimar family is warranted as it is a marker of their inherent impurity. The novel implies that the "plague?' of Indian attacks on the English forts is a difise societai outgrowth of a past action on the part of the society's leader, that is, Colonel de Haldimar's devious usurpation of Reginald Morton's place in Clara Beveriey's heart. The rationale behind de Haldimar's actions against Morton is madc clear. At the beginning of his chronicle of Clara Beverley. Wacousta anests to the "nature" of Colonel de Haldimar as it was apparent even before de Haldimar's act of treachery: "Me. al1 coldness. prudence. obsequiousness. and forethought"(439). Wacousta's assessrnent is augmented y the assertions of his fellow officers. "for al1 understood and read the character of your father. who was as much disliked and distnisted for the speciousness of his false nature. as 1 was generally esteemed for the frankness and warmth of mine"(449). Thus. Colonel de Haldimar. as well as those who are connected to him. are cursed a priori. as a result of the flaws in his character. Finally, Richardson stresses the curse's association with ritual acts of authon5 in the expropriation of Ellen Halloway's speech act. Her position as author of the curse is undermined by her continuai depiction as a hyneric who is obsessively dependent on men and is canceled out altogether when Wacousta retrospectively invokes a cune on the de Haldimar fmily at the end of his chronicle. Thus. Ellen Halloway 's utterance is also an rffect of predestination. reflecting the contamination of the society's leader. in many ways, the curses that are included in MacDonatd's work suggest a sirnilar set of attributes and capacities to those of Richardson's novel. In The Arab's Mouth, it is the authoritarian figure of Ramsay MacIsaac who articulates the presence of a family curse as part of his aforementioned dl, which in itself furîctions as another performative speech-act. In Ramsay's mind, it is his 'iuiholy alliance with the papist, Régine MacPhail0'(29)that is the cause of both Claire's physical deformity and Victor's eccentric spirit: it is his "will" that designates these conditions as consequences of 'rhe family curse"(30). The terms of Ramsay's will may be considered as a double performative. Firstly. its recitation effects a series of actions, notably the disinheriting of the fint born son and the regulating of his daughter Pearl's womb. Secondly. Ramsay's will, in its articulation of the presence of a family curse, enacts the force of a curse onto the bodies of his late wife and children. In other words. the constative utterance. "my family is cwed." is equally the perfonnative utterance that places a curse on the family. It is Flora who suggests that the reproach of familial difference extends even Merback along the patemal line and that Ramsay himself was marked by Grandfather MacIsaac as being somewhat tainted: "he never took to Ramsay [. . -1. Our faither would ne'er owvn to it. but 1 think it wvs because Ramsay was a red-head [. . .]. It's Faery hair, you see. Some think it's the divil's hair [sic]" (56). Ramsay's utterance is thus an acknowledgmeni of his own contaminated body. the impurity or "weakness" of which led him to "[squander his] sees' and funher "[sully ] the Maclsaac bloodlineg'(30). Ramsay is immened in the process of genealogicai fabrication. although his attempts to manipulate the genealogical Iine are an effort to foreclose its perpetuation. The majority of genealogical plots, including those contained in Genesis. are occupied with the problem of genealogical pwity. The paradox of these plots is that, in most cases, the endeavor to keep the family line rescricted, and therefore pure, exposes the line to the threat of annihilation. as is the case in Buddenbrooks and The Sacrificg. Both Ramsay MacIsaac and Merczdes are anvious to preserve the auis of the kw, even at the expense of familial continuity. as is reflected by the edicts of Ramsay's will and by the effects of Mercedes' initial willfulness. As the executor of Ramsay's will, Dr. Reid is another genealogical fabncator. who goes so far as to try and physically master the presumed purveyon of the family curse. Dr. Reid is responsible for controlling Victor with sedatives. as well as keeping Claire imprisoned in the attic after surgically removing one of her pointed ears. His main objective throughout the play, moreover. is to convince Pearl to many him so that "the ailing plant shall graft unto a healthier stalk and Belle Moral shall have a master. once againo0(63).Dr. Reid's scheme to solve the problem of genealogical purity drives the process of genealogical fabrication throü& to its most grotesque conclusion. His marriage proposal to Pearl includes an invitation for her to participate in the Fascist science of eugenics. so that together they might "engender a blueprint for the new man. genetically pure and uncontaminated"(3 1). Although Dr. Reid sometimes uses the language of a gardener. he is not on the sarne complex joumey as Mercedes. Perhaps owing to the necessarily more limited scope of a play. the villain of The &ab's Mouth is not much more than that. Despite his important role in the plot. Dr. Reid does not play a part in the Jungian fairy tale that foms its background. Here. MacDonald has adapted Jung's widrama"of the chymical mariage (Mvaerium par. 109). which he describes in ''The Penooification of Opposites." Jung tells us that the main players in this drarna are the King and Qiictn, or Sol and Luna (par. 109), and that the goal of their union is the "rebirth of the (spiritual) light fiom the darkness [. . .]: healing self-knowledge and the deliverance of the pneumatic body fiom the corruption of the flesh"(par. 104). MacDonald gives us two versions of the pair. Firstly, Ramsay, who is depicted on the hieroglyphic Stone as the Egyptian King Rarneses (43), and his wife, Régine and, secondly. Victor the son (the Sun) and his twin Claire, who is named for a Song her mother sings, "Au claire [sic] de la lune'y73). MacDonald also makes use of Jung's assertion that the '~darkside of the mon is hinted at" in its association with the figure of the dog, as the actor playing the dog-eared Claire also plays Pearl's pet puppy (6),both of whom are sometirnes destructive. The crux of MacDonald's interest in The Penonification of Opposites" is her desire to rewrite Jung's gender codes. in which the feminine 'passive" Luna only *gborrowsher li&tht"from the masculine --active" Sol (par. 1 17).18 The final scene of the play reveals that. yean before having her body cursed by Ramsay. Régine was forced to submit to the will of her husband. Dr. Reid explains that "Régine would not consent to have the thing confined in the attic. Ramsay gave Régine a choice: life on his ternis or exile and a vow of silence. She chose exilewD(78).Régine, however. confiants her prescribed role as the passive queen when she becomes the sculptor whose interpretation of the Maclsaac genealogy challenges the version upheld by Dr. Reid. The subversion of conventional gender roles is continued in the figure of Victor. who passionately identifies with his mother and wears a skirt for most of the play; Dr. Reid goes so far as to diagnose Victor's behaviour as the results of hysteria a '\voman's disease"(23). Stevenson asserts that '-the flamboyant, efferninate. kilt-wearing, unmarried Victor resembles the stereotype of a gay drag Queen"(41) arguing that. in the figure of Victor. MacDonald is picking up on the exploration of sexual identity initiated in Goodnieht Desdernona (Good Morninq Julieti. When Victor dies in Act Two. he is enacting what Jung calls "an essential part of the mystery of transformation [. . .which] signifies the overcoming of the old and obsolete"(par. 169). MacDonald imagines this transformation as a final disavowal of patriarchal law so that the reunion of Victor with his twin, which entails Claire's inheritance of Belle Moral, is a truly balanced chymical wedding. MacDonald's challenge to the patriarchal law that directs the curse is resumed in Fa11 On Your Knees. It is another patriarch, Mr. Mahmoud, who invokes the cune on the Piper Family: just before he decrees that Materia will henceforth be dead to the Mahmoud family. he bids: "May God curse her womb(17). Interedingly, especially in light of his profound aversion to Mr. Mahmoud. it is James who most explicitly perceives Materia's womb as cursed or. rather. who marks familial abnomality as the consequence of a flaw in his ~vife.James' belief that his initial attraction to Materia was the result of a pretematural sort of hex (34) is related to his fear of miscegenation. as well as the effects of his own maniage on the behaviour of his daughters. Even belore James hears about Frances' relationship with Leo. he meditates that he '9s grateful that al1 girls tumed out fair. But there is obviousl y a morbid tendency in the blood they inherited from Materia that made Kathleen lean toward coiouiœ(3j9).Afier Jarneel announces (erroneously) that Frances is already sleeping with Leo. James duplicates Mr. Mdmoud's course of banishment. stating: "1 don2 have a daughter by that nameY'(360). Thus. in MacDonald's work there is a conspicuous shift both as to the figure who retains the imprint of the curse and to the favoured manner of controlling its effects. It is not the male --house" or even -.race" that sustains the marks of a curse but rather the female womb. While Richardson evades the issue of Clara Beverley's tainted womb by eliminating her from the main narrative, there are wombs al! over MacDonald's work. By shifting the repository of the curse ont0 the womb, MacDonald highlights the power of her female characten and emphasizes a ritual sense of ordering over the logic of inevitability. Further, the privileging of wombs in MacDonald's work challenges the function of the curse as it is most generally depicted in the Hebrew Bible, where it is manifestly opposed to the workings of a blessing. As Douglas notes. with regard to the catalogue of precepts contained in Deuteronomy: God's work thmugh blessing is essentially to create order, through which men's affairs prosper. Fertility of women, livestock and fields is prornised as a result of the blessing [. . .]. Where the blessing is withdrawn and the power of the curse unleashed. there is barrenness, pestilence, confusion. (5 1) Again, Douglas' analysis of the ritual aspect of blessings and cunes in ternis of the societal impetus towards ordering resonates with MacDonald's focus on genealogy and its relationship to codes of authority. Although it is the patriarchs in The Arab's Mouth and Fall On Your Knees who articulate the terrns of the family curse, the consequences of their invocations are an increase in the fertility of women. as well as a profusion of births that threaten the soleness and wholeness of the patemal line. Not only are there wombs al1 over MacDonald's work but the? seem to have a life of their own. Beginning with Pearl's imrnaculate conception in The Arab's Mouth. MacDonald introduces several instances of pregnancies which repudiate heterosexual or even corporeal impregnation. Dr. Reid successively attributes Pearl's symptoms of pregnancy. firstly, to the 'noxious vapours fiorn her rejected womb. which has begun to bloat and burgeon with turnourous life in revenge against the proviso of her father's wi11"(49) and. secondly, to her nymphomania. Victor does suggest that the father of Pearl's child might be "i2nubis, Guide to the Undenvorld(77) but, ultimately, the matter remains inconclusive. There is a similar type of arnbiguous pregnancy depicted in The Anic. the Pearls and Three Fine Girls. While Jelly's answer to her sisters' interrogations and accusations is, simply. that there isn't a father (83), the play suggests that the fourth Fine girl in Jelly's womb hctions as a syrnbolic link between the past and the present. The first indication of Jelly's pregnancy occurs during the funeral for Mr. Fine, when "JELLY stqpsbehind und hm a moment with Dad. She fiels a light kick ivithin her bel&. She srniles. rhen exils sioir~y~'(Z5).Further. it is in a moment of private communion with her dead parents. during which Jelly announces to them that "It's a girl. Another little Fine girïœ(S).ihat she finds her mother's lost pearls.'9 The thematic alivent of klly's autonomous prepancy with the symbol of the pearls resonates with Nina Auerbach's assertion that. in the narrative of female self- suficiency. "ihemale quest is exchanged for rootedness [. . .] while the treasue is the invisible and often partial gain of a possession that is also self-possession"(8). The association of the ambiguous birth with the motif of buried treasure is also made in On Your Knees: in Lily's version of the family tree. which she superimposes over Mercedes' chart. '-nestled among the blue subterranean branches, is a golden chest encrusted with diamonds. Buried treasure"(2 14). Here again. MacDonald is making reference to Jung's exploration of the garden dream that represents Mercedes' imer journey. in which the beautifid garden is a -'treasure [that] is hard to attairP(Psycho1og par. 155). Jung suggests that the treasure is both the self and "the 'cornpanion,' the one who goes through life at our side9'(par. 1 55). Lily later infonns Frances that the treasure inside the chest is Ambrose (216), and it is the work of several of the novel's fernale figures to reconceive Am brose/Aloysius/Anthony. While i t has already ken suggested that Frances initially uses Leo Taylor to ''transport" Lily's twin back to her, Frances is ultirnately convinced that she is pregnant by way of Teresa Taylor's buliet (425). And jua as Teresa plays a part in Frances' pregnancy, Frances is symbolically responsible for the birth of Teresa's child Adele Claire, as it is Frances who "took Teresa's hate away"(411) by way of her eccentnc form of forgiveness. Even Lily takes pan in hrr twin's reconception. feeding her sister's womb "a silent meal of blood"(407). Thus. MacDonald's work confronts the features of the conservative genedogy. The genealogical plot is shown to be as uncontainable as is the figure of Frances: it too is a "moving picture" which must be able to accommodate al1 rnanner ~Cconvolutedand controversial interrelationships. as well as all the various perspectives from which those interrelationships are undentood. The fmily tree presented at the end of Fa11 On Your Knees includes various mixed-race relationships. rnarking the encounter between Frances and Leo. as well as the marriage between Kathleen and Rose. The "'equals' sign'*(565) that joins Kathleen to Rose finally inscribes the sarne-sex relationship into the farnily's story. while the fact of James* rape of his daughter is similarly acknowiedged. As for Mercedes and her atternpts to "prune" the Piper-Mahmoud-Taylor family uee. it is important to bear in mind that. in the end, it is she who reunites Lily with the embodiment of her Iost hvin. hthony informs Lily and Rose about the conditions of Mercedes' will: "When Miss Piper died. she lefi me a note with your name and address. and instructions for me to give you this personally"(565). Mercedes' forsaking of the vertical axis of genealogy, as tell as any notion of the "chosen" line, is not merely a reversal of a binary relationship. MacDonald's championing of genealogicai profusion actually manages to warp the axes of Iineage to such an extent that it is difficult, and ultimately unnecessary, to definitively place Anthony on the chart. in his own mind, he is the ward of Miss Mercedes Piper: in a strictly corporeai sense, he is the son of Frances and Leo. Alchemically, Anthony is Lily's long lost twin and. symbolically. he is the child of Kathleen and Rose, conceived to attenuate the violence that intemipted their love. The characterizaiion of Anthony as "a very happy person"(563) marks MacDonald's affirmation of the tension between Frances and Mercedes' modes of genealogical expression. as well as her rejection of those conservative binary codes that have controlled the actions of Anthony's anceston. The final family unit of Lily. Rose and Anthony is "therose garden of the philosophers"(Alchemical par. 155). which. in the words of Constance Ledbell y, celebrates the "harmony of polar oppositesJ with gorgeous mixed-up places in between"(85). I The purity of pearls may be a clue to Pearl MacIsaac's immaculate conception. the significance of which will be Merdiscussed below. MacDonald's attraction to riddles is evident in her earliest play, Clue in the Fast Lane, which follows the activities of teenage supersieuth Nancy Prew [sic]. Both Goodnieht Desdernona (Good Morning Juliet) and The Arab's Mouth are explicitly organized around the solving of riddles, and both involve the decoding of occult (alchernical) signs. In Fall On Your Knees, MacDonald explores the nddle of identity, with Kathleen's diary acting as the hidden writing that must be laid bare. and Mercedes' family tree working (temporarily) as a solution. 