Myth, History and Labour: the Construction of Identity and the Critique Modernity in Alistair Macleod's No Great Mischief 'And Island

Myth, History and Labour: The Construction of Identity and the Critique Modernity in Alistair MacLeod's No Great Mischief 'and Island

Carmen Natalie Benke

Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts (English) Acadia University Fall Convocation 2008

© by Carmen Natalie Benke, 2008 I, Carmen Natalie Benke, grant permission to the University Librarian at Acadia University to reproduce, loan, or distrubute copies of my thesis in microform, paper or electronic formats on a non-profit basis. I, however, retain the copyright in my thesis.

Signature of Author

Date This thesis by CARMEN NATALIE BENKE was defended successfully in an oral examination on AUGUST 28,2008.

The examining committee for the thesis was:

Dr. Andrew Biro, Chair

Dr. David Creelman, External Reader

Dr. Wanda Campbell, Internal Reader

Dr. Herb Wyile, Supervisor

Dr. Patricia Rigg, Head

This thesis is accepted in its present form by the Division of Research and Graduate Studies as satisfying the thesis requirements for the degree MASTER OF ARTS (ENGLISH). iv

Table of Contents

Approval of Thesis ii

Permission for the Head Librarian to Make Copies iii

Table of Contents iv

Abstract v

Acknowledgements vi

Introduction 1

Chapter One 17

Chapter Two 49

Chapter Three 86

Conclusion 126

Works Cited 133 V

Abstract

This thesis examines the role and construction of identity, through culture and labour, in Alistair MacLeod's novel, No GreatMischief'(1999) , and short stories collected in

Island (2000). I explore both the productive use of tradition and its limits. While

MacLeod's work builds a powerful image of tradition and labour, grounded in a profound sense of history, place, and community, it suffers from rigidity, essentializing Cape

Breton as well as the urban center. Examining his writing, with close attention to historical and ideological contexts, the thesis explores how MacLeod creates a highly nostalgic and selective historical narrative of the Scottish diaspora, an image of the ideal

Cape Bretoner as something paralleling The Folk, and the region itself as a primordial, natural home. Despite the static center-periphery (urban-rural, modern-traditional) divide guiding MacLeod's mythology, moments of genuine challenges to globalization disrupt both his nostalgia and the power of the modem. vi

Returning thanks for life, I turn back and bow eastward. -Goshi, 1775

My deepest thanks are extended to Dr. Herb Wyile for his unwavering support and encouragement over the past two years; to the professors at Acadia who made my year both challenging and rewarding; to Joel for all his efforts to keep me grounded; to my friends Colleen, Ryan, Genna and Ben who insisted that all work and no play is not a life worth living; and to Maggie, the fattest of cats, for keeping me company through many long nights spent working.

This thesis is dedicated with much love and gratitude to Eileen Benke and Florence Shaw. 1

Introduction

More than any other quality, Alistair MacLeod's work is marked by a profound commitment to history: its power to shape self, place and community. His novel and short stories persistently dramatize the moment of construction, sometimes underscoring the possibility of a heightened historical consciousness, sometimes recreating a nostalgic image of Cape Breton life. In either case, MacLeod productively engages the power and complexity of history. Most critics, even those more concerned with his power to evoke emotion and the universal human condition (Jane Urquhart), attend in some way to the role of history in MacLeod's work. Generally speaking, whether the emphasis is on labour (Janice Kulyk Keefer), communication technology (David Williams), postmodern consciousness (Colin Nicholson), or a positive form of cultural recovery (Karl Jirgins,

Chris Gittings, Andrew Hiscock), history is viewed as the point where MacLeod reacts most powerfully and positively to the modern. The ways into history are diverse. One strain that cuts through many of these approaches is that MacLeod's historical narrative challenges what Gittings calls "official" or "received history": "the barely audible vibrations of narrative that are suppressed by the monolithic din of official 2 historiography" (Gittings 93). Here, the debate centers around historiography, specifically marginal history against the official. The struggle is a textual one rather than one that accounts for economics and the processes of globalization.

Colin Nicholson also keeps things within the territory of the text, but from a more individualistic angle. "The Turning of Memory: Alistair MacLeod's Short Stories" emphasizes the importance of history, though tellingly, Nicholson is less interested in history than personal memory: "MacLeod constructs a deeply historicized discourse in which self and other endlessly merge, diverge and recombine" (85). He sees in the individual's historical situation the possibility of endless renewal, but he is less concerned by the problems with MacLeod's elegiac tone, showing instead how it is compatible with what amounts to a 'subject of deconstruction'—always on the edge, open, but in a decidedly apolitical way. While I would also like to demonstrate a quality of openness in MacLeod's work, this thesis argues that MacLeod is more explicitly political and less concerned with individual consciousness. The subjectivity important to

MacLeod transcends any given protagonist and looks to the group, city, historical event, organization of work, and processes of production rather than the mere effects.

To understand MacLeod one must hold to the political moment. This approach has more in common with critics like David Williams than Nicholson. In "From Clan to

Nation: Orality and the Book in Alistair MacLeod's No Great Mischief" Williams documents MacLeod's attempt to recover the collective consciousness of the oral tradition. For Williams, MacLeod's novel, while integrating the more individualizing world of print, moves progressively to a more open communication with the nation, something like a mosaic of tribal consciousnesses. Williams sees, as do I, a larger, 3 specifically political Utopian possibility in MacLeod: "where Highlander and Quebecois may truly live in harmony with Ukrainians, Mennonites, and migrant workers from

Mexico (70). My own work complicates this optimism, seeing in MacLeod an equally ingrained (equal to the politically Utopian) inclination to exclusive origins, tradition as an essence, and a debilitating, fixed binary between urban centers of power and marginal

Cape Breton. I appreciate Williams' focus on the cultural substrate rather than the individual, but find his emphasis on oral/print communication too deterministic.

Andrew Hiscock's "This inherited Life: Alistair MacLeod and the Ends of History" places MacLeod's short stories in the context of postmodernism, rebelling against it, insisting on the grand narrative, and origins against Francis Fukuyama's declaration of the end of history. MacLeod specifically rejects the postmodern (contra Karl Jirgins'

"Lighthouse, Ring and Fountain"). He returns to the grand narrative rather than "have

History overshadowed by the imperatives of the shopping mall" (51). Hiscock sees

MacLeod returning to realism, origins, and myth with a "frequent gravitational pull [...] towards [...] sentiment" (63). What this thesis addresses, building on such emphases as found in Hiscock, is the implications of this myth and history. If it is a response to globalization, how adequate is this gesture?

In another important examination of MacLeod's work, one that refreshingly looks beyond the textual, Janice Kulyk Keefer, in "Loved Labour Lost: Alistair MacLeod's

Elegiac Ethos," points out MacLeod's attempt to grasp the meaning of labour, rightly emphasizing the social over the individual (81) and asserting that in No Great Mischief

"MacLeod insists upon a transnational and transcultural solidarity among those who perform authentic, necessary and demanding physical labour" (82). Keefer is correct to 4 point out the importance of labour for MacLeod, but my work problematizes the idea of

MacLeod's openness to "transcultural solidarity" or to any radical change in relation to the world beyond the clan. This optimism contrasts with David Creelman's view of

MacLeod's late work (which he sees as a retreat to a mystical and conservative ideology) and his early work (which he sees as utterly fatalistic, with economics and nature appearing as uncontrollable forces). For Creelman, "economic and the environmental forces....are viewed as inevitable, natural conditions beyond the sphere of influence of the local community" {Setting 130). Creelman argues that MacLeod is uninterested in "a politicized analysis of capital or class... He is more interested in the workers as individuals than as representatives of the proletariat" (Setting 130).

The relationships between marginal histories and official stories, agency and fatalism, individuals and collectives are key to understanding MacLeod's work. The chapters that follow attempt to capture how such elements intersect. Against critics focusing too much on the individual and an elegiac fatalism, I argue that MacLeod's approach, while not

Marxist, is indeed a political analysis concerned more with collectives than individuals.

Problematizing critical attitudes which suggest MacLeod offers a progressive politics, I suggest that his surface text tends towards a debilitating rigidity, but that the unconscious of his text holds the possibility of a more radical politics.

This thesis travels some of the territory charted out by MacLeod's critics: MacLeod's profound connection to history, his attempts to recover the remains of a disappearing culture, and even hints of a Utopian vision of the future. But what needs further examination are the implications of MacLeod's return to tradition, his reaction to an official culture, as well as the relation of the self to the larger world: all themes that occur 5 throughout his career, despite important shifts in perspective characterizing his oeuvre.

With that in mind, the difference between early and later works deserves some mention.

MacLeod's early fiction from the late sixties to the mid seventies, collected in The Lost

Salt Gift of Blood (1976), differs in tone from the later short stories collected in As Birds

Bring Forth the Sun (1986) and the novel, No Great Mischief '(1999). The early stories are less explicitly nostalgic and more ambivalent in tone regarding the region. Stories

such as "The Boat" (1968) and "The Vastness of the Dark"(1971), grimly realistic at times, offer little comfort or freedom to their protagonists, while later works, such as

"Vision" (1986), "Island" (1988), "Clearances" (1999), and No Great Mischief offer a

greater sense of community and a grounding connection to history and place. Creelman is persuasive on this point, especially in his comments on the later characters' (such as

Catriona of No Great Mischief) conservative ideology and the introduction of a mystical

relation to Scotland (Creelman Setting 140). Recognizing the early stories' more

ambivalent and existential tone, I see in them the template for the later shift. Even "The

Boat," which depicts the father as a reluctant member of the community, casts him as a

rugged, heroic, even Hemingwayesque figure, connected to nature. Authenticity and

historical depth are associated with what the mother calls "physical work" (as opposed to the "effeminate" airs of city men 16), the father's assimilation of songs and historical

places (13), and the description of fishing. Undercutting the sombre realism, MacLeod's

style becomes lyrical when he describes the fishermen at work on their boats at the

beginning of the season: "They were almost like living things as they plunged through the

waters of the spring and manoeuvred between the still floating icebergs of crystal-white and emerald-green on their way to the traditional grounds that they sought out every 6

May" (18-19, my italics). The emphasis on a vital lived experience, technical mastery, beauty, and tradition contrasts with the protagonist's actual and ideological distance, watching "from the high school on the hill, discussing the water imagery of Tennyson"

(19). Despite the protagonists' desires to escape home in "The Boat" and "The Vastness of the Dark," the rural communities remain privileged grounds defined against urban life.

Moreover, against the focus on the individual and his precarious psychological life, even these early texts allow for an alternative view on the theme of the external production of reality (competing discourses, mass communication, the assimilation of language, the formative power of work and tradition), and demonstrate the powerful presence of an outside that constructs and de-privileges the individual subjectivity.

The following chapters offer a detailed analysis of the quality of historical narrative that MacLeod constructs. I argue that he offers a counter discourse to official culture— not so much based on textuality as on a whole set of practices (work, economic processes, and historical discourse). Contrasting the generally affirmative attitudes towards MacLeod's response to modernity, this thesis also finds some entrenched problems of approach. MacLeod creates his own image of culture which restricts agency and which, through an insistence on a center-periphery binary, perpetuates the marginal status of Cape Breton. Also, by constructing a highly selective and romantic narrative of the Scottish diaspora, MacLeod's work risks echoing the ideology of The Folk, outlined by Ian Mckay. In all of this MacLeod flirts with a rigid collection of essences, myths of origins, and a patriarchal cultural rule.

One of the defining features of MacLeod's work to date is the consistency with which he depicts his unraveling fictional universe. The novel No Great Mischief'and MacLeod's 7 short stories, most of which are collected in Island, repeatedly come back to capture the evolution and present state of Cape Breton, depicting a host of mainly patriarchal characters, whose identities are threatened by the waning of the resource sector— primarily mining, fishing and farming. The novel and many of the short stories explore the construction of identity: the intertwining of places (Scotland, Nova Scotia, Ontario), families and clans, equipment (boats, horses, lighthouses, drills), songs (traditional Gaelic ballads), languages (English, Gaelic), and genetic characteristics (red hair, black eyes, etc). They also explore the Cape Breton identity-in-transition, focusing on the pull between modernity and tradition. In No Great Mischief, for example, MacLeod explores the ruptured sense of self of an Ontario orthodontist as his modern identity contrasts with his formation by an older culture. The protagonist of "The Boat," similarly, is shown caught in two competing networks of interests, one connected to literature and the other to the history of rural, coastal life. Will he be won over by the elite canon of literature, popular magazines, and Toronto, or his father's fishing boat the Jenny Lynn and the life that goes with it? Underlying any such decision or choice is the unstable socio-economic situation caused by declining resource industries.

Regional identity is a fundamentally ambivalent presence for his protagonists, as it serves to strengthen their solidarity against a hegemonic economic center, while simultaneously restricting their agency and subordinating them to that very center.1 Key to understanding both the more radical gestures and, more prominently, the debilitating

'Though many of MacLeod's texts are nostalgic for a lost homeland and a lost means of production, David Creelman discerns a shift within MacLeod's more recent fiction "toward more conservative and patriarchal ideologies" where individuals are connected "firmly to a larger community" {Setting 129). This contrasts with MacLeod's earlier collection of short stories The Lost Salt Gift ofBlood (1976) which Creelman argues demonstrates a more acute sense of alienation for the protagonists {Setting 129). In his later texts, MacLeod's emphatic romanticization evinces a shift toward a more restricted agency for his protagonists, binding them to a regional existence. Although the shift is discernible, the tensions between an essential community and agency have always been active or present. 8 binaries in MacLeod's narratives is the ever present appeal to a highly romanticized past.

The main source for his historical vision of Cape Breton is a particular version of emigration, emphasizing a forced exodus from the Scottish Highlands—a cherished home functioning as an absolute origin in much of his writing. The vision is highly selective, overlooking the complexities of that history, but nevertheless reveals MacLeod's concern with large social processes and the effects of capitalism as a historical force. This conventional narrative of exile and emigration ends up depicting both Scotland and Cape

Breton as essences, and provides a foundation for restricting emergent identities (refusing evolving roles for women, families, and the mainly male protagonists); in addition, the tendency towards this Gaelic romantic essentialism sustains the center-periphery binary structure, which repeatedly casts Cape Breton as an eternal underdog, kept down by urban centers, especially Toronto. At the same time, and complicating matters, within the strictures of such romanticization is a potentially radical moment based on MacLeod's relentless desire to think historically, create holistic contexts, and an 'outside' which allows a basis for thinking beyond the illusions of the 'eternal present.' For grasping the significance of this historical sense, the work of Fredric Jameson, much of which attempts to think outside the 'eternal present,' will be invaluable. Jameson's take on

'reification," "cognitive mapping," and "late capitalism" helps to illustrate the more radical formal elements of MacLeod's texts that are most often lost in nostalgia.

MacLeod's historical interests are varied, and, as I have just suggested, his textual strategies sometimes exceed his orientation towards a nostalgic view of Gaelic heritage and give a glimpse of a genuine emancipatory politics. But for the most part, his historical sensibility appears most notably in his fixation on power differentials, more 9 specifically, the seemingly intransigent binary of center and periphery. Most points of tension within his texts, and the specific historical and social forms they take, ensue from the socioeconomic, and, ergo, geographic, disparities between regions. Generally speaking, as mentioned, in MacLeod's texts the metropole is depicted as Toronto, and his vision of metropolitan Toronto represents the negative pole of a duality between an alienating urban center and bucolic Cape Breton. This inclination to uphold a rigid division between a hegemonic center and an exploited margin is a key theme in postcolonial studies. As indicated by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin

"'Metropolis' is a term used binaristically in colonial discourse to refer to the 'centre' in relation to a colonial periphery" (138). The center-periphery tensions in MacLeod's work take shape in several ways. They begin with an emphasis on the historical conflict between English and Scots and the result of this conflict—the Highland Clearances.

These strains continue into the present with intranational tensions that set a region (rural

Cape Breton) against the larger nation.

Following the Scottish exile, colonial ascendancy is repeated at the regional, contemporary level within MacLeod's fiction. Within this context, MacLeod's protagonists confront the dilemma of persevering in Cape Breton, despite the lack of employment, or reluctantly migrating for work. Out-migration and class mobility, however, do not occur without complications. Those who migrate to pursue professional occupations experience an overarching sense of cultural alienation, in contrast to the cohesion experienced in Cape Breton. This alienation combines with a deterioration of

Gaelic cultural identity for those who leave. Those left behind experience not only a denigration of culture, but are also the sole bearers of cultural authority. 10

Collective identity for the regional protagonists of MacLeod's fiction is formed in two distinct though overlapping ways. First, identity is constructed through their Gaelic culture of language, symbols, and a shared heritage rooted in a historical exile. This

Gaelic culture provides cohesion and solidarity for clan members facing subordination from a hegemonic center, either in Scotland or Canada. In turn, drawing on this cultural identity as a form of resistance provided cohesion for a subaltern group confronted with a forced migration from their homeland. Subsequently, cultural solidarity continues in the

New World and remains fundamental to the identity of latter-day clansmen facing similar postcolonial divisions within Cape Breton as first experienced in Europe. Oppression of clansmen is augmented by their marginalization both within and outside of Canadian urban centers and the idealization of their rural 'lifestyle' by urbanites. Additional threats include assimilationist pressures from a mainstream national culture that provokes a breakdown of Gaelic solidarity and identity.

Class is another important ingredient in producing clan identity and fostering group solidarity, although it is always threatened by the instability of resource industries. This formation of identity through labour is not featured as prominently in the historical setting of Scotland, though capitalist oppression of the lower class fuels the forced migration. In a way, the crisis situation of the labourers of the modern clan reenacts the unifying collective strife of their Highland warrior ancestors—a central theme of the novel and at least some of the short stories. Class is fundamental to the identity of the clansmen at the regional, contemporary level in Cape Breton as MacLeod's protagonists are bound to physical labour. Working life features prominently in his fictional universe: farming, fishing, and mining, their collective natures, their relationship to each other and 11 to kinship. Even when his characters, like the narrator of No Great Mischief, move away from the labouring class, they remain haunted by their debt to it. Labour within the resource industry shapes regional existence in Cape Breton, and its decline reinforces the marginality first experienced by the clansmen in Scotland. Crucially then, in terms of identity and potential class consciousness, MacLeod emphasizes collectivity and the material conditions that sustain solidarity. For example, mining is not solitary work, but depends on the combined efforts of those employed. In MacLeod's texts, relatives from the same clan often work for one mining company and the organization of this labour, therefore, reinforces their cultural cohesion and class consciousness.

Though class within MacLeod's texts is often compatible with culture, the two are far from identical and often conflict. As the need to migrate from Cape Breton for employment persists, an identity-destroying, cultural alienation occurs for those who

leave this regional setting. Like the exile that occurred two hundred years earlier because of capitalist pressures, similar tensions result in the clansmen reluctantly abandoning their native Cape Breton. This often takes them to urban centers for employment, and those who leave are disconnected from their Gaelic culture. A similar threat of cultural erosion results from class mobility, exemplified by those who become university-educated professionals. By sacrificing their working-class status, these professionals are displaced

from their Gaelic culture. Membership in a pan-Scottish diaspora and the collective

identity it entails is, at least in part, contingent upon inclusion in a fairly homogenous

working-class labour force. Regional identity and class identity exist in relation to each

other. In MacLeod's texts, to move to another (usually upper) class means to become

alienated from one's authentic heritage. Those exiled characters who nevertheless remain 12 attached to their past class and region (for example, Catriona and Alexander in No Great

Mischief) are haunted by a deep sense of loss, and, ironically, an intense consciousness of what has been lost.

MacLeod's texts present a double vision in regard to class. From one angle, perhaps the strongest, he sees class in terms of a center-periphery binary, his working-class characters associated with peripheries exploited by the centers of power. At the same time, beyond the image of a war between nations (little nations against larger ones) or the rich center and the poor regions, MacLeod infuses his texts with a more totalizing understanding of 'late capitalism.' As Fredric Jameson characterizes it, 'late capitalism,' the present phase, translates all life into commodities, all consciousness into disoriented, reified consciousness. Jameson makes the important Marxist concept of 'reification' central to his analysis of culture, arguing that 'reification' is a way of perceiving and thinking (fragmented, compartmentalized, and lost in the illusion of the 'eternal present').

It is a "lived source of the mystifications on which ideology is based," destroying one's ability to map out his or her place in the totality, "rendering society opaque" (Jameson

"Debate" 146). Reification then is a narrowing of lived experience to a fraction of the complexity of the overall capitalist system. In Marx's writing, reification is discussed in the context of the structure of labour within industrial capitalism: the term captures the effects of the objectification of social relations and the depersonalization of the worker's experience. Workers, losing their connection to older forms of production, reduced to selling themselves as labour, become mere cogs in the machine of capitalist production.

Jameson's definition of reification vastly enlarges Marx's sense of it. Following George

Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness, Jameson, in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural 13

Logic of Late Capitalism, sees reification as something that permeates all aspects of modern existence including art, the family, religion, the law and government. In such a milieu, the self is encouraged to see reality as simply there or given rather than formed by external forces such as class antagonism and commodification. Jameson develops the concept of 'cognitive mapping,' which he equates with class consciousness, as a way of moving beyond the constraints of reification. The aim of 'cognitive mapping' is to achieve a form of enlightenment:

If the diagnosis is correct, the intensification of class consciousness will be less a

matter of a populist or ouvrierist exaltation of a single class by itself, than of the

forcible reopening of access to a sense of society as a totality, and a reinvention

of possibilities of cognition and perception that allow social phenomena once

again to become transparent, as moments of the struggle between classes

(Jameson "Debate" 146 my emphasis).

For Jameson, then, iate capitalism' creates a new set of problems. In his most innovative moments, MacLeod addresses this state of affairs and these problems

(reification, the erosion of class consciousness, etc.), showing how a class might produce a consciousness-expanding 'cognitive map' of its place and time in the social whole.

Jameson's idea of the cognitive map is designed to allow the modern alienated subject to insert him or herself into a larger, formative history. While Jameson's idea of cognitive mapping refers to space, in MacLeod's texts the idea of mapping can productively be applied to time. Both spatial and temporal mapping underscore that self and world are shaped by historical forces and that immediate perception or the lived moment cannot be understood in isolation. The important work is to recover the elements of 14 construction/mediation against "a perceptual barrage of immediacy from which all sheltering layers and intervening mediations have been removed" (Jameson "Cognitive

Mapping" 180). This orientation in MacLeod's texts might not be the most dominant, but it is significant and competes with his strong urge for nostalgia. This accent in

MacLeod's work differs from his binary division of the world into center-periphery. It brings them both together under the same cultural style ('late capitalism') and opens up the possibility of undoing the binaries.