3 Both Andrews and Stevenson give readings of the novel that are more explicitly politicai. Andrews' framing concem with the magic reaiist text progresses to an examination of how Fa11 On Your Knees explores '?he complex matrix of gender, race. sexuality, and power from a lesbian feminist perspective"(l2), while Stevenson's primary interest is race. 4 Upon close inspection of Jane's movements around the house, it becomes apparent that Bertha Mason is not actually held captive in the attic proper of the Hall, but in a room on the third story that is hidden by a tapestry (2 10). Brontë sometimes refers to the entire third story as "the attics." in keeping with the architectural idiom of the nineteenth century. The actual attic above the third story, however, is used merely as a passapway out onto the leads. and is only mentioned during Jane's initial tour of the Hall. 5 See. for example. Robert Cluett, Diana Brydon. Jamie Dopp and Linda Lamont- Stewart who asserts that *'they [the novels] carefully manipulate narrative voice and offer intriguing puzzles. clever witticisms and snippets of arcane information in order to engage us in constructing their meaning, and to win, through our participation in the narrative process. our assent to their elitist ideology"(Lamont-Stewart 291). 6 MacDonald's interest in this aspect of Jung's theory is revealed by her reference to this section of Psycholow and Alchemv. Following his description of the dud processes of alchemy. Jung quotes a few alchernical texts in which the extraordinary nature of this dual process is acknowledged. In the fiat excerpt, alchemist Abtala Jurain instnicts his readers as to how they should conduct themselves when dealing with physical matter: "Fall on your knees before you undenake this operation. Let your eyes judge of it: for thus was the world created(par. 347). in her allusion to the phrase "fall on pur knees.-aMacDonald is evoking the miraculous simultaneity of practical and visionary (psychic) work. 7 The Hebrew word for Jacob (Yakov)is a pun for both the word akev. which means '*heel"and the verb akav, which means 70 overreach." 8 MacDonald gives merevidence as to Leo's role as material conveyor in her depiction of his 0-71 expenence of king in a type of limbo: the narrator asserts that "ber since his las Sometimes she is happy just to be dive and a witness. (Gowdy, "Body and Soul") There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stoiies, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at lest be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgonen is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. (Flannery O'Co~or,"The Grotesque in Southem Fiction") The remembering is taken for granted. It is the noticing they question. (The White Bone) The Rupture of Allegory Most reviewers of Barbara Gowdy's The White Bone embrace the novel's talking animal apparatus. doing so within the context of the author's claim that she was writing something other than a prolonged beast fable. Catherine Bush, writing a favourable review for The Globe and Mail, offers a representative handle on this taie told fiom the point of view of elephants: The White Bone is a quest story, and a novel that takes its readen into an altemate world seen through the eyes of an alien intelligence [. ..]. Gowdy has created her own elephant lore. hymns, cosmology"(l). The similarly positive reviews by Bill Richardson in Ouill and Quire and Margaret Waiters in the Times Literarv Suridement echo Bushosobservation of the novel's quest pattern, as well as her defense of Gowdy 's representation of elephants: "We recognize in [the elephants] traits and peccadilloes that are our own, but they are mercifully innocent of anything that smacks of cutesy [sic]. Disney-like anthropomorphizingt'(Richardson 35). Waltra even goes so far as to suggest that the weaknesses of The White Bone are to be found in its occasional attempts at fable, such as when ?the matriarchs' squabbles occasionally dwindle into obvious satire on humans behaving badly"(22). Such non-allegoricd readings stress the significance of Gowdy's zoological scrutiny, contending that the detailing of specificdly elephant habits of eating, excrcting, traveling, and mating protects the characters fiom signihing as human. And, as a glance at the novel's acknowledgments shows, Gowdy has indeed done her research, supplementing her extensive reading with a trip to "the Masai Mara so that [she] might see the African elephant in its natural home"(330). Reviewers of The White Bone that foreground its description of physical behaviour are satisfied to comprehend the animal characten as animals so that even if "the elephants do offer us a mirror of omelves, [it is] not a straightfonvard reflection but the chance to imagine ourselves as elephants rather than elephants as usV(Bush 1). There is dso a camp of reviewers who are unwilling to disregard the novel's allegorical properties: while Judy Edmond of The Wimi-pee Free Press notes that "Gowdy has said she did not intend this book to be a parody or social satire along the lines of Animal Fmor Watershi~Down," she argues that bgGowdy'sprose [is] so weighty with metaphor that one wonden whether The White Bone is meant to be understood on another level"(3). Sara Boxer of The New York Times is more explicit: The White Bone is a big religious put-on?an elcphantine Pilgrim's Progress. The white elephant bone at the center of the book is a relic that everyone believes will point to the "Safe Place.'' The elephants, fearful that uttenng the name of the bone will weaken it. cal1 it "the that-way b~ne'~(soundslike "the Jahweh bone"). The elephants' trek is a test of their faith in the face of drought and bounty hunters. When Date Bed, a Christ figure, picks up a rearview mirror, it is a lessoo in vanity. And those monstrous femaie names are not so different from Prudence, Piety. Chastity and Discretion. (7) The issue for Boxer is not the fact that Gowdy's charactea are animais; in fact, Boxer is most absorbed by those sections of The White Bone that describe the finer points of the elephants' materiaVcorporeai existence. Rather, Boxer is annoyed by Gowdy's perceived references to "another level" of interpretation. The fact that Gowdy's elephants act like elephants is, for Boxer. not enough to counteract their representative role in an allegorical story. The uncertainty regarding The White Bone's standing as an allegory is only partiaily a matter of Gowdy's declarations on the subject. It is mie that. despite its engagement with metaphysics, the narrative does not appear to fünction as a textual veil for either a moral or an allegorical level of interpretation.' Gowdy is certainly not providing the type of didactic lessons for individual behaviour expected from the moral allegory, and even the ecological grounding of The White Bone, which is surely occupied with ethics. cannot be read as a coherent doctrine. In other words. while the depiction of the slaughter of animals is ethically and environmentally charged. the novel's literal story does not indicate Gowdy's recommendation of a particular code of human conduct or a particular order of beliefs. What reviewers have noted as her znological emphasis is what precludes this kind of mandating. as the behaviour of the elephants cannot serve as a code for the behaviour of humans. Still, The White Bone's concem with narnes and naming, the reading of signs. and the processes of mouniing are al1 associated with the typicai concems of the dlegoricai text. The elephants' naming procedure, which entails the marking of and "surrender to"(21) personality traits, together with the species' reliance on an elaborate syaem of "links," recalls Deborah Madsen's assertion that "Interpretation is ïepresented as the subject of allegorical narratives"(135). Further. the portraya1 of Tall Time's increasing disbelief in the veracity of the "links," his alann at -the sickening prospect that everything exists for the purpose of pointing to something else"( 139, is associated with the so-cdled "revival"(Smith 1OS) of allegory initiated by writen of modernism and postrnodemism. Paul Smith argues that the critical insistence on 'Vie nature of allegory to stress discontinuity and to remark the irremediable distance between representation and ides'-(106) has led to the recovery of 'allegory as a privileged form of discourse in postmodern artistic practice and theoryY(l06). Finally, The White Bone3 ironic orientation toward the pst. whereby the genealogical plot describes the diminishment of a fàrnily as opposed to its growth, seems related to Walter Benjamin's conception of the allegory as min, as "in this guise history does not assume the form of the ptocess of eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay8'(l 78). That such a concem \hith interpretation and mouming might mark Gowdy's novel as an allegory is fùrther amplified by the fact that. even without engaging the moral or allegorical levels of interpretation, The White Bone does appear to point to the presence of an anagogue. The thernatizing of the spiritual and the metaphysical, which occun as a supplement to the zoologicai scnitiny, indicates a level of fixed meaning ont0 which literal referents may be translated. Thus, the legend of "the Descent." which tells of "a starving buil and cow [that] killed and ate a gazelle and in doing so broke the first and most sacred law 'You shall eat no creature, living or dead"'(ï), signals that Gowdy is working explicitly within (and against) the ûamework of Judeo-Christian myth' In her conception of the elephant visionary, defined in the novel's giossary as "A cow or cow calf who is capable of seeing both the hture and the distant present9(xvi), Gowdy presupposes the kind of interpretive activity that is both transparent and fixed. Mud's role as her farnily's visionary forces her to corne to terms with Torrent's conviction that "nothing want[s] substance until it is envisioned - 'Once envisioned,' he said. 'it is obliged to transpire"' (82). And, as Boxer cegistes, the elephant mythology that Gowdy imagines includes figures that represent the universal sign. Boxer rnakes note of "Date Bed. a Christ figure,'' although for a discussion of the anagogic level of interpretation. it is also necessary to consider how the figure of "the She" operates as a sign for God's persona. It is the tension between the narrative fiuiction of 'rhe She" and that of Date Bed that begins to mark The White Bone as an imperfect or ruptured allegory. in that the anagogic sign is undermined by the force of the syrnbol. As Madsen explains. the true allegory should be thought of "as the quest for a transcendental center or origin of meaning - an absolute - in ternis of which narrative truth will become legible"(135). The tint clue that the sign of '~heShe" is not such "an absolute" is the fact that its apparent function as such is never veiled; as the narrator asserts, "Ask tic: big cows to account for any mystery and they wiIl answer, 'Thus spake the She"'(23). Much of the novel is concemed with contesting blind faith in the ways of '-the She" and, by extension. the entire pre-text of Judeo-Christian myth. Paradoxically. the function of Date Bed as a Christ figure is not developed as part of an allegorical pre-text but rather as part of a symbolic system in which other levels of meaning are suggested without being controlled.) Date Bed's symbolic, as distinct from signiwg, status cornes into focus when her role is compared to that of the white bone itself. As Hail Stones recounts, the legend of the white bone emerged afler a period known as "the darkness," during which al1 seemed lost for the elephant species in the face of drought and slaughter. The white bone. a newbom elephant's rib bleached by the sun, "radiaied toward al1 living creatures a quality of forgiveness and hope"(43) and could reveal a Safe Place io any elephant who found it and "believe[d] in its power"(44). The white bone belongs to the same diegetical system of myth as *rheShe" and is vulnerable to the same kind of skepticai understanding. In fact, the hackneyed construction of the elephant rnythology with its various inversions and parodies rnight incline the reader to interpret The White Bone as an ailegory for the failure of religion altogether. However, the qmbolic value of Date Bed as a Christ figure. the qualities of which will be discussed below, has a dual function. On the one hand, Gowdy's development of a symbol undermines the authority of a fixed anagogue requisite to the true allegory while, on the other ha&, the syrnbol of the sacred de fuses the reader's sense of an unqualified attack on faith. Gowdy's characterkation of Tai1 Time reflects her dual concem with the ruptured allegory, especially as this irnperfect form has been taken up by postmodemists. Smith differentiates between the traditional ailegoy and the contemporary allegory in which "a shared referential. metasemantic system such as was available to mediaeval alleprists and their audience is not commonly held by readen [. . .] so [that] one has to be constructed or invented in the act of reading itselfF(l07). Craig Owens also focuses on this aspect of the contemporary dlegory, arguing that *'thealtegorical impulse that characterizes postrnodemism is a direct consequence of its preoccupation with reading7(223).It is the thematization of trying to read an indeterminate system, or, as Paul de Man would assert, the thematization of the failure of such readings (Alletzones 203, thai defines allegory. The character of Tail Tirne is an emblem of these interests in The White Boneoas he is often portrayed in the process of obsessive dlegorizing. The narrator explains that "It was a comfort for [Tall Time] to discover that his birth mother had died as a result of a specific circumstance - that, with vigilance, such deaths could be avoided. He became a student of signs, omens and superstitions, or 'links,' as al1 three are often referred to"(49). Ta11 Time's comfort level is greatly distufbed not only by the aforementioned idea that the links might be idinite (135) but even more so by his increasing sense that the links are meaningless; he wonders: %bat use are the links if ihey do not warn us of suc h tragedies?"( 1 57) Ta11 Time eventually cures hirnself of his a~le~oresis.~his tendency towards excessive interpretation, and decides to follow the directions of Torrent rather than those suggested by the links: "Not once, in thirty years of being guided by the speechless messages of his surroundings did he ever feel this certain. There is a membrane of moonlight on the ground, bats flare up, temble omens he strides through as if in defiance of a natural law"(299). Lest we think that Tall Time's catharsis resolves the dilemma of interpretation, putting to rest the value of the sign, in the very next parabpiph Gowdy depicts Tall Time's ironic death by gunshot. Gowdy's mptured allegory largely determines her writing of the genealogical plot. especially in terms of allegory's relationship to history. In The Origin of German Tranic Drarna Benjamin explicitly associates the "allegorical way of seeing?' with the "secular explanation of histoxy," as both allegory and higotory chronicle ihe stations of [their] decline0'(l66).Allegory is historiographie because, like history, it attempts to resurrect lost origins; Paul de Man notes that "Whereas the symbol postdates the possibility of an identity or identification, allegory designates prllnarily a distance in relation to its own origin [. . .] it establishes a language in the void of this temporal differenceW(Blindness 207). This language of temporal difference, if we are to follow Benjamin, exhibits the process of allegory's own decay. Tall The's allegoresis is both a product of his desire to recover the history of his species that has ken shrouded by %e darkness," and a way to embrace the death of his own rnother as a necessary moment in his identity formation.' Further. Benjamin's remark that "an appreciation of the transience of things, and the concem to rescue them for etemity. is one of the strongest impulses in allegoryY'(223) seems particularly pertinent to The White Bone, because of the novel's concem with witnessing devastation. However. as I have shown above, Gowdy's deployment of allegoy is cornplex. While she depends on the fragmentary nature of allegory, especially as it is explicated in a postmodem context, in order to highlight the theme of metaphysical anxiety. her use of the form does not completely cohere. Her development of a ruptured allegory rnay be said to double the fragmentary energy of the allegory so as to Meremphasize ruptures within the genealogical plot. However, the syrnbolic system that interrupts her allegory seems to challenge the very force of genealogy; the Christ figure in The White Bone, dong with other versions of this symbol found in Gowdy's earlier works. does not possess the power of blessing or promise. By investigating the way Go~dylocates the sacred within a symbolic system, the way she represents the relationship between mothen and children, and the way she writes the story of the witness. I will indicate how her ironic orientation toward the past results in the sort of agenealogical narrative anticipated by the ruptured allegory. Gowdy's Cbristology: While it is clear that The White Bone is not using Christianity as an anagogic pre- text. it is also true that Gowdy is absorbed by Christian symbols of sacredness and salvation, and by such rnythical topoi as the Fall, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, and the Apocalypse. In its distinguishing between signs of Christianity and the symbol of Christ. Gowdy's work recalls that of feminist theologians who have sought to reinvigorate their faith by refomulating the symbol of Chna. in To Chme the World, Rosemary Ruether notes that. although "Christology has ken the doctrine of the Christian tradition that has been most fiequently used against women"(45), it is precisely by considering "alternative models of christology"(47) that feminists cm reconcile thernselves with the Christian chur~h.