While attending to and even privileging the important moments where MacLeod's texts transcend binary (reified) thinking, much of this thesis focuses on his surface impulses: nostalgia, romanticization, a social conservatism that resists emergent identities, and a rigid conception of collective identity. MacLeod constructs the collective identity of his protagonists through labour and culture and through the relationship and tensions arising between these two forms of identity. Though constructed to ensure

survival against a hegemonic center, this same identity further subjugates the regional group to that center. Therein a fundamental ambivalence in his negotiation between romanticizing and realistically portraying regional identity is produced. This ambivalence

is demonstrated by MacLeod's fictions wherein many of the postcolonial tensions and the

interplay between cultural and class identity are evident. Though the narrative is permeated by examinations and recollections of historical experiences and events, the

novel is set primarily in contemporary southern Ontario and Cape Breton. As with many

2Along with Jameson, MacLeod also, at least at times, promotes an 'outside' to the present homogeneity of capital so that one can have some basis for thought. It is fitting, in relation to MacLeod's depiction of the cultural and class identity of Cape Bretoners of Scottish descent, that in his article "Reflections on the Brecht-Lukacs Debate," Jameson suggests that ideals of the tribal or the idealization of the craftsman once seen only as sentimental might provide a kind of Utopian 'outside' from which to judge the current situation (145). 15 of MacLeod's texts, the novel's foundation is the historical migration of Scottish clansmen from the Highlands of Scotland to the shores of Cape Breton. The narrative focuses on the lives of Alexander, Catriona and Calum MacDonald—the great-great- great-grandchildren of Calum Ruadh who migrated to Cape Breton in 1779 from

Moidart, Scotland. MacLeod explores the familial and cultural losses endured by the

Clann Calum Rhuadh and the effects of the breakdown of cultural and class solidarity.

Both Alexander MacDonald—the narrator of the novel—and his twin sister Catriona migrate out of Nova Scotia to live more modern and urban lives than would be available in Cape Breton, and the nostalgia for their former landscape is pronounced.

Employing MacLeod's texts as primary sources, the thesis is divided into three chapters and a final conclusion. Chapter One of the thesis introduces the postcolonial and

Marxist theoretical framework through which MacLeod's texts, and the center-periphery and class tensions within, are defined. Additionally, Ian McKay's critique and demystification of 'the Folk'—an ideology that established and perpetuates the idea that

Nova Scotians are pastoral people bound to the land and untainted by modern, urban strife—provides a valuable lens through which MacLeod's romanticization of Gaelic culture and identity will be examined. This chapter also reviews the doubly historical context shaping collective identity, including the historical factors that led to the migration of Scottish clansmen from the Highlands of Scotland and the contemporary decline in the resource industry in Cape Breton. Following the examination of how historical circumstance sculpts identity within MacLeod's texts, Chapter Two provides a substantive exploration of Eric Hobsbawm's theory on the invention of tradition, and the representation of Gaelic diasporic tradition within MacLeod's texts. This chapter is 16 concerned with the restorative function of Gaelic identity and the problematic way it constrains the regional protagonists. Additionally, Chapter Two discusses MacLeod's limited portrayal of women, and concludes by examining the decisive ambivalence of his portrait of migration and exile. Chapter Three diverts from the discussion of cultural identity to explore the way class and labour, and more importantly, capitalist exploitation, reinforce clan solidarity. Within this context, I explore the tensions emanating from class identity and clan identity and the way cultural corrosion occurs as a product of upward mobility. The thesis concludes with an analysis of MacLeod's ambivalent treatment of regional identity and of the degree to which he both romanticizes and resists romantic delineations of history, cultural identity and labour. 17

Chapter One

Because Alistair MacLeod's work functions as a kind of vortex of myths, histories, social contexts, and competing ideologies, this chapter will chart key regions, both spoken and unspoken, making up the universe of his texts. Knowing what MacLeod draws from and leaves out of history, for example, fosters a deeper, more complex understanding of his project. Attending to his formal methods for constructing history, and establishing social contexts, alerts a sensitive reader to radical potential in his style.

His work is political and concentrates on the social, and that in itself, as Fredric Jameson has argued, radicalizes a vision. But most significantly, establishing the patterns of a problematic nostalgic Gaelic identity brings us to the core of his work. In constructing and elevating the pan-Scottish identity of his protagonists, MacLeod adopts a particular mode of grief to detail both Scottish migration to North America and the continued sense of economic and cultural urgency within Cape Breton. Grievances experienced by

MacLeod's protagonists, including socio-economic and historic, consolidate their profound sense of injury and lead to their cultural and economic vulnerability. 18

Ultimately, the Gaelic identity MacLeod frames for his protagonists is grounded in a history and geography that fosters and sustains their sense of marginality to a hegemonic center. Specifically, the peripheral, subordinated status of tribal clansmen, so central to

MacLeod's work, is established in Scotland by the presence of an oppressive landlord class, and is transported to and reinforced in Cape Breton by the failing resource industry and economic instability that ensues. Postcolonial and class tensions emphasized within the historical context of Scotland are thus reinforced at the contemporary level in Cape

Breton, and the resultant distinguishing marginality restricts the agency of MacLeod's protagonists, while simultaneously strengthening collective solidarity. In terms of a revolutionary politics, MacLeod's realism walks a troubling line between a potentially liberating historical sensibility and a reifying sentimentalism. On the positive side, I will suggest here and in Chapter Two that the holistic gestures toward the role of historical processes and social contexts in the construction of narrative, the self, and the social whole, create a significant rupture in the ahistorical, fragmentary world of what Jameson, building on Ernest Mandel, calls late capitalism.

As a result of repeated references to corporate control of resources and labour, the operations of a ubiquitous global market, detailed descriptions of the rationalization of work, the flow of labour from around the world, and the fragmentation of consciousness,

MacLeod's world reflects the totalizing effects of 'late capitalism.' For Jameson, the current state of capitalism has virtually penetrated all aspects of life: all previous modes of production, nature, and even the unconscious. This colonization of all otherness leaves one in a kind of 'eternal present' without any historical sensibility or any 'outside' of the 19 system.1 On the negative side, MacLeod's Utopian tradition, posed against the centers of power, risks, at least internally, essentializing and approving of class divisions. While

MacLeod is too often swayed by romantic images of the Folk, his sense of social- historical form destabilizes the more retrograde, sentimental moments of his texts.

Ultimately, in other words, the question is, do Alistair MacLeod's more radical moments sufficiently supply the tools to undo the more debilitating nostalgic moments?

Prior to examining the way MacLeod constructs the identity of his protagonists, I will look at Ian McKay's concept of "the Folk" as it relates to MacLeod's sometimes emancipatory and sometimes romanticized portrait of regional identity. Any understanding of MacLeod's vision of exiled consciousness demands an exploration of

Scottish emigration and the postcolonial and class strains shaped and exacerbated by this

'exodus.' These contexts underwrite MacLeod's work. After looking at how Scottish emigration provides the contours for his protagonists' collective identity, I will investigate the similar postcolonial and class tensions occurring at the regional level in

Cape Breton that reinforce their diasporic consciousness. Tracking the history that surrounds MacLeod's work and with which he relentlessly engages is especially important given his own foregrounding of the processes of the construction of tradition.

As the argument proceeds it will be useful to keep in mind Jameson's sense of the term

'reification,' as it is especially helpful for keeping an eye on MacLeod's dual desires (to romanticize and to contextualize). "Reification," writes Jameson, "is a process that

'As Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks argue, "The passage to late capitalism is defined primarily by a completion of the processes of modernization" {Jameson Reader 16). In other words, modernity has thus far been characterized by a constant struggle between modern and pre-modern elements of society. Modernization was the process of transformation: the generalization of industrial production, the mechanization of the various spheres late capitalism. (See for example "Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" 216 in The Jameson Reader). 20 affects our cognitive relationship with the social totality" ("Debate" 146). Recast, reification refers to blindingly fixated forms of perception (seeing the world, to bring us into MacLeod's realm, in the narrow frame of nostalgia, for example). Reification "is a disease of that mapping function whereby the individual subject projects and models his or her insertion into the collectivity" ("Debate" 146). What needs to be asked of

MacLeod then is whether his narrative strategies—his discernible desire to provide

"cognitive maps"—counter his desire for romanticization, a complex of cliches which bar access to the "totality" or "total system" (The Jameson Reader 143).

Fundamental to examining MacLeod's romanticization of regional identity and the uneasy relationship between labour and culture is the concept of "The Folk" as critiqued by historian Ian McKay. In his book, The Quest of the Folk, McKay explores the essentialist and romanticized portrait of Nova Scotia popularized by folklorists, including one of the Maritimes' first, Helen Creighton. McKay examines and critiques this particular construction of Nova Scotians as pastoral people dependant on rural resource industries, largely fishing, for the source of their cultural identity. He accuses "middle- class cultural producers—writers, visual artists, promoters, advertisers" (8) and a burgeoning tourist industry for exploiting the ideology of "the Folk," and argues that portrayals of fishermen as Other exist "as a spectacle to be appropriated and enjoyed within the objectifying gaze of tourism" (xv). Such representations capitalize on a romanticized, primitivist view of working-class labourers, whose circumstances, due to their connection with a rural landscape through their labour, are considered idyllic by their urban counterparts (4). Underlying the Folk ideology is an inherent antimodernism, 21 in which Nova Scotia is viewed as not industrialized, but rather an undeveloped agrarian setting with inhabitants untroubled by urban responsibilities and pressures.

McKay resists the Folk paradigm arguing that such a homogeneous depiction fails to accurately represent the plurality of cultural and ethnic groups present within Nova

Scotia. Not only is the Folk ideology reifying, but McKay claims these representations authorize the subordination of regional groups, since rewriting "the history of subaltern classes and groups in ways that ostensibly pay them homage, all the while draining their history of specificity, is one subtle and effective method of preserving their inferior position" (xvi). Part of the power of MacLeod's work emerges in his articulation of class divisions manifest in the tensions between urban and rural mentalities. But he risks slipping into the colonialist grip and restaging the kind of limited and tired binaries discussed by McKay. This internal colonization recurs throughout MacLeod's work, as characters from urban centers condescend to those living in rural regions; MacLeod ultimately depicts urbanites as alienated and insensitive, and in doing so, privileges rural life.

Though McKay cites MacLeod as a regional author resisting the Folk paradigm,

MacLeod's engagement with the discourse of the Folk is not unproblematic. In fact, to a certain degree he subscribes to the particular antimodernism critiqued by McKay. In an antimodern vein, MacLeod's stories idealize rural Cape Breton settings and romanticize

Gaelic cultural identity, making it at times an inherent, atavistic quality of his regional protagonists. Within the earlier stories, there is a discernible divide between city and country. The former has not yet been fully demonized and the latter has not yet become the site of cultural salvation. In the early stories, for example, MacLeod realistically 22 depicts the effects on women of harsh economic conditions (see for example the mothers from "The Boat" and "In The Fall"). Nevertheless, the binary between city and country still operates. The rural world is privileged, even if the romanticization of Gaelic culture and cultural identity is considerably toned down. In the earlier stories and in the later ones, those who succumb to out-migration by moving to urban centers for employment face cultural alienation within their new environs. Urban expanses within MacLeod's texts are sites where cultural identity becomes diluted and cultural solidarity eroded.

Though McKay suggests that those within the mining industry are not part of the Folk, many of MacLeod's regional protagonists who represent the Folk are miners. McKay asserts that mining is not part of the Folk ideology because, by affirming their class, miners become the antithesis of what the Folk should ideally represent: "the essential and unchanging solidarity of traditional society" (12). The Folk for McKay, therefore, are associated with fisherfolk, as opposed to those within other resource industries, as the individualist essence of fishing unites them with the elements and reinforces a traditional existence. MacLeod's inclusion of mining within the category of the Folk creates an important tension and site of investigation: the industry, associated in his work with modernity and worldly political consciousness, at times seems tamed by the Folk image but equally threatens to turn it inside out. Yet, ultimately, MacLeod's ambivalent exploration of the complexity of mining life often translates the radical back into the sentimental.