~AS Maryanne Stevens points out in her preface to Reconstnictine the Christ Svmbol, the essays contained in the volume dl discuss such "alternative rnodels." figuring Christ as a symbol for "universality and inclusivity,"(3) for '-radical stubbomess."(3) in terms of his status as a "stranger; outcast, hungry, weak, and poor."(l) and as a "trickster who dismantles our categories and peels us open to new depths of humanity"(j).' In the same way. Gowdy's work imagines the sacred to be detectable in non-traditional realms. such as those of worldly/bodily experience as opposed to myth. and on the margins of "normal" behaviour. Gowddy's fashioning of the sacred symbol is part of a trend in Canadian literature and culture surveyed by William Closson James in Locations of the Sacred. In his preface. James states that "even as fiction relocates the sacred from its older abode beyond the eanh to some place or other wvithin ordinary experience. so the broader cultural scene provides evidence that the sacred may be found at the boundaries and margins rather than at the centre, at points of crisis and limit rather than in the continuities of the conventionai"(ix)? James goes on to argue that 'The religious rneaning of fiction cannot be determined or measured by the degree to which its subject is overtly religious. nor by the extent to which it espouses a view of life congenial to some religious outlook or othei0(33).By James' definition of "religiousness," which he asseris is "derive[d] from [a novel's] concem with ultimate questions of meaning, truth and value0.(33). Gowdy's work may be considered religious and, 1 would argue, Christological raiher than Christian; the story of Christ is envisioned as a myth rather than as the essence of a faith. Her concem with the syrnbol of Christ is predicated on her interest with a locus of redemption and does not extend to an inquiry into Christian faith. In order to detennine the features of Gowdy's Christology, it is useful to return to a discussion of how the sign of the white bone differs from the symbolic value attached to Date Bed. as well as to other Christ figures fiom Gowdy's worlr. As noted above, the fint mention of the white bone is made by Hail Stones, who recounts what he knows of it to the She-S family 'bsing the formal diction"(42). Hail Stones frames this almost ceremonial narrative by referring to Rancid as his own family's source for the story (41), and concludes by conceding that "* We [the She-D's] never did leam how Rancid came by the legend [. . .]. He died before we could ask. But we did not doubt himY"(44).The She- S's also decide to give credence to this version of ''the legend" and to take up the quest for the white bone. It should be noted. however, that Rancid's counsel that the white bone wiill "always [dace] within a circle of boulders or termite mounds to the West of whatever hills are in the region"(.)-)) is not the only account circulatirig amund The Domain. Ta11 Time. who has been told by Torrent to "go to the most barren places and the hills and to look for an extremely large standing feast tree"(l42), is "taken aback" by She- Boom's profession that '%f~ SHE-L'S'AND'L'S SAID IT WlLL BE FOWND NEAR A WINDMG RIVERBED NORTHEAST OF A RANGE OF HILLS"(~~~).The codicthg aCCOUiltS of the white bone's whereabouts reflect Gowdy's interrogation of the reliance on an ever-receding truth-source that characterizes blind faith. Torrent explains to Tall Tiethat '"Faith is not trust in the known,"' ( 157) and it should be noted that even Torrent's version of the white bone story is marked as third-hand (142): In keeping with her dual locus, however, Gowdy also portrays the act of storytelling in positive terms, especially when it is associated with memory and cultural continuity. Early on in The White Bone, Gowdy discusses the importance of cultural transmission amongst the elephant community: the Long Rains Massive Gathering [. . .] is the great annual celebration to which upwards of forty families journey to feast together and hear the news and sing the endless songs (those exceeding five hundred verses) [. . .). So much is bound to happen. in fact. that cows arrivhg at a gathe~g customarily greet each other by declaring their chief intention (next to eating, of course): "1 come to seduce." "1 come to gossip." "1 come to enlighten." (8) It is the transmission of culture through Song that most powerfully connects the elephant farnilies to one another when they are dispersed throughout The Dom* as the songs iake up such activity as birthing. "delirium" or oestrus. thanksgiving, and especially mouming. In keeping with the superstitious nature of many of the elephants, some songs have developed as 9ink sangs. which fhction as mnemonic guides of waming. Mer the siaughter at Blood Swamp, Mud fin& comfort in one of TaIl Tirne's link songs: "Except in the cases of bemes and speckd Blue blesses calves and the peak-headed sexl Eat a blue stone and for two days and nightsl Those who would hmyou are thwarted by rights"(94). The link songs differ from songs of birthing or modng and are like the various accounts of the white bone, in that their circulation defers spintual energy on to material objects. The dubiousness of this deferral is brought into focus in the chapter that describes Date Bed's death. and in which both her attempts to make use of a mnemonic guide to find the She-S-and4 farnily. and to mobilize the power of the white bone fail. As a result of their panic the elephants mistakeniy depend on the value of extemal, arbitrary and synecdochal signs. for, as TaIl Time rnust admit. *'thewhite bone is itself a lin."( 156). In her chancterization of Date Bed. however, Gowdy suggests an alternative, more metaphoric. manner of conceiving the sacred. Gowdy's devaluing of the synecdoche in favour of the metaphor is another reîlection of her dissatisfaction with allegory. As Benjamin notes, "In the field of allegorical intuition the image is a fragment. a ninegW(176).To give interpretive value to a fragment is. in The White Bone, to camouflage doubt to bespeak alami, or even to suggest madness. as is the case when Date Bed cornes to depend unreasonably on the Thing (a car's side-mirror that is a fragment of one of the instniments of her species' destruction). Also. Gowdy's prevailing interest in the Chnst figure over the God persona reflects her interest in a symbol of hope rather than a symbol for the rnystery of ongins; in this way. Gowdy's work ditrers markedly from that of Lee. While Disapwarine Moon -Café is focused on the recovery of even the most problematic of originating energies, Go~vdy'sapocahptic novel is taken up with the irony of beginnings and the problem of endingdOHowever, Gowdy's Christology does not simply reiterate the values of conservative Christianity. As 1 will examine below, her apocalyptic construction of a symbol of hope. and even of resurrection, does not depend on a contrary symbol of evil. It is for this reason that Gowdy's work resists the forces of injunction (both blesting and cursing) that pemeate Disamarine Moon Cafe and Fall On Your Knees, and, thus, may be thought of as agenealogical. While the white bone makes various characten susceptible to the hazards of superstition. Date Bed is distinguishable by her interest in logic. Mud thinks that, when the time cornes. Date Bed should be given the cow name '-She-Studies'*(ZJ),and the narrator describes Date Bed's unusual curiosity about cow remedies: Before she learned not to, [Date Bedl would ask the cows why one treatment was chosen over another. why the ingredients deviated from the standard mixture. and the answer was always a variation of "That's what works." which even as a smail calf Date Bed heard as a variation of Thus spake the She." To her fmstration nobody, not even the eminent She- Purges. was interested in the logic behind the remedy. (107) Date Bed's '-supreme" interest in logic ( 107) is identified as troubling for the nurse cows who feel that to inquire into finer points of a remedy is '-to tarnper with their power and offend the She"( 108). For Date Bed. however. healing is more a matter of resourcehilness and reason than blind faith. as is reflected by her deduction that she can use a fire to cautenze her bullet wound in the absence of the standard warthog urine or hyena dung ( 108). Date Bed is also the only elephant chamcter in the novel depicted as having an explicit -'ide&" that of atvacting eagle scouts with the Thing (1 79), as opposed to functioning only according to habit, duty or distress. Date Bed's logic, however, does not keep her from expressing her faith in some sort of spintual energy; directly after healing herself she 'murmurs a Song of thanksgiving*' directed towards the lovingkindness of the She (109-1 0). What this scene illustrates is Gowdy's privileging of a belief system whose energy is pnmarily situated in the individual mind; Date Bed's acknowledgment of the She is an acknowledgment of her o\vn ingenuity. The scene is also significant in that its literal representation of malady and healing emphasizes an important aspect of the sacred syrnbol. which will manifest itself as a process of psychic healing in the surviving memben of the She-S family. In the earlier novels. fa il in^ Annels and Mr. Sandman, Gowdy provides somewhat unsettling examples of this sarne metaphor. Mrs. Field's practice of self-medicating with alcohol and even her suicida1 fa11 from the roof that frames the action of Falling Angels become sites of cornfort for her daughtcrs, as they are perceived as signifying the power of a quiet will. Joan's apparently self-induced coma and equally self-directed recovery bat take place towards the end of m. Sandman are the catdyst for a gathering that will finally lay bare al1 of the family secrets. The depiction of Date Bed in terms of her logic and her will to heal is associated with another aspect of her character that is similarly crucial to Gowdy's Christology, and that is Date Bed's facility with unusual forms of communication. Date Bed is a remarkably adept mind talker. able not only to hear the thoughts of other creatures but to converse with them: she is even able to gain information from a cluster of flies. despite the pattern that 'Mnd talkers and insects don't communicate, so there is no point in asking [them for help]*'(l 10). Date Bed's skills are set in relief against the strained dialogue that takes place among the rest of her fmily?whose infighting and petty silences add bittemess to their grief, and against the difficulty Ta11 Tirne has communicating with the brusque We-Fos.During their trek toward the Second Safe Place (as it is called by the We-F's). Tall Time realizes that "it is no use asking Sink Hole where they are going, or even when they will be stopping for the day. such questions invariably king met with an odour of disapproval so powerful it burns the inside of [his] tmnk(289). The two bulls' failure to make contact, which culminates in Sink Hole's literal reaction to Ta11 Time's petulant order that Sink Hole leavc him alone (29 1 ), results in their permanent separation and. metaphorically, in Ta11 Time's death. The capacity for conununication is thus granted sacred value as it provides a possible avenue for literal and figurative salvation. When Mud becomes the family's mind talker. a transformation that conclusively signals Date Bed's death. her initial response is to disregard the sacred value of communication that typified Date Bed's handling of the gift. Mud is not interested in conversing with other species: "What [the giraffes, irnpalas and oryxes] cal1 themselves [she] doesn't know. she never bothered to ask Date Bed. and not knowing. she can't conceive of addressing thern. Besides. why should she?"(309) Mud is similarly dismissive of her omfarnily's grief. having become freshly obsessed with the search for the white bone and oddly resentful of the time wasted on the search for Date Bed (307). Mud shows her temble single-mindedness when she promises her newborn to Me-Me. and it is only afier She-Snorts has saved Bolt by killing Me-iMe that Mud is shaken from this dangerous fixation. Significantly, Mud's newbom is a metaphoncal resurrection of Date Bed. having been bom exactly where Date Bed died. and at a moment rnarked by a bolt of lightning (322). In the fmt place. Mud's catharsis allows her to finally gieve Date Bed. '-this beloved name a requiem for every loss of her life, from her birth mother io her birth name to Date Bed to the brief, drearn-like loss of herself"(324). in the second place, the catharsis reveals to Mud the difference between the Safe Place, which is rnerely an allegorical sign. and symbolic salvation, which for Mud is love. Once Mud has become --herselyagain she is finally able to cultivate her new gift; Mud's first success at mind talking with another species is the dialogue she has with Date Bed's beloved mongooses who point out the direction indicated by Date Bed's lhrowing of the ''that way" boue (326). Mud. however. is no longer consumed with the idea of the Safe Place; rather she "is weak with loveq'(327) for her daughter. Before cxarnining how love manifests itself as, not surpnsingly, the mon important aspect of Gowdy's Christology, it is usefùl to look at another aspect of the sacred value of communication as it is refiected in the characteïization of Date Bed. By way of her ability to mind talk, Date Bed has arnassed an extensive range of comparative animal lore. including the legend of the spirit oKin that is told to her by an ailing manial eagle. Martial eagles believe that their lives are govemed by the relationship they have with the reflections they see of themselves in the water: "Frequent sightings of the spirit twin [the retlectionj are essential. Without these contacts the twin loses faith in his own existence and begins to wane and act carelessly, and if he should deteriorate, so will the eagle. The clearer the sighting, the more the twin is reasswd, the more vigorous he is. and vice-versa-'( 167). By bribing Stench, Swamp and Sour with glimpses at the Thing in exchange for their reports about what they have seen during their flights. Date Bed is. of course. taking advantage of her knowledge. This bargain. however, does not indicate that Date Bed is contemptuous of a faith that differs fiom her own; on the contrary. upon first hearing about the eagle legend Date Bed acknowledges its plausibility (168). Her own devotion to the Thing is not merely a matter of its utility as a bargaining chip but is also evidence of her sensitivity to altemate belief systems, for "now that she has the Thhg to see herself in, she mut admit that she feels ... not recovered, far fiom that, but pluckiei'( 168). This ability to accommodate diverse creeds is also portrayed in Date Bed's response to a rhino who is recklessly standing vigil at a water hole, waiting for the 'breath" of her calf who was slaughtered there. Although Date Bed is concemed foi the rhino's safety. she considers that "It is not for her to question the rituals and compromises by which somebody stumbles through monstrous loss"(176). This capacity for accommodation is also exemplified by Joan Canary, the Christ figure in Mr. Sandman. although, in this case. what needs to be accommodated are the various sexud identities of her farnily members. loan's closet becomes the family's conkssional. and the narrator describes their visits as "a regular pilgrimage throughout the dayg'(57). The family Ends securî ty in Joan's muteness, and Gordon "gets the feeling she's giving him the response that suits some rigotous, unfathomable purpose of hem because never in her face has he witnessed reproach or shock"(ll8). In fact, Joan is consoled when her farnily members betray their hidden lives to her, as when she picks up the scent of semen on Gordon and *'breathes it in like fiesh air - that smell! - the closest she might ever get to her real fathe?