MacLeod's textual representation of the Folk is discernible in his romanticization of

Gaelic culture and pastoral life (idealized images of the Gaelic language, traditional songs, descriptions of nature, and everyday rural practices), yet there are areas where he 23 resists this anti-modern delineation. While often presenting an idealized version of cultural identity (though even his cultural representations have a potentially subversive side), MacLeod depicts resource labour, perhaps because of its traumatic reality and grim historical traces, as violently disrupting any soft-focus pastoral pictures of Cape Breton life. MacLeod graphically depicts the physical adversities of fishing and mining within his texts; for example, "The Boat" and "The Closing Down of Summer" both chronicle the deleterious physical effects these industries have upon the worker. His texts typically attend closely to the broken, deformed, or shattered body. In "The Closing Down of

Summer" he captures the way machinery and the mines transform the body, and in "The

Boat" he lingers over the father's drowned corpse: "His hands were shredded ribbons, as were his feet which had lost their boots to the suction of the sea, and his shoulders came apart in our hands when we tried to move him from the rocks" (25). MacLeod's adherence to the Folk ideology is limited by his attention to capitalist exploitation and its effects at the historical and contemporary level. Through his embrace of history MacLeod furthers a discussion of the issues of exploitation. In Scotland, clansmen were exiled from their land to accommodate agricultural practices, and then again within Cape Breton as the declining resource industries forced many to migrate for employment. These historical details subvert traditional Folk depictions, as McKay shows, since capitalist exploitation, commodification, and complex political problems, including migration and out-migration, tend to be suppressed by the purveyors of the Folk myth. McKay's critique of Folk ideology thus helps to highlight MacLeod's uneasy negotiation between romanticizing the regional identity of his protagonists and providing a realistic portrayal of regional life. 24

Before discussing the histories underlying MacLeod's work, it is important to situate him within the discourse of regionalism, which has a special sensitivity to the concerns animating No Great Mischief and the short stories collected in Island. Categorically,

Alistair MacLeod's work falls under the rubric of regional writing, with its potential for politicizing particular places and cultures and its often self-conscious delineation of class tensions between centers and margins of power. A brief examination of regionalism in relation to his texts will broaden the discussion of how MacLeod constructs identity. In previous decades, regionalism was popularly defined as 'local color' but has progressed well beyond such a pedestrian definition. David Jordan's views on the theoretical dynamics of regionalism in New World Regionalism are important, not the least of which is his discussion of the way regionalism relates to marginality (Jordan 8). As Jordan articulates:

Because a region is by definition a small part of a larger whole, regionalism

necessarily proceeds from a de-centered world-view, and this de-centered world-

view distinguishes regionalism from other place-based literature... Regionalism

begins with an author's privileged access to a community that has evolved

through generations of interaction with a local environment, and whose identity is

defined in opposition to a larger world beyond regional borders. (8-9)

This condition, in turn, prefigures the complex relationship and correlation between regionalism and postcolonialism, and consequently, how MacLeod's characters are defined anti-centrically against a larger national culture and class. Applying these ideas to

MacLeod will illuminate why he is often characterized as a regional author. Though born in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, and living in Ontario, MacLeod was raised in Cape 25

Breton and continues to spend much of his time in the small fishing and mining community of Inverness located on the rocky northern coast. This experience has provided MacLeod with the "privileged access to a community" about which Jordan speaks, allowing him to draw from, and ground his fiction within, a unique regional identity. In short, MacLeod is well-placed to document, narrativize, and engage with the complex strands of history and social relations making up his region.

More significantly, MacLeod's work exploits and contributes to regionalism's capacity for heightened political consciousness, including a strong sense of historical processes. As a term, regionalism has gained purchase through the "growing suspicion of institutional nationalism, combined with the development of a global economy and a more eclectic international culture... [which has] undermined the cohesion of the nation- state" (Wyile "Regionalism Revisited" xii). Etymologically speaking, the Latin root of the word region is from regere, or 'to rule' which implies the existence of subordination between co-existing geographical entities (Pryse 22). The regional identity of MacLeod's characters is that of an oppressed group subordinated and strengthened by their marginality, beginning with the exile of Scottish Highlanders. Scottish emigration and exile and the ensuing mythmaking about that experience, profoundly influence the regional identity and consciousness of MacLeod's transnational and transatlantic Scots.

The Scottish exodus to Nova Scotia began in earnest in the 1760's, following the displacement of the Acadian population and the American Revolution (Donaldson 129).

Of those who emigrated, many arrived in Cape Breton on the Hector, which first landed on the shores of Pictou, Nova Scotia in 1773, beginning what Marjory Harper would label Nova Scotia's "foundation myth" (20). The distinct Gaelic identity of MacLeod's 26 characters emerges as a product of the Scottish migration and the history of this emigration to Nova Scotia, particularly Cape Breton, and is often a conflation of romanticization and historical accuracy.

A version of the history of Scottish emigration and exile (or rather, its history as exile) operates as the conscious and unconscious of MacLeod's texts. All history is partial. In his texts, MacLeod's sympathies tend to follow the conventional, romanticized strand which ends up defining Cape Bretoners' individual and collective consciousness as nostalgic, permanently exiled, and as encouraging class divisions for the sake of the clan.

That version of history tends to repress important defining events such as the historical desire to take advantage of North America's lands and profitable economic possibilities—not so much exile as escape. MacLeod's approach is therefore problematic.

What is at stake is whether or not his history of the region creates a reified consciousness, inflexible and fixated on a narrow image of the social and therefore unable to map out and react to new contexts. An examination of some of the possible narrative approaches to Scottish migration, including both the romantic and opportunistic, suggests that

MacLeod veers toward nostalgia. However, I believe his work can be read against this grain (his own tendencies), and doing this requires an examination of the twists and turns of Scottish emigration that compete, as it were, for MacLeod's attention. It is also important to look at this as my own gesture toward the importance of that which is outside-of-the-text, the historical context, as a basis for the construction of MacLeod's work.

Developing a sense of what is omitted from his texts is crucial for explaining and defining his philosophical approach to regionalism. The traditional and romanticized 27 portrayal of Scottish emigration, which captivates MacLeod, posits a causal relationship between the Clearances, landlordism, and the exile; this emphasis leads to his vision of the exiled, oppressed consciousness of a people and the particular shape of their struggle in modern Cape Breton. It is important to note that MacLeod's overarching story (driving all of his work) is based on real events. Moreover, what may matter in the end is what he is able to do, in terms of creating a sense of totality, place and history in relation to modernity. But it is also necessary to examine what gets left out. The romantic paradigm is simplistic and does not account for the plurality of political and socio-economic factors in both Scotland and Canada that led to the exodus of Scottish people from their homeland. The maudlin perspective is popularized by media portrayals, folk revivals and best selling-books including John Prebble's The Highland Clearances (1963), and though there is legitimacy to such a depiction, complicating factors exist. In recent years, the traditional, romantic perspective has been scrutinized as overtly sentimental by many academics. Contemporary scholars look to alternative factors initiating the migration, playing down the importance of landlordism and the Clearances.

A primary cause of Scottish migration was the restructuring of Highland clan society that eliminated the need for large populations cohabiting on small tracts of land. Prior to the Jacobite Risings of 1715 and 1745, the Highland social structure was archaic, and based predominantly on a tribal clan system. Under this social configuration, a chief owned a tract of land that was leased out within the clan. "Tacksmen" were the middlemen who held this lease and subdivided the land among the various clan members.

2This clan system was valuable as a military structure—the clansmen were exploited for their combative fortitude—but substantially less so as a means of economic sustainability. Conditions were poor since livestock cultivation and agricultural activity could not sustain the populace living on such small estates, and this made clan raids a feature of Highland society (Donaldson 48). 28

They paid out thirty to forty pounds a year, and were relatively secure in their position, as their leases lasted up to seven consecutive years (Devine 85). Tacksmen in turn profited from any additional revenue brought in by rent paid from tenants, over and above what was paid to the chief. The hierarchy of the clan system created a tenuous social and economic balance in the Scottish Highlands. As T. M. Devine observes, the "vast majority of the Highland population were in a profoundly insecure position and very vulnerable to the will of the landlord class" (86). The autocracy of this class led to the oppression of the clansmen who, because they had limited legal claim to the land on which they resided, were at the mercy of the landlords.

Reconstruction of the clan paradigm occurred as tacksmen were increasingly considered superfluous. Their elimination from the stratified social hierarchy began in the

1730's and continued for half a century (Donaldson 51). Dispossession typically ensued.

Clansmen were expelled from land their kin had occupied for generations as those newly responsible for the estate removed them to accommodate more economically rewarding pursuits, including agricultural practices. The dispossession of clansmen eroded the traditional clan structure of the Highlands, and within MacLeod's fiction, this formative event initiates the exiled consciousness of his characters and their drive toward cultural solidarity as a point of resistance. The cohesion of clan solidarity in response to external oppression illuminates the way a "tribal society may owe its social bonding to direct or indirect imperialist assault from the outside" (Diamond 488). The landlord-governed system was not focused on military strength as was the clan system, but rather on economic accrual. Assisting the dissolution of the traditional clan structure was the defeat of Prince Charlie at Culloden in 1746. Land belonging to chiefs who offered him support 29 was appropriated and leased out by the Crown for the next forty years, making a return to the traditional clan system impossible (Donaldson 52).

Another primary cause of the forced migration of Highland clansmen was their removal to accommodate sheep farming, a practice which greatly increased the production value of land. The drive behind this transition was economic, connected to capitalism and the rise of the industrial revolution in not only England, but also the

Lowlands of Scotland (Donaldson 52). As clansmen were displaced from the Highlands, they often relocated to urbanized towns for employment. Sheep farming spread disproportionately, and estimates indicate that of the roughly three million sheep in

Scotland during the late eighteenth-century, half of them were located within the

Highlands (Adams 27). The profit from raising sheep surpassed that which could be made by leasing the land to clansmen or from other agricultural pursuits. Few people are required to tend sheep, and the introduction of sheep farming to the Highlands led to the displacement of many Highland clansmen. From 1810-1860, roughly sixty percent "of west Highland estates above 5, 000 acres changed hands from the debilitated hereditary elite to a new class of merchants, lawyers, bankers, financiers and southern landowners"

(Devine 86).

This wealthy new bourgeoisie who controlled property and means of production were capable of financing "assisted or compulsory emigration" for the impoverished

Highlanders (Devine 86). The landlord class was not swayed by the precedent of traditional land holdings, and violence and force were used to execute the Clearances as tenants protested their removal from land their families had inhabited for generations.

This ultimately shaped their identity as an exiled and economically subjugated people. 30

Though the rise of sheep farming undoubtedly contributed to the displacement of Scottish people from their lands, it is not wholly the cause of the emigration as is popularly mythologized within historiography of the Clearances. In order to see what MacLeod's realism registers and what it represses of the 'total context,' it is important to be aware of, if not a repressed content, a severely minimized one. Such historical elements remove us from MacLeod's glorification of Gaelic culture and point to how the capitalist world provided a welcome opening for some Scots. Any good 'cognitive map' must be able to transcend reified self-representations of the Folk.

While many clansmen were undeniably subordinated and oppressed by an imperial landlord class, there were many who migrated enthusiastically for economic opportunities overseas. Far from an explicitly enforced exile as characterized in romantic depictions, there existed a degree of opposition toward those who left willingly for land and economic ventures in the New World. In some cases, landlords attempted to prevent the mass migration, fearing financial ruin from lost rent payments (Campey 3). A significant amount of voluntary migration occurred in response to poor economic conditions in Scotland and the possibility of circumventing impoverishment through relocation. The problems presented by a failing economy began to make a considerable impact in the Highlands of Scotland. From 1762 through 1774, beginning in Perthshire, and spreading through Invernessshire, Ross, Cromarty, and eventually to the Hebrides and Shetland, the Scottish agrarian economy declined (Adams 27). Landlord hegemony was augmented in the 1820's by the decline of resource-based labour in and around the

Scottish Highlands (Devine 86). Furthermore, favourable economic factors in North

America drove the momentum of emigration for the Scottish Highlanders. The prospect 31 of property ownership was enticing for tenant clansmen, as land in Scotland was increasingly scarce and there was little opportunity for growing populations to settle in either the rural or urban locales (Gray 20). Additionally, commercial enterprise and the promise of higher wages overseas fueled a desire to emigrate westward. Industry was growing; for example, the timber industry in the Maritimes was extremely important by

1775—only two years following the first arrival of the Hector. Such industry presented an attractive economic opportunity for Scottish merchants.

Crossing the Atlantic did not offer the only avenue for earning a reasonable livelihood, as employment opportunities existed in the manufacturing industries developing in the Scottish Lowlands, but overseas migration represented an opportunity to maintain cultural cohesion. Employment opportunities in the Lowlands would have meant sacrificing a distinct Highland cultural identity through assimilation into the urban environment (Campey 7). Those who migrated westward, including Scots from the

Highlands in and around Inverness, maintained communication with clansmen and community members from their region and encouraged further migration to maintain

"family, kinship and neighbourhood links" (Gray 18). This led to the relocation of significant portions of many Highland communities to North America, and transatlantic connections were especially strong between the Scottish settlements in the Maritimes and the homeland (Gray 19).

Through mass emigration, clans and communities remained largely intact and cultural solidarity was sustained. Their leaving Scotland in an effort to preserve their unique identity highlights the value Highlanders placed on remaining distinct from Lowland groups. Further efforts were encouraged to maintain a culturally cohesive Scottish 32 identity in the New World, such as marrying within Scottish clans and between clans who migrated from the same Scottish region (Gray 19). The opportunity provided by Cape

Breton and other regions of North America to preserve cultural distinction is mirrored in

MacLeod's fiction. In his literature, Cape Breton nurtures cultural unity amongst the descendants of the Scottish settlers, and geographic isolation allows Scottish-descended communities to maintain and promote cultural solidarity in opposition to a larger national society.

Though several factors contributed to the migration, MacLeod explores the differences through a homogenizing, often mythic filter. Nostalgic narratives of the historical exodus of Scots are, in many ways, an evocation of poetry by Scottish bards, providing "romantic mythic understanding of Scottish emigration" (Harper 16).

Sentimental texts by Scottish poets, according to Harper, shaped the perception of the exodus, and subsequently became part of "popular culture" (16). Poetry lamenting the plight of Scottish Highlanders was popularized on both sides of the Atlantic, and still enjoys a noteworthy prominence in Cape Breton with the revitalization of folk music and culture (Harper 17). Narratives deploring the emigration resonate in Cape Breton, and

MacLeod serves as a paragon of writers romanticizing the exile of Highlanders. This is not to suggest that MacLeod should be dismissed as a nai've romantic. What needs to be interrogated is the degree to which his writing contributes to a reification of consciousness, for example, narrowing what can be thought to a static center-periphery binary, and whether or not his texts are compatible with the competing histories that diverge from the more nostalgic narratives. It will also be important to recognize the 33 positive political work that the romantic narratives achieve, including their construction of solidarity and resistance to centers of power.

The historical account of the emigration provided by MacLeod in his collections of short stories as well as in No Great Mischief is, in spite of its briefness, fundamental in shaping the identity of his protagonists. Scotland, though geographically removed, remains meaningful to MacLeod's characters though few have traveled to its shores. His protagonists are typically from Cape Breton but are profoundly influenced by a specific, reified version of their Scottish heritage. Because of this, it is compelling that the cover of No Great Mischief is a photo of a Scottish shoreline, rather than the coastline of Cape

Breton. The image displays the Atlantic Ocean in the foreground with Scotland in the background, and significantly, is one of the last views of Scotland observed by members of the Clann Calum Ruadh as they leave for the New World. The cover captures the reifying effects of MacLeod's nostalgic narratives: the present, Cape Breton context and possibilities narrowed or erased by the backward gaze to an absent geography.

As Jameson might appreciate, the hypnotic image of Scotland masks the 'cognitive mapping' of the present (and future) and that mapping's capacity to make sense of one's political contexts. The image is in this sense profoundly disempowering. In MacLeod's fiction, Scotland represents both an end and a beginning for clan identity. Migration from

Scotland is reluctant, and clansmen understand that returning is not an option. This is largely why, upon arrival in Pictou, Calum Ruadh spent two days "crying for his history"

(No Great Mischief 25). While Scottish descendents must modernize and abandon their tribal clan system, they evince little enthusiasm in doing so, and carry a nostalgic longing for their ancestral homeland. This particular strain in his work—history as fateful

3That is, McClelland and Stewart's first edition version of the novel. 34 tragedy—does the most to close off his narrative strategies and undermine any emancipatory politics.

In MacLeod's representation of the exodus, the Clearances are often identified as the primary cause. One of his most explicit examples portraying the Highland Clearances as precipitating the transatlantic migration occurs within his most recent short story, aptly titled "Clearances." As previously noted, Creelman observes a shift within MacLeod's narratives towards increasingly romanticized delineations of regionalism, and his most recent work is not exempt from that progression. "Clearances" is a narrative detailing the protagonist's struggle with a declining economy and cultural deterioration within not only his community, but also his family. The narrative takes place mainly on Cape Breton land occupied by the family descended from the emigres of the Highland Clearances, and is thematically torn between progress and the maintenance of tradition—themes replicating the capitalist transformation that transpired in Scotland over two hundred years earlier. This narrative illuminates the center-periphery tensions in Scotland between a landlord class and impoverished clansmen, while additionally demonstrating

MacLeod's penchant for romanticizing the exodus of Scots to Cape Breton and their ensuing exiled identity.

The Highland Clearances are referenced only briefly within "Clearances," yet their importance to the text is substantial. Sentimental references to the historical Clearances pervade the narrative, but become increasingly explicit when the protagonist reminisces about his travels through Scotland "armed with scraps of paper bearing place names and addresses" (418) in an effort to connect with his ancestral past. He boards a train to

Glasgow, and, as his travels take him further north-west, he observes that the Gaelic 35 language increasingly permeates conversations. He asks a shepherd "Ciamar a tha sibh?" or 'how are you?' in Gaelic. The shepherd's response, "You are from Canada? You are from the Clearances?" (419), illuminates that, within this text, the Clearances are the only cause of migration—no alternative contributing factors are mentioned. The protagonist supports the claim that he is from the Clearances, and notes that the shepherd

"pronounced the word 'Clearances' as if it were a place instead of a matter of historical eviction" (419).

In presenting the migration as "historical eviction," MacLeod provides parallels between his illustration of the Scottish migration and the traditional representations. In both, the mass exodus of Scots is a byproduct of capitalist exploitation by a merciless landlord class. MacLeod's character construction relies on a romanticized, reified view of class and ethnicity, contrasting the more contemporary approaches that portray the clansmen as opportunistic migrants drawn by vast stretches of land and the economic possibilities offered by bourgeoning resource industries. MacLeod's "Clearances" supports a sentimental interpretation, and romantic, ethereal description flows from the brief but important discussion of the Highland Clearances. The train passes by "the empty moors," "mist-shrouded mountains" and "tumbling white-watered streams cascading down the mountains' sides and a lonely eagle circled over the stone foundations of a vanished people" (419). This description accentuates the lonely and desolate landscape of the Highlands following the Clearances, evoking "a vanished people," as opposed to a depiction of a vacancy resulting from eager and voluntary overseas relocation.

Though MacLeod's description of the Clearances is brief, the resultant exile remains an important theme throughout the story. For example, the shepherd's presence is not 36 trivial, but rather indicative of the effects the Clearances had on the Scottish Highlands.

Clans were displaced for the profits promised by grazing—a practice employing few. The shepherd continues to live in Scotland because many other Highlanders do not. This does not imply that the shepherd deserves censure for the exile—he is merely an instrument of estate owners. MacLeod underscores this point when the shepherd states that he is

"working for an estate and looking after sheep that are not my own" (421). Underlying this class-based society is the hegemony of the wealthy upper class that controls the means of production and exploits the working class to produce a surplus of profit. Within this capitalist paradigm, the shepherd is rendered a product of capitalist endeavours exploited for his labour. The shepherd's class consciousness fosters an awareness of his marginal position in a stratified social and economic hierarchy, and as the protagonist continues his travels, he becomes increasingly aware of his class and identity as a descendant of these exiled Highlanders. If "the precondition of 'class consciousness' is the visibility of a class to itself (Buchanan 107), then by casting his ancestors as exiles, the protagonist maps an awareness of himself as descended from, and belonging to the same 'othered' class.

As the protagonist continues his nostalgic tour of Scotland, MacLeod presents a more detailed sketch of the effects of forced migration and the postcolonial subordination of the lower class Highlanders by the wealthy landlord class. This oppression, he insists, fosters a consciousness structured around the notion of an exiled identity. The following passage highlights MacLeod's portrayal of Highland Scots as ostracized in their homeland: 37

He found the crumbled gravestones, some bearing his name, beneath the waste-

high bracken. Where once people had lived in their hundreds and their thousands,

there now stretched only the unpopulated emptiness of the vast estates with their

sheep-covered hills or the islands which had become bird sanctuaries or shooting

ranges for the well-to-do. He saw himself as the descendent of victims of history

and changing economic times, betrayed perhaps, by politics and poverty as well.

(420)

This passage illuminates the post-colonial binary and economic disparity between the wealthy upper class and those with no economic or political power forced to migrate. The protagonist identifies his ancestors as "victims" and acknowledges the central role of economics and class impoverishment in defining the Scottish diaspora. Historically, merchants and wealthy Scots were among the emigre masses, yet MacLeod's penchant for portraying the Scots as "victims of history and changing economic times" exemplifies the traditional, nostalgic depiction of Highland emigration.

Such moments in his work pose a challenge to the critic, revealing an important tension: MacLeod does not contain his narratives within the category of the self, consciousness being more an effect of history than the source of events. In other words, while his work is usually filtered through an introspective ('contained') consciousness, his characters are nevertheless always contextualized and altered by the past, present and local events. The narrator of No Great Mischief XendiS to use the language of containment as if the self were a unified sphere: "we were like gently nudging planets," "although our outer perimeters brushed we were still deep within the private areas of our own circumferences" (198). But the narrative itself illuminates interconnection; it traces the 38 history and social processes that make the self, dismantling the illusion that people are separate "planets." The narrative shows how discourse informs subjects: the narrator's consciousness, for example, is shaped by history and class (his in-between place on the center-periphery borders), the U.S.-Vietnamese war, Highland history, and even a traumatic event revolving around his brother's impacted tooth which presumably draws the narrator into dentistry. The texts always direct the reader to an 'outside' as MacLeod reaches for formative political events. In this case he maps out the role of class division and its historical resonances. On the other hand, his mapping of social processes tends to be predetermined by his vision of exile. Again, the question arises as to how debilitating this limit becomes.