( 188). Even more so than Date Bed?Joan makes use of unusual channels of communication. Principally. she clicks or gobbles to signal her responses. and imitates other non-verbal sounds to express her attention. Jorn is also able to converse with Marcy through a fom of mind taiking, for Marcy beiieves that she and Joan are one: Joan is the "[Marcy] that was tiny. mapical. celestial [. . -1. In bed at night Marcy's communication with Joan was entirely telepathic"(59-60). The consequence of Joan's only attempt to communicate with words is a divulging of the family's "closet" confessions which she has been taping; Joan's motivation for her explicit missive is her hope that, after having been forced to "sing," the Canarys too might learn to accommodate one another's secrets. It is more difficult to pinpoint a single Christ figure in Fallinp. Annels especially since the story follows the Field girls' encouniers with a varïety of false angels, including Norma's glorification of baby Jimmy and Stella, Lou's devotion to the coldness of Tom, and Sandy's worship of "everything that feels like a loss - Rapunzel, Jimmy, the Santa Claus man. their mother's hair before it went white"(162). It is Mary Field who is most like Date Bed and Joan. in that she is also able to accommodate her daughtea' lives, as is most plainly reflected by her tolerant reaction to Sandy's pregnancy (213). The message that Mrs. Field irnparts to Lou as a "cornfort from the other side" affirms this detached compassion: "'You are on your own now. The world is al1 yours"'(249). The Christliness of Date Bed. Joan and Mary Field is explicitly marked by the part each plays in Gowdy's various resunection and reincarnation narratives. 1 have already noted that the circumstances surrounding the birth of Bolt mark her as a resurrection of Date Bed. and it is further the case that Date Bed's death is a cepetition of the death of Mud's binh mother. "both killed by snakes"(326). Date Bed's life is thus a resurrection of the lire Mud lost when her family abandoned her; like Marcy's impression of her comection to Joan. Mud is unable (or at lest unwilling) to distinguish between herself and Date Bed. When Mud first encounters Date Bed between the legs of She-Snorts, "She thought that the calf was heaelf. and she halted to be investigated by her own trunk and to gulp in her own milk perfûme"(l8). As calves. Mud and Date Bed *%ere so devoted to each other that they waiked with Date Bed grasping Mud's tail, and they said 'we' instead of '1' [. . .] as if they were a single calf '(169). While the relationship between Mmy and Joan may be wwlerstood as a siMlar sort of parallel resurrection narrative, Joan is involved in several other, even more explicit. tesurrection narratives that nui through Mt. Sandman. The first sentences of the novel declare that "Jorn Canary was the Reincarnation Baby [. . -1. Joan was that newbom who supposedly screarned. 'Oh, no, not again!'"(l). Joan's birth mother, Sonja, is sure of her daughter's reincarnated status and is always on the aiert for signs that Joan is acnially the manifestation of a woman named Alice Gunn who had killed herseIf in the room where Joan was bom ( 14). Sonja's convictions. however, are undermined by the fact that, like Tall Time. she seems immoderately eager to see the "Signs" of reincarnation. When she hears Grandma Gayler cry "'Oh. no. not again!"' in response to dropping her grocenes. Sonja irnmediately infers that "Grandma Gayler [is] already starting to reincarnate in the throes of death(150). More signifiant, in ternis of her sacred value, is Joan's own seIf-induced death and resurrection, as it is this resurrection that stimulates the members of her farnily to sel f-recognition and mutual acceptance. Joan's telepathic explmation that her hem stopped because she was "so exhausted"(259) parallels Doris' exhaustion with lying. The title of the first chapter of Fallina Aneels is "Resurrection 1969," suggesting that Mrs. Field's death should serve a similarly catalytic purpose for her daughters. During her mother's funeral. Lou ~swailow[s]Maternai instinctq(5), an occurrence thai is recailed in The White Bone during the scene in which the grieving rhino awaits the '-bteath'. of her calf. ' ' In the last chapter of the novel, Lou has a revelation that the Matemal Instinct is a love. and a will, which makes one weightless with happiness (247). Thus, Gowdy is suggesting an inversion of the meaning of Mrs. Field's bbFall"fiom the roof. which is repeatedly figured as a type of floating. In fact, Gowdy's recurrent attention to the motif of resurrection reflects her challenge to the Christian conception of human fallenness. As Paul Diel asserts, much of the New Testament is ''the story of forgiveness. The fault of Adam is atoned for by Christ Jesus, the savior of mankind, crucified, buried and riseno*(159). Die1 argues that the "real natureT'(159) of the good that is implied in the symbol of Christ's Resurrection depends upon an understanding of the origin of evil as it is represented in Genesis as the "satisfaction of exalted desiresY'(l13). In other words, the symbol of Resurrection. as it operates in the Christian tradition, signifies the triurnph of the holy spirit over the evil of earthly desires. and it is this symbolic resonance that Gowdy endeavors to undermine by way of her representations of falls and resurrections. The most prevalent theme in Gowdy's corpus is the celebration of al1 manner of eanhly delight. most especially the delights of spiritual and erotic love. At fint glance. it seems that Gowdy's privileging of earthly delight coincides with those works in which. as James descnbes. "the sacred resides in ordinary experience. The search for transcendence in [this] Canadian fiction is focussed on this-worldly reality or presence"(xii).A suney of Gowdy's work. however. displays a concem with tigures, rclationships and events that can hardly be described as "ordinary," fiom Fallinn Angels* portrayal of suicide. nymphomania alcoholism and burgeoning lesbianisrn, through the wide range of sexual exploration represented in Mr. Sandman and We So Seldom Look On Love. a collection that includes stories about sexuai voyewism. necrophilia, and the erotic impulses of a two-headed man, to the circumstances of impending annihilation faced by the animal characters who inhabit The White Bone. In the midst of dl this are Christ figures who are similarly worldly, and yet Far fiom ordinary. The singularity of Date Bed. Joan. and Mrs. Field is registered by their ability to psychically heal those who love hem, by their capacity to communicate via unusual means, and by their pivotai role in Gowdy's resunection narratives. Gowdy is also particular about singling out her Christ figures in ternis of their physical appearance. Mrs. Field is both cxonerated From al1 household responsibi lities and ardently loved because she is "meek and mild"(1 O), her natuie manifesting itself in her appearance when her hair goes "white ovemightW(94). Looking at her mother's hair. Lou feels that this "surprise of whiteness [. . . is] minored inside herself as the one unsullied thing she has harboured no matter what"( 196). l2 From her birth. Joan is not only another "surprise of whiteness" but also a marvei of smallness. While the Canarys think that Joan's whiteness and size make her flawlessly beautiful. Marcy's boyfnend Paul leaves her with the unsettling suggestion that han's appearance and behaviour are *'tniIy weird(202). At the age of eighteen. Joan still looks Iike a ghostly child. and Sonja is "shocked to see thai Joan still has no pubic haiig(235). Although Date Bed herself is not white. she ultimately symbolizes the sacredness which has been wongly attributed to the sign of the white bone. Gowdy's chancterization of her echoes Joan's state of perpetual prepubescence. as Date Bed has only just entered her tirst oestrus when she dies. Thus. Gowdf s gallery of Christ figures contains an ineffectual rnother and two children who never grow up; a look at We So Seldom Look On Love reveals other candidates for this roster of sacred personae, including the deformed children from "Body and Seul,-' the parasitic Little legs in "Sylvie." the corpses from '-We So Seldom Look on Love." and a transgendered man in "Flesh of My Flesh." This roster is particularly significant in ternis of a discussion of the genealogical plot, as Gowdy's sacred syrnbols seem to indicate genealogical failure. While Disavoearine Moon Cafe depicts the dangerous silences built up between generations of parents and children, and Fa11 On Your Knees portrays siblings immened in the process of forgiving and overcoming the sins of their parents. Gowdy's work is taken up with the problem of ineffectual or absent mothers. and the fact of isolated and, ofien. malfomed children. Such a focus is in keeping with Gowdy's apocalypticism and the ironic tone of The White Bone, as the genealogical impetus cornes into conflict with other. seemingly more powerful, energies. In my next section. 1 will investigate Gowdy's representations of mothers and children. focusing on their association with characteristics of the grotesque. as weil as how such representations resonate with the themes of sacred and profane love. Absent Mothers and Grotesque Cbildren: Considering Gowdy's concem with the failure of the anagogic sign, and her interest in challenging traditional definitions of sacred syrnbols. it is no surprise that her work also engages with the grotesque. The modem preoccupation with the grotesque is generally associated with theories or Iiterary works that are suspicious of social or cosmic order. while the use of grotesque imagery ofien marks some kind of confrontation with conventions of the Bernard Mc Elroy's cla.l-ifications of the "kinds of terroi' and "kinds of play'. that are integral to constructions of the modem grotesque (3) reveal those aspects of the grotesque that are especially pertinent to Gowdy's work. On the one hand. Mc Eiroy asserts that *the grotesque is linked definitively to [. . .] the fear of beîng the victim of aggression," in particular, "aggression by rnagicY(4).Ths, "The grotesque transfomis the world from what we 'know' it to be to what WC fear it might be"(5). This feature of the grotesque becomes conspicuous, for example, in the face of "'Monstrous' births [. . .]. Such events are more than misfornuies: they seem to resunect primitive fean about human identity, inexplicable influence. and the possibility of some malign principle at work in the very process of nature"(9). On the other hand, Mc Elroy also stresses the "playful side of the grotesque [which] detemines a meraspect of our response to it"(1 5).14 Unlike the g'merely ugly" or *-simplyludicrous," the '-grotesque lues even as it repeis. fascinates us with our own irrational dreads. and refuses to let us altogether dismiss the game even after we have played ito'(16). And since the "literature of the modem grotesque usually focuses on the unequal struggle between the self and [. . .] a hostile environment"( 171, Mc Elroy's notion of play might be co~ectedto the ways in which we confront and corne to tems with the ierror of a grotesque world. In Falline Aneels. Gowdy provides an image of the grotesque that corresponds precisely with Mc Elroy's daims. In "Dance to the Music." a chapter that tracks the Field girls' encounten with their false angels, Sandy decides to let her boyfkiend Dave "go al1 the way"(179) with her during a drive-in movie. Al1 the while that Dave is penetrating her. Sandy watches the movie. which is -about a monster baby that preys on milkrnen"(179). The background to this scene is Sandy's fear about her own "addiction'. to having sex with older. rnarried men (173), which is really her terror of king unloved. The monster baby on the screen is a projection of Sandy's feu of whai she henelf might be: '-From a distance the baby seems cute. Then, as you get nearer. you see that it has deranged eyes. The carnera travels right into its howling mouth. to its tonsils and down a black and red tunnel - the route that the mihen take"(180-8 1). When Dave mistakes the image of the monster baby's throat for "nie birth canal," Sandy is overcome with demented laughter (1 81).15 Although she is not able to articulate it at the time, Dave's blunder exposes Sandy's related fears that she wiil either give birth to a monstrous baby (214) or will develop into the kind of rn~therwho, monstrousiy, dlows her baby to die. Lou articulates this aspect of the Field girls' terror in her declaration that babies' helpless devotion to "-anyone who looks af'ker them'" makes them unlovable (1 38-39) or simply "heavy"(165). When Sandy finally announces her own pregnancy to her mother and Dave. her anxieties disappear. which suggests that she has overcome her conflicts with the hostile environment of her home. Like Mud's Boit. Sandy's unborn child signifies renewal for the sisters. as well as the triurnph of materna1 love in the face of the terror of their ever-preseni impression that Ma. Field dropped baby Jimmy over Niagara Falls. Gowdy's handling of the grotesque becomes more complex when her images are not simply "projections." The first two stories of We So Seldom Look on Love. "Body and Soul" and "Sylvie." confront the reader with far more explicit representations of the grotesque world. Two of the main characten in **Bodyand Soul" are Terry. boni "bald and blind and with a birthmark covering most of the left side of her face"(4). and Julie. a mentally handicapped. epileptic child who is "fat." has "short white-blond hair in some kind of crazy brushcut."(9) and pale. almost "blank eyes"( 1 1 ). In contras to Mc Elroy 's assertion that the monstrous birth indicates an anviety about a "malign principle at work in the very process of nature-' Aunt Bea considers these malformed children to be angels in the sarne way that Joan's strange body makes her sacred to the Canarys. However. whereas Joan's smallness and muteness make her a relatively mild angel. Aunt Bea's charges are loud, often angry and, in the case of Julie, physically unmanageable. The "hostile environrnent"(Mc Elroy 17) that Julie must confiont is the realm of her own mind, which is filled with a variety of disturbing images: a cat falling off a ledge and bleeding to death (2); her mother "straightening out a hanger and poking it up a hash pipe"(21); the man who beat up her mother and "drowned a cat in the toilet"(3 1). In the moment that Julie drills a hole into her own forehead and sticks a finger into it, Gowdy is depicting Julie's challenge to the aggressive terror that is contained in her own grotesque body. Gowdy's "play" with the significance of the grotesque is reflected in the fact chat Aunt Bea's witnessing of this horrible confrontation ultimately convinces her that these maligned bodies house the divine soul. The co~ectingof the grotesque with the idea of the sacred recalls Flannery O'Co~or'sdiscussion of the grotesque. In defense of the son of realism that does not "represent the typicalgY39),O'Connor introduces the writer who "believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious. [. . . who] looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we tieely respond'(41). In order for this writer to explore the sacred e-mysteries"of life, he or she will ''be interested in characters who are forced out to meet evil and pceand who act on a trust beyond themselves"(42). In O'Connor's own work. the grotesque renders visible how the 'npical" world has succumbed to the forces of pettiness and pride. Joyce Carol Oates argues that "[O'Co~or's]madmen. thieves. misfits. and murderen commit crimes of a secular nature. against other men: they are not so sinhl as the criminals who attempi to usurp the role of the divine"(46). The grotesque body frequently acts as a malign double for those figures whose sinfùlness is concealed by a self-consciously 'Mpical'' extenor. In 'The Lame Shall Enter First." Rufus Johnson is a malign double of Mr. Sheppard; while Johnson's grotesque club foot marks him as a social outcast. it is Sheppard's sel f-indulgent desire to "save" the deformed boy that is ultimately show to be sinful. Sheppard himself finally realizes that "He had stuffed his own emptiness with good works like a glutton [. . .]