Oppression by the landlord class is fundamental to the exiled identity of MacLeod's protagonists, which is reinforced through similar economic and anti-centric sentiment on

Cape Breton Island; in this respect, MacLeod captures more of the complexity of

Islanders' consciousness. Revealing the layers integral to his writing, MacLeod's work also shows how the collective solidarity of traditional societies can function as both a static, nostalgic image of the past as well as a response to the colonizing processes of modernity. In other words, while MacLeod's vision of collectivity is problematic, I would agree with Jameson's placing importance on traditional societies. Any resistance to the homogenizing forces of late capitalism deserves attention and holds some possibility of creating an 'outside.' In a comment on Ernst Bloch affirming the Utopian potential of a clan or tribe, Jameson writes,

The newer Marxist anthropology ... reminds us—from within our 'total'

system—of the absolute difference of older precapitalist and tribal societies; and 39

at a historical moment when such an interest in a much more remote past seems

less likely to give rise to the sentimentalizing and populist myths that Marxism

had to combat in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ... ("Debate"

145).

The remote past in MacLeod's world, I am suggesting, offers the possibility of transcending his own "sentimentalizing" tendencies. In MacLeod's fictional universe, the sense of history, traditional knowledge and practices, connection to the land, residual elements of pre-capitalist modes of production, and the importance of solidarity and community are points of resistance to the world of commodity exchange that help create the possibility of rethinking the capitalist system.

The dramatic international flight of the Scots produces a hyper-consciousness of oppression that is replicated in Cape Breton, now in relation to intra-national urban centers of power. In both Scotland and Cape Breton collective solidarity is invoked as a form of resistance to outside oppression. While this oppression came from a landlord class in Scotland, within the contemporary setting, rural Cape Breton fishing, farming, and mining communities are juxtaposed against a national hegemonic center typically represented by Toronto or Montreal. MacLeod's regional and post-colonial narratives can therefore be viewed as an act of resistance to the dominant national culture by seeking to subvert mainstream ideologies and mainstream representations of the minority or regional group. Resistance is important to avoid appropriation by the center, but one often finds

MacLeod's critique returning to cumbersome binaries, designed to reinforce a permanent state of alienation—an alienation reinforced by the construction of a reified consciousness. MacLeod's characters tend to internalize such structures, from narrow 40 perceptions of emotional life to romantic fantasies and nostalgic tendencies. No real view of the whole becomes possible within such limits. More problematically, such limits seem to be encouraged by the texts themselves, so that readers are invited to participate in the images of romance and nostalgia inhabited by MacLeod's characters, thereby discouraging a more complex exploration of history and social relations.

Following the migration of clansmen from Scotland to Cape Breton, their problems— political, social, and economic—persist. The clansmen's colonial and class subordination that shaped their identity in Scotland continues in Cape Breton with the decline in rural resource labour and the need to migrate to urban centers for employment. This economic decline, followed by out-migration, leads to a continued experience of exploitation for

MacLeod's protagonists. Subsequently, a relationship forms between regionalism and class within MacLeod's texts. Similar to the way regionalism can overlap postcolonialism, where a region is defined against and resists a larger entity, so too can this apply to the way regionalism works with class inequality. More specifically, the rural working class within MacLeod's texts is defined anti-centrically against urban professionals. This class binary becomes complicated when Islanders face out-migration, and half-hearted attempts to integrate into urban environments are problematized by clinging nostalgically to a working-class ideal. Furthermore, as Wallace Clement argues, since one region is typically defined against another, hierarchical power structures inevitably emerge and one region progresses and develops at the "expense of the other"

(25). The very epicenter of the unequal distribution of power is class (Clement 25).

Inevitably, class relations manifest throughout social structures built on gender and ethnicity as well as region (Clement 26). This reinforces the binary between the 41 metropole and the periphery where regional protagonists are subordinated to larger economic urban centers due to their working-class identity. The connection between region and class is, of course, complicated. But in MacLeod's work, creating a problematic sense of homogeneity, the differences between the Cape Breton rich and powerful (including political leaders and owners) and workers is not articulated.

The repetition of postcolonial tensions at the regional level fosters a continued sense of diasporic, exiled identity for MacLeod's protagonists. William Safran's definition of diaspora can be used to frame the continued exiled consciousness of MacLeod's protagonists in Cape Breton. Safran ascertains that diaspora are:

expatriate minority communities that are dispersed from an original center to at

least two foreign regions that maintain a collective memory, vision or myth about

their original homeland, that believe they are not fully accepted in their host

society and feel partly alienated from it, that regard their ancestral homeland as

their true home and place of eventual return; that are committed to the

maintenance or restoration of the homeland; and whose group consciousness is

importantly defined by this bond with the homeland. (83)

Though definition as a diasporic community is not contingent on adherence to each of the above characteristics, Safran's list provides a framework for understanding the reinforcement of the clansmen's diasporic identity at the regional level in Cape Breton.

Two characteristics Safran articulates resonate within MacLeod's treatment of those descended from the Scottish diaspora. One is the idea of the "collective memory, vision or myth" in relation to place of origin, and the second is the feeling of "alienation" experienced in the adoptive homeland. Both components are particularly applicable to an 42 examination of MacLeod's fiction, where fracturing and displacement of the Scottish people resulted in a uniquely constructed identity, built at least in part on the mythology and romanticization of their exile. The clan identity of MacLeod's characters is deeply affected by the experience of oppression, and as a result they adhere to their culture as a means of surviving as a distinct group against the vicissitudes of said displacement.

However, this at times results in homogenous portrayals of Cape Breton regionalism. One of the disappointing aspects of this homogenization is MacLeod's underplaying of political divisions internal to the group, especially between elites and labour. Formally, realism, as Jameson cogently argues, has the potential to map out a 'totality' and rescue subjectivity from the drift of fragmentation.4 MacLeod aims for this and partly succeeds.

Certainly Jameson would applaud his concentration on the whole, rather than the individual. Moreover, he would approve of how the self in MacLeod's work is never presented as a unity but as a site of intersecting forces.

The second important feature in MacLeod's treatment of the Scottish diaspora is alienation, and this emerges in the relationship regional protagonists have with the larger nation-state. In MacLeod's texts, alienation results from the desire to maintain Scottish cultural roots while surrounded by an ever-progressive and modernizing English mainstream culture. Alienation additionally occurs with occupationally mobile characters who become increasingly isolated from their traditional Gaelic culture. Ideally, diasporic alienation is mitigated when subsequent generations do not directly experience the effects of exile, or when financial success diminishes the economic disparity between the periphery and the center (Ropero 217). However, many of MacLeod's regional protagonists, including the descendants of the clan Calum Ruadh, remain profoundly

4See for example "Reflections on the Brecht-Lukacs Debate." 43 influenced by their diasporic consciousness, demonstrating the atavistic quality of their

Gaelic identity.

Again, MacLeod's short story "Clearances" highlights the continued sense of diasporic identity for his protagonists and the economic disparities between the periphery and the metropole. This story additionally alludes to the existence of a second, contemporary Clearance resulting from the out-migration necessitated by the decline of resource industries. In "Clearances," the underlying dichotomy between progress and maintaining tradition is inevitably causal in the decline of traditional Gaelic existence and the cultural relationship with resource labour. MacLeod's treatment of the decline in industry and the cultural alienation that ensues is particularly elegiac. With middle-aged children who have embraced progress, the protagonist of the story struggles with the desire to maintain an older, traditionally Gaelic, and increasingly archaic way of life, versus progressing with globalizing and modernizing times. Progress is his Achilles heel, a fact made evident early within the text. He reflects on the difficulty both he and his wife faced under the burden of adapting to new technology including "the computer and digital recording and so much more" (415). Modernity and the contemporary economic decline faced by the protagonist is a theme stretching back two hundred years to the historic plight of his clansmen.

The protagonist reflects on changes within Gaelic identity, traditional resource labour, and the delicate connection between the two. As a boy of "eleven or twelve" (417), he fished with both his father and grandfather for "lobster and haddock and herring and hake," in addition to salmon with their "hereditary salmon net" (417). Within three generations, a swift decline in culture and resource labour is both evident and alarming. 44

Though tradition determines that Cape Bretoners of Highland descent "conducted almost all of their lives in Gaelic, as had the previous generations for over one hundred years"

(417), industrialization and global economies render regional Gaelic culture obsolete. The homogenizing effect of globalization remains at odds with local cultures, as evidenced at the regional level in MacLeod's depiction of Cape Breton. George Grant wrote in his

1965 Lament for a Nation that "Modern civilization makes all local cultures anachronistic" (4) and despite the severity of this statement, it resonates within

MacLeod's story. Since those who speak English are advantaged by the language they share with buyers in the marketplace, Gaelic language, and therefore Gaelic culture, is viewed as a disadvantage that impedes economic development. Gaelic identity is equated with the other minority and historically subordinated groups in Cape Breton, as "the

French-speaking Acadians seemed the same, as did the Mi'kmaq to the east" (418). The road to progress is lined with the discarded and decaying cultures of regional groups, and according to the grandfather, learning English is necessary to "go forward" (418).

Though Gaelic continues to be spoken within the family, there is nevertheless a steady decline in Gaelic culture through the generations of patriarchs within the story.

The decline of Gaelic culture within MacLeod's texts is caused in part by the decline in resource industries as a viable source of income. This, of course, is an ironic feature of

MacLeod's work, as the continuity of the Gaelic heritage is so dependant on the most industrial aspects of that culture. Though the protagonist in "Clearances" helps his son

John finance a better fishing vessel "in order to be competitive" (423) within the fishing markets, quotas are adjusted, rendering fishing an inadequate means of earning a livelihood. The boat, like the "hereditary salmon net" that can no longer serve a purpose 45 because the salmon must be saved for summertime anglers, sits idle. His son becomes one of many Islanders forced to migrate to earn a living, causing further cultural dilution.

Like many of MacLeod's characters, this takes John to Ontario where he fishes Lake

Erie. Within this changing economy and declining resource industry, out-migration removes families from their land and replicates the Highland Clearances in Scotland. The protagonist's daughters also depart for Toronto and Boston "as had their aunts" (417).

This parallels the out-migration of young women in MacLeod's "The Boat" who marry men from 'away,' against the wishes of their disapproving mother as "they were not of her people and they were not of her sea" (16). This outward migration is not an enforced exile, but those who remain in Cape Breton face economic uncertainty. Though it parallels the Scottish exile, MacLeod seems to suggest a repetition of the original event, rather than exploring the new context in its complexity.

Throughout MacLeod's corpus the cultural dilution that occurs as a product of out- migration and upward mobility is given an elegiac tone, and his tendency to romanticize

Gaelic cultural identity is made evident by the lamenting quality of his texts. The elegiac tone tends to limit the possibilities of consciousness, trapping it in unchanging forms: the heroic struggle between center and periphery and an emotional longing for a romantic past. Christian Riegel contends that "many of MacLeod's narrators can be considered to be in mourning, and the stories that they tell are an activity of that process" (233). This sense of mourning emanates from characters who remain at the regional setting, as well as those who have migrated for employment. Occupationally mobile protagonists (the narrator of No Great Mischief, the grandmother's sons in "The Road to Rankin's Point," the professionals described in "The Closing Down of Summer") are unsatisfied by 46 professional work in urban centers and are nostalgic for their rural landscape and declining folk identity. Regional protagonists mourn the declining industries that necessitate the out-migration of clansmen for employment.

Regarding elegy, Peter Sacks states that "a healthy work of mourning requires a withdrawal of affection from the lost object and a subsequent reattachment of affection to some substitute for that object" (6). MacLeod's protagonists remain nostalgic because those who leave Cape Breton for employment never entirely move past their regional existence to embrace urban life. This elegiac quality is established early within No Great

Mischief-when Calum sings the Gaelic song, "Cumha Ceap BreatuinrT which translates into English as "Lament for Cape Breton." The second verse, "There's a longing in my heart now/ To be where I was/ Though I know that it's quite sure/1 never shall return," typifies the elegiac element of MacLeod's narratives and the protagonists' longing for their lost homeland (17). Though Calum initiates the song, Alexander is quick to join in, and is surprised at how the words emerged from "deep within" him "in an almost reflex action" (16). Both Calum and Alexander migrated from Cape Breton to Ontario for employment, and both have a deeply embedded nostalgia for their native land. By repeatedly providing elegiac and romantic depictions of Gaelic culture and labour,

MacLeod risks essentializing this regional identity.