. He saw the clear-eyed Devil. the sounder of hearts leering at him fiom the eyes of lohnson"(481). This realization cornes too late for Sheppard to mend his relationship with his own son Norton; in response to king emotionally abandoned by his father, Norton cornmits suicide. O'Connor's discussion of the grotesque concludes with her assertion that every story of evil and redemption must take into account Iheprice ofrestoration"(48); in O'Connois work. the '-pRceW'of redemption is violence. While Gowdy is also concemed with redemptior.. this redemption is not conceived in relation to evil or sin. In "Sylvie." Gowdy takes on the grotesque body of the circus freak. and my analysis of this story will clarify how Gowdy's version of the sacred grotesque differs from O'Connor's. Sylvie's Siamese twin. Sue, is a pair of "Perfect little legs with feet, knees. thighs. hips and a belly. the belly growing out of Sylvie's own belly, just under her naveY(37). Although Sylvie grows up with the impression that her extra legs are quite normal (38), during her fint day at school she realizes that "her little legs were white slugs when you tum over a rock"(41). Some time afier joining a circus side show, Sylvie is faced with the death of the Fat Lady's perfectly fomed baby, who had ken named Sue: "The minute she'd laid eyes on Sue it had stnick [Sylvie] that it was al1 right king defonned if deformity had to exia for there to be such perfectiongt(48).The sacred value of Sylvie's little legs is marked not only by their association with Meny Mary's flawless child but also by the link Sylvie makes between "ber fie& legs', and "her fieak memory"(58) which ailows her to faultlessly preserve every moment (37). The representation of the grotesque body also relates to the storyosconcem with the hostile realm of sexual violence. Sylvie's first meeting with her schoolmates is depicted in terms of its aggressive physicality: "Somebody pushed her, and she fell to the ground. Her skirt was pulled above her knees. Her arms were pinned, a hand clarnped over her mouth"(40). The violence of John Wilcox's penetration of Sue, which he tells Sylvie is not '~echnicallyspeaking" real intercoune (57), is foreshadowed when %e boy who chainsmoked stuck his finger up between both pairs of her legs [. . .] and she had to race home to wash out the blood that dripped onto her underpantsW(42).Despite Dr. Wilcox's disavowal of his sexual encounter with Sue. however. the little legs represent the sacredness of Sylvie's sexual vitality. a vitality that will be lost once Sue is surgically removed. During sex. Sylvie's orgasm is like an afterthought. a consequence. of Sue's orgasm. and Sylvie's final words before succumbing to anesthetic are 'They must be aliveY'(61). The grotesque bodies in "Body and Soul" and "Sylvie* are the site at which the brutality of the hostile world is disclosed. Far fiom king temble in and of themselves. Gowdy's grotesque bodies are sanctified and, thus. contained. The terror of the world. however. is not a type of evil. While the grotesque body is sometirnes acted upon. its presence does not act as a precunor to the violence necessary for O'Connor's type of redemption. For Gowdy. the price of redemption is an acceptance of love. especially 'ziruiatural?' forms of love that exist beyond what O'Connor would cal1 the 'Typical"(*'Grotesque" 39). Gowdy's interest in irregular forms of love is ofien manifested in her negative representations of relations between children and their actuai mothers. On the day of Teq's birth. her mother abandons her in the hospital. declarîng to a nurse: "'1 coulda had her at home and thrown her in a dumpster, ya know! "'(4). As Julie's disturbing mernories suggest. her mother has a bad drug habit and is in the middle of "serving a five- or an eight- year jail sentenceY(l2). And, because of her mother's "obvious favo~uitism*'of Sue (38), Sylvie feels emotionall y abandoned. Gowdy's work is filled with mothers who, io a greater or lesser degree. either abandon or are taken from their children. In addition to the mothen in "Body and Seul,*' "Sylvie," and Falling Aneels, other such absent mothers include Beth's mother who "ran off with a man down the street" ("Presbyterian Crosswalk" 62), Marion's mother who is brutally murdered (-'Flesh of My Flesh" 161). and the mothen of Mud and Tai1 Tirne, both of whom die shortly after the binh of their calves. Mud herself is depicted as a reluctant mother who *-doesn'tcherish what might be inside her any more than she cherishes her intestinesœ'(26)and who tries to leave her newborn to Me-Me. Gowdy's work is pervaded by the kinds of problematic relationships that Marianne Hirsch examines in The Mother/Dau&ter Plot, a study primarily concemed with the "silencing [ofj one aspect of woman's experience and identity - the matemaiq'(4). As 1 will show, however, Gowdy's suppression of the mother figure does not kitiate the kinds of plots that Hirsch associates with such a silencing, and is mercomplicated by the way she writes the (ofien sacred) child. Hinch's exploration of mother-daughter plots is grounded by her argument that "in conventional nineteenth-century plots of the European and American traâition the fantasy that controls the female family romance is the desire for the heroine's singularity based on a disidentification from the fate of the other woman. especially mothersg?(lO). On the one hand. Hiach's arguments that the matemal figw is "never hlly a subject" and is depicted chiefly in terms of her body (12) seem applicable to Gowdy's work. it is usually within the first paragraphs of a story that Gowdy provides a brief surnrnary of the mother's separation frorn her child; the only information the reader has about the mother is that she gave birth and that she, willingly or unwillingly, withdrew. It is Mrs. Field that most fully coincides with Hinch's idea that the materna1 figure becomes the site of bbdisidentification"and a "primary negative model"(l1) for her daughter(s). Although the Field girls adore their mother, it is in opposition to her that they must define their own erotic, matemal and practical subjectivity. On the other hand, Hinch's prevailing interest in 'Ihe female family romance" does not seem as pertinent to Gowdy's plots. Many of the daughtea in Gowdy's stories are not involved in a hilly developed family romance for the simple reason that they are chiidren. as is the case for Terry. Julie. Beth, Joan and Date Bed. For characters like Sandy, Sylvie. Marion and Mud. the engagement in a family romance is itseif a perversion or subversion of conventions. In "Flesh of My Flesh." for example. Gowdy iakes up Hirsch's mode1 and plays with it. AAer her mother is brutally murdered, Marion adopts the role of caregiver for her father until John Bucci fdls in love with her. The story of John's courtship of Marion, their marriage. and his &air with Marion's fiend Coq, is juxtaposed with the tale of Marion's second love. the one that seems like a "miracle [. . .] the one thing, the one little tree that survives the otherwise total devastation of a tomado"(l88). In a manipulation of the conventional family romance. however. Marion's second partner is transgendered. a woman who has become a man: Gowdy emphasizes the subversive nature of this partnership with the final words of the story. which resonate with al1 of the stories in the collection: -If sornebody were looking down on them [. . .] They would seem content, she thinks. Peacefiû, and lucky. Two people unacquainted with grief. They would seem Iike two happily married, perfectly normal people"(t08-09). It is thus in relation to her interest in unusual and "miraculous" expressions of love that Gowdy's rr'presentation of the absent mother figure must be undentood. Her problematic devaiuing of matemal love is somewhat compensated for by her positive representations of miraculous adoptive mothers, such as Aunt Bea, Beth's grandmother, and the various elephants who take on the responsibility of the mothen of the fonaken calves. Still, in light of Gowdy's corpus, the "Matemal Instinct" that Lou swallows and Sandy inherits, and that ultimately inspires Mud, seems fairly meaningless in that the instinct remains detached from the portrayai of a materidly realized and fully developed mother-child relationship. The imrnateriality of suc h relationships is associated with Gowdy's containment of the grotesque body. Her "play" with ille grotesque. whereby the terror of the hostile world is conquered by a sanctification of the malfonned body, actually serves to erase such a body's material difference. as is reflected by the "whiteness" and permanent prepubescence of her various sacred symbols. Thus. despite the abundance of corporeal imagery in Gowdy's work, despite her celebration of erotic delight, her principal theme is the exploration of how such bodily activity reflects the spirit of love. Further. her conception of farnily relations, especially the recovery of farnily in the face of materna1 Mthdrawal, is significant only in ternis of what such relations reveai about the way the spirit of love functions. 1 have argued above that Gowdy's fail and resunection narratives constitute an inversion of the meaning of Christian symbols: it may also be argued that her wnting of the Christ figure as one who is Zoved as opposed to one who Zoves is a similar son of inversion.16 However, whereas Gowdy's challenge to the idea of original sin validates the active expression of al1 the body's desires, her inversion of the meaning of the Christ figure is a celebration of impassivity, and of the absence of desire. Both Mrs. Field and Joan are the still, white centres that gound their families' whirlwind of erotic exploration; while they rarely express love, the two are repeatediy show to be the recipients of absolute devotion. Gowdy's most extreme representation of the unresponsive love object appears in the story "We So Seldom Look on Love," which recounts the experiences of a necrophile. The narrator explains that her -*attractionto cadwers [. . . is] dnven by excitement, and that one of the most exciting things about a cadaver is how dedicated it is to dying. Its will is al1 directed to a single intention, like a huge wave heading for shore"(149). Mrs. Field and Joan are similarly characterized in ternis of their unchangeable will. which is perceived by the Fields and the Canarys as a type of strength. Even after ail the scanda1 resulting fiom the suicide of her one living lover, and her exposure as a necrophile, the narrator of "We So Seldcni Look on Love" admits that she has "found no replacement for the tomd serenity of a cadavei'(l59). The paradox of Gowdy 's sacred love objects is that. even while they are catalysts for the delights of life. they are almost entirely associated with indiflerence. absence and death." In some cases. Gowdy privileges a sacred impetus towards death. as in the characterization of Mrs. Field. while in others she portrays a sacred inability to renew life. as is the case for Joan and Date Bed. Clearly, both of these impulses are troublesorne for the genealogical plot. as the spirit of love does not operate as a fonn of genealogical injunction. and as the sacred symbol reflects a truncation of the genealogical aues. The AgeaealogicaVApocaiyptic Impulse: What exactly does it mean to suggest that Gowdy's thematizing of the spirit of love in opposition to the force of injunction results in plots that are agenealogical? It has been the prevailing argument of this study that the vitality of the contemporary genealogical plot is ensured when the repressive imperatives associated with the conservative genealogical plot, such as those of continuity, inclusiveness. authority and asexuaiity (Tobin 60-61). are manipulated ador overcome. in Disappuine. Moon Cafe, the cultural injunctions toward silence, patriarrhy, and racial purity corne into confiict with the unmly forces of genealogical fabrication and racial clutter that serve to rejuvenate the genealogical plot. In MacDonald's' work. al1 attempts to regulate the genealogical plot by way ofcurses. violence. and the Church are foiled by the energy of storytelling and the bonds of siblinghood. How is it then that. for al1 Gowdy's sacred symbols of healing. reason, accommodation, and "serenity," her plots do not seem to suggest even a subversive sort of blessing? It has already been established thai, as impassive love objects. Gowdy's sacred symbols are characterized in ternis of their absence. in contrast to allegorical signs. such as Fallinr! An@ baby Jimmy, the suggestive white shirt in Mr. anh han.'^ or the white bone. al1 of which prescnbe interpretation, the sacred symbol does not guide: at most. Mrs. Field. han. and Date Bed offer othen a catalyst for self-recognition. As 1 wil1 argue below. Gowdy's emphasis on this aspect of the sacred symbol relates to her concem with the witness and problems of testimony. Because of their construction as absences. Gowdy's Christ figures ultimately refocus the reader's attention on other family members. and on the lives of (non-sacred) individuals. Thus, what 1 am calling Gowdy's agenealogical impulse is not a matter of any sort of retreat into the confines of genealogical repression but rather the necessary devaluing of the family history in favour of focusing on those individuals who make up a family. in other words, Gowdy's plots are less concemed with whether or not the genealogical line continues than with the state of its members. indeed, it is sometimes the case that a move to discontinue the vertical geneaiogical avis rejuvenates the individual, as when Lou decides to abon the child she has conceived with Tom or when Doris and Gordon choose to embrace their homosexuality . Gowdy's focus on the individual within the family as opposed to family history is connected to the generally ahistorical framework of her work. At fmi glance, the labeling of her novels as ahistorical might seem absurd, especially in the case of Fallinp. Aneels and Mr. Sandman whose temporal settings are so explicitly marked.19 However, just as the Fields' roof and Joan's closet are marked as sacred spaces within a profane world. so too are Gowdy's representations of profane time intempted and transfotmed by sacred time. The same patterns that are applied to her writing of allegory, and of fail and resurrection narratives, are apparent in her writing of mythical the." Mircea Eliade points out that the sacred time invoked during the celebration of mythical rites generally presumes a '-regeneration through [a] retum to the time of o@jnsY(8O). Gowdygsdistrust of primordial events. her Iack of interest in the mystenes of beginnings, infoms her reimagining of the process of regeneration. Like Eliade, Gowdy wishes to distinguish between profane Iinear time and the sacred cyclicai time that interrupts the linear inclination although her imagining of the sacred time emphasües a circle that revolves counier-clockwise. In contrast io an appeal to the time of ongins. the apocalypticisrn of Gowdy's novels rests upon her appeal to the thne of endings, whereby the world is regenerated not by the return to a moment of creation but by the energy that "radiates" from the dead (We So Seldom 145). It is not so much that Mrs. Field, Joan, and Date Bed must die so that others might live; rather, the "magical and explosive [. . .] vitality'' that is left by the dead succeeds in regenerating the living (We So Seldom 145). While Date Bed bequeaths the direction indicated by the white bone to the She-S's, the fmily's spiritual renewal is associated less with what they might find at the Safe Place than with their process of mouming. And, although Gowdy's construction of sacred time rnay be said to revolve in the less traditional direction, the necessary circulaiity of her apocalypticism undermines the importance of temporal duration in her narratives; her work may thus be considered in tems of its ahistorîcism and agenealogy. Another important consequence of Gowdy's agenealogical impulse is the abbreviation of the geneaalogical axes whereby the theme of familial continuity rarely entails the literal story of progression. Both Lee and MacDonald are suspicious of oventaluing the vertical avis of genealogy. as this son of privileging is seen to effect, and then repudiate. such geneaiogical crises as miscegenation, adultery, rape, and incest. The recovery of excised farnily members that is depicted in Disa~~earinnMoon Cafe, like the exuberant warping of the vertical and lateral axes in Fa11 On Your Knees, displays a concem For how a family may extend itself beyond the confines of vertical inclusivity. In contrast. Gowdy is not engaged with the problem of familial extension but rather with a more abstract conception of familial regeneration and individual self-recognition, as is exhibited by the sacred symbols' inability to procreate. However, the fact that her genealogies do not extend very fa.does not mean that Gowvdy is indifferent to issues of familial order. Part of the problem with the She-S's defective quest throughout the desert is that the members of the farnily cannot settle into any sort of untroubled cod~guration, the "Vformation" having deteriorated during the slaughter at Blood Swamp (86), and an insunnountable strain having developed between She-Snorts and She-Screams (1 85). And while Gowdy does not typicdly focus on crises that threaten genealogical purity, she is concemed with those apocalyptic cises that threaten the spMtual rentrwal of individuais within the family. Proceeding from my discussion of the mother-child relationship, I will look at Gowdyosvarious family compacts, both in terms of how individuai identity is constructed within and against the compact, and how the apocalyptic crisis is t ranscended. Gowdy's catalogue of absent mothen is complemented by her equally fascinating series of fathers who are not. and who do not. fit. Fitness here is not only a matter of suitability or cornpetence but also a simple matter of health; Gowdy's fathers are, for the most part. unwell. Even in cornparison to his ineffectual, alcoholic, suicida1 wife, Jim Field is the one who seems most unfit and, in "Disneyland 1961," the various aspects of his unfitness are divulged. His Iunatic resolution that the family spend their two-week vacation in a bomb shelter is the backdrop to the chapter's display of lirn's crueity. his obsessiveness. and the foulness of his body. the smell of which intensifies when the lights are out (79-80). The Field girls are most conscious of defining themselves in opposition to their father. Lou realizes that "Hanging around hûn, she acis like him. she always has, so that for most of her Iife sheosbeen somebody she can't stand"(238). Gordon Canary is not cruel and not crazy, but he is dfiicted with a weak hem and sickened by his own homosexuality. What is significant about Gordon's wiftness is that he is rarely figured in tens of his role as a father to Marcy or Sonja; when he cornes to tems with his homosexuality, it is his wife who participates in the readjustment. Like "Flesh of My Flesh." Mr. Sandman ends with a false image of a perfect, nomal family, as if to suggest that the Canarys have accepted their own peculiar order. The diminishing importance of the father continues in The White Bone, in which the prefatory genealogical tables trace only the matriarchal lines and fail to note any fathers at dl. As the narrator explains, to the elephants, -"Father,'[. . .] is neither a concept nor a word since bulls are not thought to be CO-conceiversof life. A bu11 digs the tunnel, that is all"(Z0). While Tall Time's greatest wish is that Mud agree to mate with Mm for life, so that -'the two of them plus the newbom would form their own tiny herd"(149), Mud herself is otien envious of the bulls' exemption fiom the burdens of family (8 l)." Together with the absent mothers, this chain of unfit and increasingly unnecessary father figures suggests that Gowdy is skeptical about the inherent significance of parents dtogether. especially in tenns of how love is distributed arnong the family. As is the case in MacDonald's work. the most valorized relationship is between siblings, although Gowdy is still less concemed with championing the horizontal axis of genealogy. While in The Arab's Mouth and Fa11 On Your Knees, there is much emphasis on genetics and blood ties. after Falline h\neels, Gowdy's "siblings'? are connected by telepathy and an ovenvhelming sense of identification with one another. The fac: that the connections between Marcy and Joan. and between Mud and Date Bed, are artificial sibling relationships indicates conclusively that Gowdy conceives of family as something that is constnicted rather than something that is registered or even recovered. As an adoptee. Mud is particularly sensitive to the constitution of family. While she often perceives herself as "a stranger in the family, [who is] honoured rather than entitied to [. . .] intimacy"(199). the swiving She-S's ultimately accept Mud and her newbom into their family. The only prerequisite for the construction of family is an embracing of the spirit of love. while the only real purpose for the definition of family is that it facilitates a definition of the self. In other words, Gowdy's thematizing of artificially ador apocalyptically constructed family compacts reflects her preoccupation with how individual identity is actualized and sacralized. Gowdy's child protagonists are not conceived as burgeoning playen in their own family romance but rather as subjects who are only able to define their fmily once they have defined themselves. In keeping with Gowdy's sense of apocalyptic regeneration. subjectivity is usually forged under duress and regenerated in conespondence to crises of annihilation. The Field girls corne to terms themselves in response to Mrs. Field's suicide. as well as the specter of her fatal release of baby Jimmy. an act that Lou suggests may have denved from Ma. Field's desire "To put an end to the Field line"(Z43). Likewise, the Canarys are shocked into self- recognition and mutual tolerance by Joan's death-state. Finally, it is the devastation of their species that ultimately clarifies love and gives swiving elephants a more complex sense of themselves than the sense afiorded to them under the auspices of their archaic faith. The issue of identity is raised in Chapter One of The White Bone, during Mud-s renaming ceremony. The loss of her name recalls the "derangement [that] overtook her"(4) during oestrus and registen the fact that she has now ken irrevocably '*dtered"(j). aithough it must be recalled that this is the character-s second cycle of alteration, as her binh narne is not Mud but Tiny (8). As is to be expected, it is Date Bed who ruminates most extensively on how the process of naming is bound up with the issue of identity. With reference to the renaming ceremony, Date Bed muses: -it seems to me that dessthey regard you as a future nurse cow, they choose a narne that will antagonize you [. . .]. They hope lhat by provoking you. you'll eventually prove hem wrong. A misguided strategy, in my opinion. More ofien than not. cows surrender to their names.'(21) Certainly. the cow names that give reviewer Sarah Boxer so much trouble (7) are usehl shorthand for. at the very ieast. the superficial behaviour of characters like She-Screams or L~lirt.?'Date Bed's later reflections on names suggest, however, that this sort of "surrendcr" serves only to mask one's true and sacred identity. When Date Bed converses with the tlies. who refer to themselves as "Vital." she is '-amused because al1 creatures go by such vainglorious names"(l10): for example, the wildebeests cal1 themselves "Ideal"( 102) and the secretary birds must be addressed as "Majestic"(l04). Tall Time has a similar thought in reference to the We-F's. wondering if they are "vain because of their names. It strikes him as not improbable that cows who constantly hear themselves king called 1. in families who know themselves as We. may fom the impression that beyond their own skin the worth of the world dwindles"(290). As Date Bed approaches her death. her thoughts about identity become more insistent and profound. Afier realizing that her rnemory is growing dimmer, she fastidiously works at retrieving the details fiom out of her shadow mernories. beiieving that each retrieval represents an extension of her life (270)? Date Bed's previous notion that identity is related to the eatemal sign of a name. whereby in the end "you are the measure of what your cow name has corne to signi&,"(271) is replaced by her "hunch that you are the sum of those incidents only you can testiQ to, whose existence, without you, would have no earthly acknowledgmentT'(271).This is another crucial feanire of Gowdy's Chnstology: perhaps more so than the sacred figure is a healer, she is a witness to the crises of annihilation that threaten herself and/or those who love her. In their capacity to absorb the past. Gowdy's sacred witnesses are associated with Lee's fabricators and with MacDonald's motley of interpreters. The witness is another type of mapreader committed to heeding the contents of the genealogical chart. In keeping with her agenealogical/apocalyptic focus. however, Gowdy 's witnesses must confront the imminent ends of their own stories in ways that characten like Lee's Kae and MacDonald's Mercedes do not. Mrs. Field's othenvordly "message" to Lou and Joan's tapes represent the expression of the sacred communication. or the testimony of the witness. that intemipts profane time with a regenerating sacred cycle. And although the sacred message of love that accompanies the resurrection of Date Bed in Bolt does regenerate the She-S family. other aspects of Date Bed's ability to bear witness are compromised. Jan-Melissa Schrarnrn considers the function of testimony as an eye-witness account: "[tes~irnony]not only encompasses narratives of expsrience which need lay no immediate daim to issues of tith or falsehood. but [. . .j seeks to be regarded as a species of evidence9-(5).Though her study's primary subjects of inquiry are legal proceedings and religious airimations in the Victorian period. Schrarnrn is here refemng to the recording of stones of those who are marginalized or persecuted. and whose eye-witness accounts are the proof of their hitherto suppressed expenence. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub specify one of the central features of such narratives: Since the testimony cannot be simply relayed, repeated or reported by another without thereby losing its fûnction as testimony, the burden of the witness - in spite of his or her alignrnent with other witnesses - is a radically unique, non- interchangeable and solitary burden [. . .]. To bear witness is to bear the solitude of a responsibility, and to bear the responsibility, precisely, of that solitude. (3) The assertion thai, in the face of trauma, the subject is forced back in on him- or herself, is similar to the idea suggested by Date Bed's "hunch." The witness is necessarily singular. and his or her identity is specified by that which only k or she has seen. While Date Bed's role in The White Bone is that of the sacred witness. al1 the surviving characten in the novel are forced to take up the "burden of the witness." a burden that not only transforms each individual but also produces an epistemological chasm between them. In response to She-Soothes' daim that she gknows" Date Bed. She-Snorts States: "'You don't. You can't not any longer. None of us are who we wereF'(306). She-Snorts' words reflect the paradox of Gowdy's concem with individual identity. On the one hand. Gowdy's plots track the regenerating processes of self- recognition. representing the construction of the family compact as a secondary consequence of such processes. Her work is preoccupied with the celebration of particularity. especially the particularity of experience that produces the subject and unique expressions of love. On the other hand. her work investigates such negative aspects of individualism as vanity and the inability to communicate; even the problem of self-hatred faced by the Field girls, Gordon and Mud is a by-product of solipsim. In The White Bone, many of the negative features of individualism are aggravated by those traumatic incidents that isolate the profane witness. 1t is the role of characters Iike Mrs. Field. Joan and Date Bed to solve this paradox; as Christ figures, these sacred witnesses assume the solitary burden of the witness and provide a catalyst for renewal by acknowledging the uniqueness of love. As Felman and Laub argue, "the appointment to bear witness is. paradoxically enough, an appointment to transgress the confines of that isolated stance, to speak for others and to othersg'(3). Whereas Mn. Field and especially Joan embrace the opportunity to bear witness, Date Bed's situation makes it difficult for her to "transgress" her isolation. While it is true that she bequeaths her ability to mind talk to Mud. as wll as many of her species' songs to the mongooses (271). Date Bed's role as a sacred witness to "outrage"(Fe1man 4) is jeopardized by the fact that her dying entails the draining of her perfect memory and thus the potential rupture of identity. The preface to The White Bone is taken up with the issue of elephant memory and its complex relationship to identity. The nanator points out that "Some [elephants] go so far as to daim that under that thunderhead of flesh and those huge rolling bones they are memory*-(l)and. later in the narrative, the matriarch of the She-Dosfurther explicates this claim. She-Demands' position, however. that elephants are memory in so far as they are the "living" mernories of the She (83). is another problematic manifestation of blind faith. Afier the slaughter at Blood Swamp. Date Bed considers the fate of the members of her species. wondering whether their ordeals rnight be either a test or a punishment from the She: "And then. recalling She-Demands' final sermon. she thinks. 'We are king rernembered.' and this strikes her as a more temble prospect than the other two because it is unassailable"(l04). The association that Date Bed makes between memory and the force of doom is Mercomplicated by the narrator's assertion that the elephants are actually "doomed without [memory]. When their memones begin to drain, their bodies go into decline. as if from a slow leakage of blood"(1). This two-sided nature of elephant memory is another complicating feature of Gowdy's representation of the sacred witness, especially in terms of the capacity of such witnesses as genealogical mapreaden. On the one hand. the species is doomed without memory. Like other persecuted groups, who "must survive in order to bear witness. and [. . .] must bear witness in ordrr to affim [. . .] survival"(Felman 1 17). the elephants depend on preserving and regenerating individual and collective rnemory. For this reason. the species is committed to activities like mourning their dead, singing the Endless songs. reiterating their lore. and the scrupulou~ "noticing' of the world around them (1-2). In the cave of the We-Fos.Tall Time is even show a series of '-likenesses" that have been carved on the wall by tusks. which 1- Flounder explains are. incredibly. "'the deliberate creation of a single cow intent on preserving her visionsœ"(220). On the other hand, the phenornenon of being remembered, or witnessed. is, as Date Bed registers. a "terrible prospect"( 104). both because it exposes the persona of the She as entirely and tembly separate. and because it seems to presuppox doom. fioughout the novel. king witnessed is ofien equated with death. As a visionary, Mud is saddled with various images of slaughter and death, including her vision of the massacre of the She-D family. which precedes the She-S's encounter with the survivon. EqualIy disturbingly. Mud witnesses the dead body of She-Screams several days before She-Screarns falls over the rock ledge: Mud is mck by the "cruelly pathetic" fact that she rnust now comprehend dl of She-Screarn's ludicrous behaviour in light of a memory of her death ( 183). It is precisely due to this aspect of memory ihat, for many elephants, the act of bearing witness is taboo: as She-Snorts scolds Mud, "'A death vision is the burden of the visionary alone"'(239). Thus, while the witness may absorb and heed the past, the problems associated with the aci of bearing witness, especially when it cornes to situating others as the "remembered." lirnits the possibility of genealogical mapreading. In The White Bone. the impulse to memory is most positively figured in terms of agenealogy. in terms of the individual's preservation of his or her own identity. Various questions then arise: how is spiritual regeneration possible without the sharing of memory? How is the apocaiyptic moment salvaged from the crisis of annihilation? How much of Date Bed's sacredness. her identity. has survived in Mud and Bolt without the ac t of beaing witness? Gowdy's response to these sorts of questions entails a return to the realm of ruptured allegocy. in which ail interpretive signs are revealed as necessarily indeterminate. As Date BedTshealth wonens. her mernories begin to be replaced by what she calls "hallucinations." which are visions of things to which she has never ken witness. Date Bed's hallucinations include her sense of "walking in an immense cavem where it is somehow as bright as midday. and on each side of hcr. in phenomenally straight rows. stacks of strange fruits [. . .] glide by"(160): of a '-wall. twice as high as she is and three tirnes her width" on which "life unfolds [. . .] in jerks and flashes as if it were the shifiing scene of someone else's memo j'(179). and of '*A sonica! green tree bristling with short thoms and laden in what appear to be sparkiing hits or flowenœ'(279).Date Bed's witnessing of the supermarket. the mouie screen, and the Christmas tree reflects Gowdy's brief foray into the explicitly tropologicai or moral level of interpretation, as human reality is directly juxtaposed with elephant reality. Date Bed considers that, just as such visions may be the "lost mernories of a creature from a place unknown," her own draining memory might "have entered the body of sorne suange, doortîed creature who, like her. is enthralled by the scenes unfolding in its rnind"(274). In other words, humanity is facing the same crisis of annihilation as the elephant species and the only way io transform such a crisis is to compare and embrace difFerent reaiities. Clearly, however. such transformation depends upon a fairly precarious set of circurnstances, as even the elephants themselves have difficulties understanding one another. According to Gowdy's construction of the pitfalls of sel f-recognition, the tenuousness of family compacts, and the generally destructive relationships between species. the salvaging of the apocalyptic moment seems rather unlikely. Still. beyond Gowdy 's pessimistic view of social behaviour is the sacred syrnbol that represents love. The fact that the sacred is a compound of suggesiions rather than a controlled sign signals Gowdy's postmodem approach to allegory. Further. the indeterminacy and variousness with which Gowdy imagines love dull the intensity of her social pessimisrn and makes room for a renewed conception of faith. In the final scene of The White Bone. Mud has developed enough self-awareness to shed her amiety about belonging to a farnily compact and. "out of contrition," to acknowledge the numerous guises of love (327). In this final scene. which is explicitly rnarked as a point of regenented departure by the '-spears of ps[that] have pushed through the earlhY(326). Gowdy emphasizes such potentially genealogicai features of the journey as a formal ordering of the farnily such as was not apparent since before the slaughter at Blood Swamp, as well as the farnily's serene progress across the plain. In many ways, the final representation of the She-S's corresponds to the depictions of "normal" farnilies that close Mr. Sandman and We So Seldom Look on Love, ail of which indicate that, for Gowdy, the tnie compact is forged when a family swives an ordeal together. And while Mud has had a vision of the Safe Place, "in which she recognized nobody." she chooses not to "speculate"(327) about this falsely remembered sign. Such visions belong to a system of dubious links. blind faith. and the bittemess of fear. Rather. Mud regularly look behind her io notice the trace of where her farnily has ken, "the dust raised by their passage rolling out as far as the horizon"(327). It is this son of witnessing of unique. undetermined "passage" that is threatened by the apocalyptic cnsis, and which is recovered by the sacred confirmation of love. ' The four levels of interpretation associated with traditional allegory are: the literal level of interpretation, which functions as the textuai "veii;" the moral or tropological level, a didactic level which may be read for lessons about individual behaviour; the allegorical level, whose lessons are lessons of belief rather than behaviow and that apply more generally and. finally, the anagogicd levei, which points to the universal sign of God. 