While regional writing is indicative of geographical and literary heterogeneity and can serve as an indication of the plurality of political, economic, and social differences spreading across the national landscape, there can be problems with a regional identity.

To differentiate themselves from the nation-state, regional writers often essentialize the 47 characters and regions in their texts. As Herb Wyile has noted, regionalism can problematically parallel post-colonial nationalism:

in a gesture which repeats English Canada's post-colonial act of differentiation

from England, critical formulations of regionalism react to the internal

colonialism of such national formulas by stressing regional diversity within the

nation, but at the expense of diversity within the region; ironically, they subscribe

to the kinds of critical practice within which so-called regional writing has

traditionally been marginalized. ("Post-nationalism" 271)

Similarly, efforts by authors to maintain distinctions between the center and periphery often subscribe to internal colonialism and result in essentialized representations of regional identity.

Regional identity for Alistair MacLeod's protagonists is formed through center- periphery and class tensions that originally arise from their peripheral position to a hegemonic landlord class within Scotland. Their oppression fostered clan solidarity in an effort to resist this imperial domination, though ultimately many clansmen were forced to migrate from their Scottish homeland during the Highland Clearances. These postcolonial tensions and the clansmen's marginal, diasporic identity are reinforced two hundred years later within the contemporary context of Cape Breton through the decline in resource- based industries and ensuing out-migration. This doubly historic context shapes the identity and consciousness of MacLeod's protagonists as an exiled populace, subordinated by their culture and class. In an effort to resist the nation-state and cling to otherness, clan solidarity is capitalized upon, but in doing so, MacLeod risks falling victim to essentialist representations of Gaelic identity. 48

Nevertheless, having insisted upon significant limits in MacLeod's construction of self and community, both functioning as reified channels of perception, it would be a mistake not to attend to the radical implications of his form of realism. For Jameson, accurate readings must attend to form first and foremost. Realism as a form has the capacity to engage and experiment with the 'social totality' ("Debate" 146). MacLeod's writing immerses itself in the staples of realism: the concrete historical situation, socio economic conditions, and the power of discourse. His emphasis on construction, facilitated by his foregrounding of narrative practices, also allows him to intervene in the given social reality, creating a dialectical perspective, experimenting with a new form of consciousness (something akin to Jameson's 'historical faculty'). Moreover, MacLeod's realism in particular moves beyond a focus on the category of the individual subject.

Formally, he constructs his characters as themselves constructed by historical events and communal relations. In addition to emphasizing the constructing force of history, to insisting on the political, he continually suggests the necessity of mapping out contexts and referring to an 'outside' of the text, as we will see in the next chapter. These elements of his work point to a radical, non-reified politics so that "fragmentation" may be

"connected by a more totalizing way of viewing phenomena" ("Debate" 146). 49

Chapter Two

Throughout MacLeod's fiction one finds a profound concern with the relationship between tradition and cultural identity. In the face of the economic crisis afflicting Cape

Breton, he explores the building blocks of tradition as a source of identity and a safeguard against the power of modernity, often symbolized by Toronto. As he mounts his challenge against the centers of power, MacLeod's writing generally perpetuates a nostalgic desire for home and an aversion to all things 'modernistic' (a phrase repeated throughout No Great Mischief). For the most part, as Andrew Hiscock argues,

MacLeod's work does not approach history ironically or with a postmodern affinity for instability; instead he "places emphasis upon melancholia and longing for a lost cultural unity of experience in the denouements to his texts" (63). Against those who would recover him for a more postmodern sensibility, Hiscock rightly asserts that MacLeod's work constructs grand narratives: "His stories may be seen to greet the metanarratives of

God and Progress [...] with 'incredulity,' but those of Self, Meaning, and History, amongst others, still prevail as organizing (if not comforting) principles of human existence" (68). While I agree with Hiscock that MacLeod generally writes history with a capital H, the focus of this thesis is on the quality of his metanarratives: whether they 50 have the capacity to act as a medium for a progressive understanding of the present, or whether they fall into a retrograde myth of the Folk. Moreover, without becoming postmodern, there are significant moments where more Utopian gestures occur, and his texts often present a moment of undecidability between a radical reflection on narrative and his standard desire for a fixed, traditional story and a fixed traditional place. The narrator of No Great Mischief, for example, repeatedly qualifies the status of narrative, before he reconstructs the past ("As I said, these seem the facts, or some of them anyway, although the fantasies are my own" 24; "In memory it seems always to be winter, although I know it was not so" 85; "That was Macaulay,' she said, 'the historian. He just made it up after the event" 97). Nevertheless, the narrative, punctuated with the qualifiers

"seems" and "perhaps," can end up lapsing into cartoonish Folk cliches of cultural identity (the sister's encounters with ghosts in Scotland, the at-times burdensome connection with the land, the relationship between clan and genetic characteristics). In this chapter, I will discuss the construction of tradition and explore the shifting implications of MacLeod's sense of identity as sometimes reductively essential and sometimes genuinely radical. What emerges is a double desire: an insistence on origin and fixed character types, and a sense of the necessity of narrative itself in mapping out reality. MacLeod's inclination to focus on narrative form and historicize his universe opens up positive ways out of his more nostalgic mode.

The identity of Alistair MacLeod's typical protagonist is, as the previous chapter underlined, shaped through exile and center-periphery strains both in Scotland and at the regional level in Cape Breton. As his narrative perspective goes, in Scotland clansmen were exiled from their homeland by an aggressive English landlord class. Two hundred years later, the declining resource industries in Cape Breton forced MacLeod's latter-day 51 clansmen into urban migration for employment thereby reinforcing their exiled consciousness. Rather than abandoning cultural traditions upon migration from Scotland, and then again from Cape Breton, MacLeod's protagonists retain links with their Gaelic heritage to sustain their distinction from urban culture and to strengthen clan solidarity.

Gaelic identity is therefore a homogenizing and unifying force for many of his characters.

However, although it strengthens group solidarity for the descendants of trans-Atlantic

Scots, it simultaneously restricts their agency. The unity of this identity functions as a cultural and realistic survival mechanism, though there are negative material effects created by affirming a traditional Scottish existence. This renders clan identity as both fortifying and marginalizing. Despite the continuation of clan solidarity, cultural gaps repeatedly develop when younger generations migrate from Cape Breton and experience cultural alienation, and center-periphery strains persist in the New World as Cape

Breton's subordination to Canada's urban cultural centers is emphasized.

While MacLeod attempts to present tradition as a founding essence, important investigations into the history of traditions have revealed their worldly, less than essential qualities. Eric Hobsbawm's and Hugh Trevor-Roper's theoretical explorations into the invention of tradition highlight the way Scottish heritage, which is formative to the identity of MacLeod's protagonists, is constructed. A thorough grasp of the concept of the construction of tradition will help illuminate MacLeod's own portrait of regional clan identity. MacLeod constructs this idealized regional identity with a totalizing, rigid myth of traditional values which both creates clan solidarity and marginalizes any expressions of difference or emergent identities. An important site of such marginalization and rigidity is found in MacLeod's construction of gender. Since female protagonists are largely absent within MacLeod's narratives, and the female characters within his texts are 52 given homogenous portrayals, I will examine how the Folk ideology cultivates a rigid gender binary restricting the agency of Cape Breton women in MacLeod's texts. In other words, while Macleod's romantic Scottish heritage appears handed down as a finished, holistic inheritance—founding Cape Breton values—his narrative needs to be seen as a partial, sometimes problematic political construct suitable for interrogation.

Though MacLeod's work does have its radical moments, more apparent is his inclination towards disturbing essences. Since MacLeod draws on Scottish traditions that sustain clan identity and solidarity, exploring the origins of this cultural heritage will illuminate MacLeod's portrayal of Gaelic culture and the deterministic effects it has on his protagonists. For MacLeod's regional characters, Gaelic identity is often an ancestral feature inborn rather than learned. This problematic approach to identity contrasts with recent scholarly investigations into the origin of cultural customs and heritage.

Academics including Hobsbawm, Trevor-Roper and Terence Ranger have thoroughly researched and attempted to debunk the origins of traditions, and, in doing so, have privileged and authorized some while effectively denouncing others. While their approach to tradition diverges from its portrayal in MacLeod's texts, several of their theories illuminate the purpose of traditions and symbols for his regional characters.

In his essay "The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland,"

Trevor-Roper argues that the image of Scottish Highlanders as a distinct community within Scotland is a recent invention, and that historically, Scottish Highlanders were simply "overflow" from Ireland (15). Geographically separated from the east of Scotland by a mountain range, the Highlands were alienated from the Saxon Lowlands and, as

Trevor-Roper argues, were a colony of Ireland through political, racial, cultural, and linguistic similarities (15). Trevor-Roper explains how the emergence of the Scottish 53

Highlands as culturally divergent from Ireland only developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. According to Trevor- Roper, the development of a distinct

Highland cultural identity occurred in three stages. First, a revolt against Ireland took place; second, the "artificial" invention of antiquated Scottish Highland tradition occurred; and third, these traditions became widely accepted by Lowland Scotland (16).

Trevor-Roper identifies the kilt and bagpipes as two elements only recently appropriated and inculcated with nationalist symbolic significance by Scots (15).

In MacLeod's narratives Highland Scottish traditions including music, language, superstitions, and on a lesser scale religion, foster cultural solidarity amongst the Scottish diaspora, connecting them with an antiquated history when confronted with pressure to conform to contemporary urban culture. In MacLeod's texts a desire for a secure past and resistance to imperial power emerge as a product of the clansmen's exile from the

Scottish Highlands that occurred as a result of accelerated capitalist developments in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. When social continuity is again disrupted by out-migration from Cape Breton, Scottish culture conflicts with and is under threat by a modern, though uninspired and commodifying urban culture. Due to their doubly formed exiled consciousness, many of MacLeod's protagonists struggle to connect with an authentic history and heritage.

Eric Hobsbawm's approach on the origins of tradition harmonizes with Trevor-

Roper's theories. According to Hobsbawm, the desire to affirm ownership of a legitimate, antiquated historical narrative is due to anxiety caused by the unremitting annihilation of tradition by modern culture. Because of a fast-paced modern society, the longing for an anchored past is "an attempt to structure at least some parts of social life within it as unchanging and invariant" (2). Although traditions are continuously invented and 54 reinvented, Hobsbawm argues that their creation is most pervasive when a group undergoes rapid social change, such as exile from a homeland alienating them from their history (4). Evidently, colonial oppression in Scotland and clansmen's continued social and economic oppression in Cape Breton nurture the desire amongst MacLeod's regional characters to maintain traditions that foster a sense of stability and unity. Many of

MacLeod's protagonists attempt to preserve cultural traditions in an effort to make part of their lives invariant since their history is defined by social and economic upheaval.

Hobsbawm's analysis of tradition helps to clarify how MacLeod both forms a tradition and links up with a conventional, equally constructed, tradition. The problem is not the constructedness of MacLeod's plots, but his desire to create a potentially oppressive, authoritarian narrative, guaranteed by an appeal to origins. Such moves are repeatedly made by MacLeod, and they threaten to contain emergent forms of agency and cultural life. But again, unique and productive gaps exist in his construction of tradition.

Hobsbawm's research into the creation of cultural mythoi fostered his argument that traditions through which cultural identity is created and sustained are constructs invented to incite and legitimize nationalistic fervor. Hobsbawm explains that "Invented tradition is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past" (1).