'Gowdy's manipulation of Judeo-Christian myth chiefly includes her inversion of the stories of Genesis. For example. humans are represented not as the acme of the natural order but as diminutions of higher creatures (7); the world is almost destroyed not by a flood but by drought (43). In Blindness and Insight, Paul de Man rehearses the historical distinction between symbol and allegory: "[the romantic] valorkation of symbol at the expense of allegory [. . .) appeaI[sj to the infinity of a totality [that] constitutes the main attraction of the symbol as opposed to allegory. a sign that refen to one specific meaning and thus exhausts its suggestive potentials once it has ken deciphered"(l88). ' The term Wegoresis*' is most cornmonly associated with Medieval literature. refemng to the process of interpreting texts allegorically. As J. Stephen Russell notes. "In the Middle Ages. allegory was not a mode of writing; it was the self-conscious recognition of the way we perforce see the world. replace any thing with words or other signs"(xi). Here. 1 am using the term to speci@ Ta11 Time's propensity to impose meaning ont0 the objects in his world. to hansfonn everything into a sign. Gowdy's manipulation of the allegorical highlights the interco~ectionsarnong history. genealogy and narrative that registered in Disa~warineMoon Cafe and among genealogy. narrative and interpretation in Fa11 On Your Knees. Gerald O'Collins States that the **branchof theolow called Christology retlects systematically on the person. being. and doing of Jesus of Nazareth(1). It is, thus. Christ's maleness that has been used to subjugate women. 1 am interested in Christology's focus on identi&ing the features of the Christ symbol, especially as those features are associated with a particular ideological framework. 7 Stevens is here refemng to essays by Ruether. Rita Nakashima Brock. Jacquelyn Grant. and Eleanor McLaughlin. James' remarks recall Foucault's notion of genealogy, which "must record the singularity of events outside of any rnonotonous finality; it must seek them in the most unpromising places. in what ive tend to feel is without history - in sentiments. love. conscience. instinctsw(139-40). Torrent explains to Ta11 Time that even the We-F's have not seen the white bone di rectly .but that rather their "anceston" have (70). 10 According to this scheme, it is usehl to think of MacDonald's work as prirnarily concemed with the muddle of middles. '' As Date Bed recalls. **rhinosbelieve that afier an interval of anywhere from ten to thirty days the breath [of the dead] rems fiom wherever the spirit has gone [. . .] if a female rhino happens to inhale the breath she will one day give birth to a calf in whom some portion of the spirit uf the deceased is preserved'(l76). " There is an irony to Mn. Field's whiteness which problematizes her daughten' worship of her. While Mr. Field tells the girls that their mother's hair has tumed white because of a "reaction to the anesthetic," even they can see that her trip to the hospitai has involved a more traumatic procedure than the reported appendix operation. Mn. Field sheds some light on the subject when she advises Sandy not to have an abortion: "'Your heart breaks. Your tex ducts won't close. Your hair follicies act up. Your hair just gives up"'(2 14). l3 Arthur Clayborough provides a good surnrnary of the use of the term "grotesque" in literature and literary theory in The Grotesque in Enelish Literature. '' Mc Elroy's take on this aspect of the grotesque arises from his cornparison of the degrees of play suggested in the theories of Wolfgang Kayser and Mikhail Bakhtin. in the case of Kayser's conception of the grotesque, "Such laughter as there is ofien originates on the caricatural fnnge of the grotesque, is bitter, mocking, and ultimately satanic"(14). For Bakhtin, *'the grotesque is the peoples' triumphant laughter dethroning the shibboleths of the 'official' world view [. . .] thus defeating fear"(l4). I5 This scene recalls Bakhtin's discussion of the grotesque figure of the stuttering clown in Rabelais and His World. In trying to get something out of his mouth. the stutterer displays the *-tqpicalsymptoms of the grotesque life of the body [. . . as he] helps to deliver the word"(508). What is significant here is that "theessential topographical element of the bodily hierarchy [is] tumed upside dom: the lower stratum replaces the upper stratum"(309). l6 The usual relationship between Christ and his disciples is, of course. reciprocal; Christ is both Ioving and loved. What 1 am calling an inversion of this aspect of the Christ figure has to do with Christ's activity. the extraordinary measures he takes to show his love for humanity. versus the relative passivity of Gowdy's Christ figures. 17 The collapsing of death with the idea of transcendence is a problem of conservative Christianity that James considers; he notes Camus' argument that "etemity is an illegitimate solution to the problem of the absurd"(44) and also points out that. for feminist theologians. the promise of otherworldly. individual salvation undermines the idea of community (45). la The white shirt that Al Yothers inscnbes functions as a "Sign". not only to Sonja who is prone to such oveneading (137) but also to generaily level-headed Doris. who reads the marks on the back of the shirt as "H.L.L. (Hamony La Londe)?' perceiving them as a temfying warning from God about her affairs with women (237-38). l9 The title of each chapter of in Fallinn Angels refen to a specific year, while the first sentence of Mr Sandman temporarily situates the narrative by indicating that Joan was bom in 1956 ( 1 ). 'O Mircea Eliade's distinction between profane duration and sacred time clarifies that sacred time -appears under the paradoxicai aspect of a circular tirne. reversible and recoverable, a sort of etemal mythical present"(70). '' Gowdy's representation of father figures may also be thought of in terms ofa possible challenge to the patriarchal order, although the matriarchies set up in The White -Bone are hardly idealized. In fact, there seems to be an element of nostalgia for an earlier order when the old bulls died declaiming "power and lust [. . .] as they died before the drought and the slaughters"(298). Still, it is significant that al1 of Gowdy's sacred syrnbols are fernale. with the exception of the male corpses in "We So Seldom Look on Love." and Sam in Tlesh of My Flesh," who used to be a woman. -77 In a letter to The New York Book Review, none other than John hing cornes to the defence ofGowdy0snovel. Irving revels in the fact that "it's neccssary to leam a new language to tmly possess these characten and their process of emotion," and refers to Boxer's "balkiing] at verb-narnesW(Boxer8) as simply "laqY'(2). '3 A shadow rnemory is defined in Gowdy's glossary as "An imperfect memory (similar to a human memory)"(xiv). Beyond the Individual Imperative To my parents for not being the parents in this book (Barbara Gowdy, dedication in Fallinp: An~els) In a cornpanion piece to her documentary film Women in the Shadows, Christine Welsh recounts her methods and aims for creating the piece, which is "about one wornan's stniggle to corne to terms with loss'(65). The loss that Welsh is referring to is the loss OFthe sense of self thai derives from an awareness of and engagement with farnily history. the self that knows not only from where but from whom it cornes. In Welsh's case. the family history that must be reclaimed is a matdineal Native, primarily Métis. heritage that has been suppressed by various memben of her family. in particular by her grandmother. Welsh speculates thai her grandmother's motive for insisting that the family ancestors are French as opposed to Métis is part of a "process of denial and assimilation [. . .] that goes right back to what happened to [Welsh's great-great-great- grandrnother) Margaret Taylor"(64). a Métis woman abandoned by her English husband wvith whom she had had two sons. Margaret Taylor was one of the numerous Abonginal and mixed-blood -*country wives" who married and had children with the European fur traders who came to Canada during the seventeenth and eightceiith centuries. before '-white women were pemitted to brave the peds of the 'Indian Country"'(59). Welsh situates her deficient sense of self within a framework of the past exploitation and penecution of indigenous people in Canada. Her autobiographical efforts are ccntrasted with the histories of the Canadian fur trade wntten by "European forefathers'* fiom which the voices of the %dian forernothers?' have been expurgated (61). Welsh's autobiographical piece revisits rnany of the concerns of the genealogicd plot. In particular. Welsh is preoccupied with several of the issues taken up in Disaowarinz Moon Cafe. Welsh's juxtaposition of personal and public history resembles Lee's use of the 1924 Janet Smith Trial to ground her genealogical plot. and both texts challenge the idea of the stable and sole historical chronicle. The terminology that Welsh uses to describe her own confrontation with the same son of genealogical injunction toward silence goveming the Wong family plot is strikingly similar to Lee's. Just as Kae "must work at unraveling knots"(l23) in order to comprehend her family's story, Welsh descnbes her autobiographical research as a process of "unravelling the thick web of denial. shame. bittemess and silence that had obscured [herl past"(60). And, while Lee's novel depicts certain problematic foms of genealogical fabrication brought about by both the conservative genealogical impetus and the injunction to silence. Welsh' s own genealogical fabrications ensue from her desire to challenge her family's "code of silence9~(6O).In order to fi11 in the gaps of her foremother's stones and thereby establish a coherent sense of self. Welsh is happy to "make some reasonably well-infonned assumptions"(6 1) about the lives and actions of various long dead family members. Finally. Welsh's abiding quest to know herself is initiated when she "first realize[s] that amongst [her] ghostl y relatives there was Indian bloodY(57). The issue of blood and. especially. blood purity was the initial concem of my own exploration of the genealogical plot. Using Mary Douglas' discussion in Purity and Danger about societal pollution laws as a model. my aim was to investigate how blood putity and irnpurity are thematized in the contemporary multi-generationai family history story. Douglas points out that "If we abstract pathogenicity and hygiene Erom our notion of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place [. . .]. Dirt, then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is a system"(35). By foregrounding such "events" of ancestral "dirt" as instances of miscegenation, incest, or even certain types of adoption, the system of genealogy is not only rendered visible but shows itself to be susceptible to disniptive energy. As Douglas argues, "Granted that disorder spoils patterns: it also provides the materials of pattern [. . .] its potential for patteming is indefinite, [. . . disorder) symbolizes both danger and power"(94). The disordering of the bloodline. far from foreclosing the family history story, produces a revitalized if potentially *danprous" genealogical plot. In Disa~~earingMoon Cafe, it is the adulterous relationship between Fong Mei and Ting An that, on the one hand, maintains the Wong lineage and. on the other. lays the groundwork for the incestuous relationship betwveen Morgan and Swie. The final scene of Fa11 On Yow Knees portrays the fitting reunion of Lily. the product of the incestuous rape of Kathieen by her father, with her symbolic twin Anthony/Ambrose. who is the mixed-race result of Frances' elaborate seduction of Leo. a married man who thought she was a child. in The White Bone. Mud lems that what connects her to her adopted family, and what remains in the face of devastation. is not habit, duty or even faith. but a sacred love and a will to communicate. My focus on the theme of blood purity, as well as other themes and images especially comrnon to narratives about family by coniemporary Canadian women writets. soon gave way to a focus on the issue of genealogical arrangement. Two things became clear to me. Firstly. 1 discovered that what makes the fictional genealogical plot unique is not its recome to images of ghosts, webs. or bones and not its concem with memory, silence, or blood. Rather, the genealogical plot is defined by its engagement with the system of family: its fom and content should be examined as the effects of an author's particular conception of how a farnily is ordered. Secondly, while this way of theorizing the Canadian genealogical plot is certainly generated from the texts that 1 have chosen to scrutinize, my shift in emphasis to the issue of anangement also signifies a challenge to the trajectory of studies occupied with images of mapmaking in Canadian women's fiction. In rny introduction. 1 point out that Howells' Private and Fictional World, Huggan's Temtorial Dis~utesand Goldman's Paths of Desire dl register a relationship between what Howells refers to as the "unmapped temtory"(l5) of a symbolic wildemess and the developing female subjectivity. Throughout this dissertation. 1 have shown the inadequacy of the wildemess symbol for the geneaiogical plot which is necessarily engaged ~4ththe "charted temtory" of tradition and which thematizes not the process of mapping brit of mapreading. In this conclusion. however. 1 would like to focus on the other half of the critical cornmonplace. namely the concem with the developing female subjectivity. as here too my mode of theorizing the genealogical plot is distinct. As a way of distinguishing the protagonists in novels such as Atwood's Surfacing, Laurence's The Diviners, Kogawa's Obasan, from male heroes of quest narratives, Howells declares that The 1irnits [the female protagonistsl challenge are cultural and psychological and their discoveries may be of no importance to anybody but the characters themseIves"(5). It is in this sense that Howells defines her corpus as "pnvate and fictional." reading even the most political aspects of Canadian women's fiction wïting as being "boughtout of persona1 and often unconscious emotion"(32). Huggan and Goldman are more concemed with the politicaily subversive (Goldman 4) potential behind the use of cartographic imagery and tenninology, whereby references to boundaries. for example, "may be perceived as means of exclusion, symbolic devices for the marginalization of women in patnarchal culture'' (Huggan 15). Still, li ke Howells, Huggan and Goldman are primarily interested in how such imagery relates to the theme of an evolving subjectivity; as Huggan argues, representations of mapping are employed as metaphors for discovering "new, formerly suppressed or disallowed projections of selP'(13). The close readings contained in Territorial Disputes and Paths of Desire regularly privilege the issue of the individual's subjectivity so that the experiences ofa lone fcmale protagonist are marked as the key site of a work's feminist politics. Thus, the female self that emerges out of the symbolically emptied landscape dominates the refashioned world as a new sort of pioneer, a figure that is sometimes eenly reminiscent of Ricou's '*vertical man.'' 1 am not suggesting that the novels these critics explore have nothing to do with individual identity or that the emphasis on a female protagonist's developing subjectivity occurs in a vacuum. Nor am 1 trying to diminish the political implications of a woman- centred text which. in its giving voice to the experiences of a female protagonist. concems itself with those aspects of womenoslives that may be obscured or rnisrepresented in male-centred narratives. Still, the tendency to overvalue the subject position of a female protagonist sometimes results in the oversimplification of a fictional text and its classification as some fom of autobiography. The locus of Goldman's analysis of Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historie. for example, is Annie's selfdefinition: Annie's curiosity about Mn. Richards and her mother. Ina derives from what Goldman perceives as "the ongoing struggle to constnict a female identity"(113). GoIdman goes on to declare that "Histones must be generated in order to arrive at a story - and a life - that works"( 113). While the explicit coilapsing of "stories" with "life" produces the kind of reading championed by such second-wave feminist critics as Adrienne Rich and Shoshana elm man.' this type of analysis is better suited to the truly autobiographicai text. In an essay such as Welsh's, for example, it is to be expected that the primary concem is the aiiro or self. Weish develops a coherent identity by imagining her foremothers as past versions of herselt She resolves, for example, that "[ilt must have been Jane [Margaret Taylor's mother] who taught her children to make the best of who anci what they were - to take from two cultures the things they would need to make their way in a world that was shifting and cbanging before their ver-eyes"(62). In fabricating a history of her foremothers' *'resourcefulness. adaptability, and courage"(65), Welsh builds an identity "that works." Goldman not only consigns Mn. Richards and Ina to the parts they play in Annie's story but is ofien inclined to read Annie as a version of Marlatt (120). This cntical tendency to. as Felman would declare, "read autobiographically"(13) is aiso apparent in Melanie Stevenson's analysis of MacDonald's work. as she reads The Arab's Mouth and FaIl On Your Knees as explorations of MacDonald's own mixed-race heritage (42). My classification of Disap~earineMoon Cafe, Fa11 On Your becs, and White Bone as genealogical plots is intended to mark. not just the prevalence of a cornplex of images and themes but a distinct genre of identity novel which favours the ensemble rather than the individuai. Because its narrative spans a few generations.' the genealogical plot undermines or at least challenges the idea of a protagonist, or chief player in a story. What the critic of the geneaiogicd plot must attend to is the ordering and disordering of family systems over time and space, rather than how an individuai situates him- or herself in terms of a retrospective vision of the ancestors. Here, I am reminded again of Foucault's assertion that genealogy 'must record the singularity of events outside of any rnonotonous finality; [. . . genealogy] opposes itself to the seiuch for 'origins"'(l39-40). Thus, each story in the family history is "singular;" the retrospective endeavor to perceive (or even io fabricate) the various strands of family history in terms of a sole identity serves to overdetemine the past. The three novels that I have focused on in this study al1 engage with this central criterion of the genealogical plot, often portraying the potentially damaging effects of retrospective overdetermination or a solipsistic perception of family. Kae's initial belief that "the intricate complexities of a family with chinese roots could be massaged into a suant. digestible unit"(19) parailels the readerly expectations Br a contemporary novel written by a wornan that appears to have a female protagonist. narnely. that the "unit" of Kae's developing subjectivity will be Disa~~earinp.Moon Cafe's pnmary concem. The form and content of Lee's novel. however, deemphasize the idea of a farnily protagonist in favour of an exploration of how family patterns evolve. The novel's episodic structure allows Mui Lm's tierce anachment to the patrilineal golden chain to stand beside Kae's sense of her collective mothers. both biological and adopted. and Gwei Chang's loyalty to a community brotherhood. Most importantly. Lee's novel does not begin and end with Kae's story but \cith Kelora and Gwei Chang's, whose love develops under the eyes of Chinese 'iuicles"( 13) and Aboriginal b'grandmothea''(l 4). Lee's genealogical plot thus proves an effective frarnework for her examination of the complex process of histoncal recovery and the hazards of what Morgan would cal1 "one-dimensional" thinking (69). Of the three novels highlighted in this study, Fail On Your Knees is the one that can most properly be called an ensemble piece. Despite her interest in Jung's notion of individuation, MacDonald counters every instance of retrospective subject formation with an instance of performative familial arrangement in order to show the "danger and power"(Doug1a.s 94) inherent in any exclusive construction of self. For example, Frances' . use of a talking cure to help her recover her memory of the birth of the twins and to heal the distress of her father's abuse leads to the seduction of Leo. Frances' manoeuvre is not so different from the kinds of familial arrangement carried out by Mr. Mahmoud, James Piper, Rose's mother Jeanne. and Mercedes, al1 of whom act in response to their own sense of self as it is defined by race. class, and/or religion. Fa11 On Your Knees, like MacDonald's other work. indicates the necessity of embracing genealogical confusion as every attempt to regulate family according to a particular subject position will most likely backfire. In contrast to Fa11 On Your Knees. The White Bone does have a protagonist and. whereas the arch of MacDonald's work depicts her gradua1 movcment away from a central heroine like Constance Ledbelly. Gowdy's earlier novels are consistently focused on the family collective. My analysis of Gowdy's work as agenealogicd, whereby the health of the family is predicated not on its potential for continuity but on the well-king of fmiiy rnembers. accounts somewhat for The White Bone's emphasis on Mud. For Gowdy. it is the unhealthy family that produces the promgonin; Mud's entrenched resistance to her adopted family. dong with her regular encounters with death. gives rise to her solipsism and tendency towards allegoresis. Gowdy's sacred symbols fùnction in response to such genealogical crises as the inability to communkate and the failure of love, taking up the solitary burden of the witness in order to compel their loved ones towards mutual recognition and acceptance. Still, the very presence of a protagonist reflects the faft that The White Bone is a far less coherent genealogical plot than Disap~earingMoon Cafe and Fall On Y our Knees. 1 would argue that Gowdy is demonstrating the diniculty of maintainhg a genealogical vision in the face of outrage and devastation. although by the end of the novel Mud's vision has begun to widen as she relearns how to love, to rnoum, to communicate and to hope. The recent popularity of the genre of the genealogical plot for Canadian women writers may thus be considered as pan of the evolution in feminist literature that concems itself more with context than with subject. In het critique of feminism's risky flirtation with the "mythology" of American individualism (1 34), Linda S. Kauhann bemoans the tendency of feminist critics to "view literature as a reflection of individual expenence9'(135). Such a procedure often reduces the literary text to an expression of personal sentiment ancilor a simplistic tale of unilateral oppression (Kaufmann 137). While certainly calling the pnnciples of the conservative genealogical impetw into question, the authors 1 have focused on are al1 carehil not to simply blarne the patriarchy for genealogical trespasses. Critics such as Lien Chao. Marie Noelle Ng and Melanie Stevenson. however. do sometimes fall into the trap of reading Disappearina Moon Cafe or Fa11 On Your Knees as mere victim narratives. Kaufmann's wish that the "mythologizing [of] ounelves or the pan"( 144) might be left behind begins to corne to hition in the contempocary geneaiogical plot. As 1 have demonstrated in this study, for the women witing genealogy in recent Canadian fiction. constmcting a freshly coherent mythology of self or family is not the goal: rather. women writers have adopted the genre in order to explore family history as what Foucault would cal1 "a profusion of entangled events7'(1 5 5). 1 also suggea that the genre of the genealogical plot need not only be considered in terms of its relationship to feminist theory but is also amenable to, for example, Marxist, pst-colonial, or new histoncal readings. Here, 1 will remto rny opening discussion ofûrove's The Master of the Mill in order to show how the genealogical plot may be read in conjunction with a Manrist critique. Like many feminist genealogical plots, The Master of the Mill is occupied with the failure of the vertical axis of genealogy although, for Grove, the continuity, wholeness, and soleness of this axis are associated not with what Lee would cal1 the patrilineal "golden chain" but with bourgeois ideological interests. Sam's relationship to his father is defined by his complicity with Rudyard's falsification of insurance documents in order to gain control of the flou market; Sam's son Edmund embraces his grandfather's act, declaring: "1 was bom to wield powei0(226).Grove's critique of capitalism is revealed when Edmund's death terminates the Clark lineage and by way of the image of the vertical mill. whose "logicD*(32S)supplants the family's story. Further, as is the case in The White Bone, the geneaiogicd crisis produces an ailing, solipsistic protagonist; Sam's attempts to organize his mernories and construct a coherent identity mirror the destructive championhg of the individual inherent to capitalist ideology. Finally. because Grove imagines the sound genealogical line in ternis of continuity and sequence. the haphazard temporal framework of The Master of the Mill signals the unfitness of the Clark men. Thus. the parameters of the geneaiogical plot, that is the extent to which the ensemble rather than the individual is a text's focus, together with the way the organizing pruiciples thought to govem family are replicated or challenged in narrative, have the potential to reveai any number of theoretical premises. The prevalence of this genre in Canadian literature belies Kae's exclamation that "no one writes family sagas anymore!"(l28), leading me to believe that a wide range of readings are yet to corne. Ultimately, my exploration of these novels has ied me to clarify my sense of how literary study should proceed, especiaily in tenns of finding a baiance between formal and political concerns. In rny introduction, 1 used the phrase "concurrently disobedient and continuous" to describe the potential of the contemporay genealogical plot to be at once cornmitted to tradition and to transformation. This phrase serves not ody to delineate the sort of text that I am moa interested in but, more importantly, to characterize my own preferred mode of analysis. The desired mode1 of "concurrence," for example, stands behind my choice to view my corpus with the eye of both a structuralist (narratologist) and a feminist. to assess a novel's recourse to the features of a particular poetics even while remaining aware of its challenge to certain ideologicai assumptions. Because the novels 1 chose for my corpus are written by women. because 1 am inclined and have been trained to read as a feminist, that second "eye" was perhaps more readily engaged when 1 began research for this project. The feminist side of the dissertation always seemed easier and more exciting to explain to colleagues. was ofien self- explanatory while the structuralist side was more dificuit to define and, sometimes. defend.' It was, however, my inquiry into the system of geneaiogy, and the ensuing observation of vanous formal or thematic coniinuities between contemporary plots and the biblical tradition of genealogy. that gave depth to my analysis and allowed me to specify exactly how Lee, MacDonald and Gorvdy were king disobedient. Exploring the tension between the continuous and the disobedient has also corne to serve as my pedagogical model. Thcoughout this project, I have continually corne back to the various avenues 1 might take in teaching Fa11 On Your Knees, concerning myself primarily with how to reveal the complex aesthetic qualities of a novel that is so readily comprehensible in ternis of its response to "popular" politics." Much as 1 am wary of the tendency in some feminist criticism to read "autobiographically" and thereby lose sight of the specificity of literature as literature, 1 am cautious about any propensity in the classroom - especially the classroorn where the work of contemporary women miten is being taught - to confuse fiction with fact. Lest it appear that this project. which began as an inquiry into the radical redefinition of fmily, has turned me into some sort of neo- New Critic. 1 should also state that 1 am passionately committed to seeking out the relationship between art and ideology and encouraging students to do the same. Still. 1 have corne to recognize that, while attention to the redrn of politics or sociohistory is crucial, "texto' or "literature" is what literary analysts know and know best what to do with. In order tu inspire students of literature to read in a way that is usefully "disobedient.'' that seeks out that which is politically andlor structurally radical, the arch of the continuous must also be stressed. As John Metcalf points out, literary tradition is "like a farnily which is constantly expanding yet managing somehow to contain and sustain contradictory penonalities"(40-4 1 ). To extend (and mix) genealogical metaphon. my work as an observer and teacher of literature depends on a cornmitment to an ever widening family of writers and readers. which might include al1 manner of embanassing great-uncles or nonconformist stepdaughten. My responsibility thus demands a concurrent engagement with both the strongea of roots and the keshest of hit. ' See Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966- 1978 and Felman, What Does A Wornan Want? Reading and Sexual Difference. I have been using the phrase "multi-generational plot" throughout this dissertation, although it is more useful to define one of the necessary parameters of the geneaiogical plot as its three-generation minimum. Here I am reminded of Peter Brooks' point that three is "perhaps the minimum tepetition to suggest series and processW(9). 3 1 see the same inclination to "defend stnictuialist modes of andysis in, for example, Kathy Mezei's introduction to Ambimious Discourse, a collection of feminist narratologist essays. Mezei asserts that "Although narratology obviously has its roots in structuralism [. . .] poststructuraiism - sometimes filtered through ferninist theory - has problematized certain features of narratology [. . .] as unified, knowable, and inscribabIe"(5). Mieke Bal notes that, by the 1990s, "it seemed that nanatology had gone out of fashion"(l3), and that a continued interest in it "seems to cal1 for an apology, a denid, or a justification"(l3) 4 In fact, my choice of MacDonald's novel for this project ww, initially, another front that required defending, as its immediate commercial popularity, not to mention its inclination towards melodrama, made it seem more appropriate for a book club or Mother's Day present than a doctoral dissertation. During the few years since rny initial thesis proposai. however. Fail On Your Knees has made its move up the canonical charts: not only is the novel starting to show up on syllabi for Canadian Literature courses and in conference papers. but it is the focus of a special issue of The Canadian Review of American Studies to be published in Spring 2002. Portions of my chapter on MacDonald are to be included in that issue. Works Cited Abraham, Lyndy. A Diction- of Alchexnical Imagerv. 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