Hobsbawm alleges that traditions accepted as archaic relics and untraceable links to a distant past are often more recent than commonly theorized (1). Therefore, required for a cultural group to accept symbols or rituals as tradition and for the formulation of authenticity are invariance and repetition. These two components privilege past narratives over future cultural and social advances, and while Hobsbawm confirms that some 55 progress within society is necessary and compatible with the maintenance of cultural traditions, such developments must stay attuned to the dominant customs within a society

(2). Consequently, Hobsbawm argues that real or invented traditions give "any desired change (or resistance to innovation) the sanction of precedent, social continuity and natural law as expressed in history" (2). This tendency toward a blinding stasis is registered in MacLeod's texts when too much is invested in a myth of origins.

Within MacLeod's work, resistance to modernity is interconnected with the desire to preserve cultural traditions. Archibald, the seventy-eight year old protagonist from "The

Tuning of Perfection," exemplifies Hobsbawm's theories on the privileging of traditions to oppose progress and preserve a distinct cultural identity. Archibald's distrust of progress is evident when he sells his last mare and learns she will be used in modern science and the production of birth control pills. Distressed, Archibald realizes the mare will not live up to the potential of the stock from which she is descended, as the horses were traditionally used for removing timbered trees from the forest. Carver, a younger character additionally caught in the struggle between economic advancement and societal stagnation, recalls of Archibald and his horses, "no one knows where he gets all them logs, hauls them out with them horses and doesn't seem to disturb anything. Year after year. Treats the mountain as if it were a garden" (289). This pastoral image contrasts with the description Carver provides of contemporary logging when he states "Not like now eh? We just cut 'em all down. Go in with heavy equipment, tree farmers and loaders and do it all in a day, to hell with tomorrow" (289). MacLeod's sensibility promotes an idealization of the sustainability and tradition of the earlier logging method. The latter, contemporary style embodies capitalist aims of deriving maximum financial benefit, with disregard for the consequences. Echoing the sentiment and sensibility typical of 56

MacLeod's text, Archibald resigns himself to knowing that efforts made to prevent the mare's fate would be ineffectual.

Ultimately, Archibald is "betrayed by forces he could not control" (290). Such concerns affirm the deterioration of traditional life and the subsequent desire to seize control of an established though romanticized heritage as a form of resistance to this hegemonic, capitalist center. Problematic is the sense of fatalism embodied in the pastoral mode, reinforced by MacLeod's general elegiac tone. But despite the fatalism and cliched idea of the pastoral "garden," the story registers a temporal shift, creating an 'outside' reference to the totalizing effects of capitalism. MacLeod captures, for example, the possibility of alternative modes of production and different forms of time compared to the modern experience of an eternal present ("do it all in a day, to hell with tomorrow").

These two paragraphs 'map' a change or mark a history: the movement from a sustainable, organicist rural culture to a relentlessly rationalizing profit-oriented culture.

Though MacLeod writes with an air of hopeless fatality, his strong dialectal sense can be viewed as challenging the polished operations of late capitalism. Despite his elegiac attitude towards the present and near hopeless attitude towards the future, MacLeod's texts nevertheless provide the basis for a type of historical thinking that might undo the urge for authority or origins.

Concomitant with MacLeod's persistent resistance to modernity and urban society is the privileging of tradition, and an important site for this contest in MacLeod's texts is the meaning of music. In "The Golden Gift of Grey," for example, the parents of Jesse, the protagonist, listen to "the sound of Eddy Arnold and Jim Reeves" (65) and, though capable of capturing a primordial "aching loneliness" (65), the music "branded" his parents as "hillbillies" (66). Despite Arnold and Reeves being American country singers 57 rather than Cape Breton folk musicians, their music is criticized by urban dwellers. This sentiment is repeated in "The Return" when Alex narrates how his mother, a member of the Montreal elite, does not approve of his father's traditional violin records because, she claims: "they all sound the same" (80). Her affectation, evoked by a presumed urban cultural sophistication, leads her to ridicule her husband for the music of his ancestral homeland. Because of this, he only listens to the records in her absence. Music again sets region and center in opposition within "The Boat" as the father's possession of Gaelic

songs connects him to an authentic past and true manhood when "He sang all the old sea

chanteys that had come across from the old world and by which men like him had pulled ropes for generations" (13). This separates him from a superficial and uncomprehending audience with their modern gadgetry of tape recorders and cameras.

Furthermore, the issue of reception is explored in "The Tuning of Perfection" by

Archibald's insistence on the preservation of traditional Gaelic songs despite the changing tastes of contemporary urban audiences. This demonstrates in MacLeod's texts the desire for the traditional as a point of salvation. Archibald, regarded by folklorists as

"the last of the authentic old-time Gaelic singers" (280), contests his family's attempts to reduce the length of traditional Gaelic tunes often containing "fifteen or twenty verses"

(275) for a festival ironically celebrating and falling under the rubric of "Scots Around the World" (284). Intended to showcase Scottish culture and talent, the festival is "not a regional show" but, rather, plays to a "national and international" (300) audience, thereby exemplifying the binary between the metropole and periphery while ultimately highlighting the subordination of the periphery. Designed to celebrate Scottish heritage, the festival nonetheless favours mainstream audiences, by sacrificing the authenticity of regional Gaelic culture for a more consumable version. Though Gaelic is subverted by 58 mainstream demands, MacLeod counters this effect by drawing attention to the inauthentic condition of the metropole.

Insistence on the authoritative "original" version of Gaelic songs and therefore

Gaelic culture is alienating, however, and Archibald's insistence on cultural authenticity causes a division between himself and the younger members of his family unconcerned by the precedence of tradition and resentful of his inflexibility. Though able to relinquish his mare to modern science, Archibald, preoccupied with authenticity, refuses to sacrifice the original structure of Gaelic songs to increase their palatability to apathetic, contemporary audiences. While this alienates him from his extended family, it simultaneously unites him with community members who similarly value the tradition of their culture and are cognizant of its erosion through cultural apathy and the homogenizing rise of what the narrator of No Great Mischief calls "modernistic" society.

An example of this cultural cohesion occurs with Mrs. MacKenzie, who heads a competing group of singers. Like Archibald she values the precedent of their traditional

Gaelic verse, and as a result he feels "almost more kinship to the scarcely known Mrs.

MacKenzie than to those members of his own flesh and blood" (295). This illuminates the estrangement Archibald experiences within his family, typified by the detached relationship he has with his granddaughter Sal. Sal, when asked by Archibald what songs the festival organizers want to hear, replies "who cares?... It's the trip that's important"

(284). Sal's indifference mirrors that of the rest of Archibald's family toward the maintenance of cultural continuity. Ian McKay critiques folklorists' fetishization of cultural authenticity, arguing that it is "construed in the most rigid possible way" (14).

Because of this rigidity, McKay states, "a version of a song was 'authentic' only if it consistently reproduced the characteristics of the piece in its 'original' form," promoting 59 the focus on an "idealized past of the Folk" (14). In MacLeod's texts, the tone suggests not that the search for origins is misguided, but that the passing of original tradition is tragic, casting a negative light on any mutations.

Again, MacLeod typically manages to explore the complexity of tradition, even if he ultimately succumbs to nostalgia. His works often thematize the production of history and problematize tradition as foundational even as he seeks such a foundation. For example, take the issue of how ancient symbols circulate. Hobsbawm explains that the development of new traditions is often executed through the incorporation of ancient symbols or materials connected to an authentic past (6). Newly invented traditions can be superimposed on old ones, or borrowed "from the well-supplied warehouses of official ritual, symbolism and moral exhortation—religion and princely pomp, folklore and freemasonry" (6). In MacLeod's texts, the invention of traditions through adaptation of symbolic images is often demonstrated by younger generations passingly familiar with an antiquated Scottish way of life but whose understanding and practice of Gaelic culture is not as prominent as with older generations. An example of this occurs in MacLeod's

"The Road to Rankin's Point." The twenty-six year old protagonist Calum is dying of cancer, with only several months left to live. With limited future, he returns to his grandmother's isolated house on Cape Breton to live his last days in exploration of his past. Calum's physical decline parallels the decline in Gaelic culture as indicated by his statement: "Sometimes when seeing the end of our present, our past looms even larger, because it is all we have or think we know. I feel myself falling back into the past now, hoping to have more and more past as I have less and less future" (176). By exploring his history, he realizes that the brooch worn by his grandmother—a Christmas gift he purchased in Toronto—was really a false representation of Scottish thistles which do not 60 twine as depicted on the pin. Calum concludes that he was "being more symbolic" than he first realized when it was purchased (163). In this way, MacLeod exemplifies

Hobsbawm's theories on the symbol. As a representation of Gaelic cultural symbols, the

"falseness of the brooch" (162) is a synecdoche of the deterioration and hybridization of

Gaelic heritage, and the appropriation and misrepresentation of that culture within larger urban society. With the end of the narrative comes the death of Calum's grandmother, which additionally sounds the death knell for Gaelic culture. Calum discovers his grandmother's body on the road to her house, and notices "the twining Scottish thistles... still pinned to the collar of her dress. This is the ending that we have" (178). Here

MacLeod indicates how the inauthentic brooch has taken on real meaning, traveling from the world of commerce (Toronto) into the narrative of Calum's life. Symbols accrue meanings through use. In this case the symbol is concretely bound to a real body. But here as elsewhere in MacLeod's work, the emphasis falls on the degradation of this sign.

The brooch in the context of his grandmother's death underscores how this "ending" is additionally indicative of the debasement of traditional Scottish culture and its inevitable hybridization in contemporary urban society. This compounds Calum's realization that

"For the first time in the centuries since the Scottish emigrations there is no human life at the end of this dark road" (178). Calum, though increasingly sensitive toward his Scottish heritage, is himself dying and therefore unable to maintain this and other Scottish traditions.

MacLeod's tendency towards a foundational history, albeit affirmatively and as a counter to an equally foundational official history, is brought out in Christopher Gittings commentary on "The Road to Rankin's Point." Gittings emphasizes the protagonist's search for the hidden text of his past. He sees history at the center of MacLeod's vision 61 and finds MacLeod creating a grounding counter-discourse, a text outside official history.

Calum, the protagonist, strives, writes Gittings, "to decode the barely audible notes emanating from the vacuum created by received notions of history" (95). But more problematically, echoing MacLeod's sensibility, Gittings suggests that there is but one narrative possibility, and that it, like the protagonist, is passing away before the force of the modern world. Calum is out to discover an ultimate origin, along bloodlines, defining a founding relationship between his "cultural heritage" and his "present self," one "that has been obfuscated by historiography" (104). The idea of a pregiven subtext or, more disturbingly, "blood" as an essence binding a cultural heritage appears as a strong impulse in MacLeod's work. Creelman addresses MacLeod's problematic preoccupation with blood in No Great Mischief. The command to "Always look after your blood," for example, "occurs more than ten times in the course of the novel" (140-41). Creelman notes that "The call for clan solidarity, and the novel's careful use of blood imagery verge on overdetermination, but MacLeod takes the risk in order to secure his central ideological vision" (Setting 141). Blood, and the focus on genetic characteristics, moves beyond the instability of language and history, suggesting an essential ground or ultimate origin underwriting cultural production. These elements legitimize MacLeod's tendency towards patriarchal scripts and discourage the questioning of hierarchical relationships. It is important to be conscious of, even as we affirm his progressive moments, where

MacLeod himself obfuscates, how he constructs culture and tradition, and the implications of his choices.

Common to both Trevor-Roper's and Hobsbawm's cultural analysis is a conviction that many traditions are manufactured rather than organic, and, within a historical timeframe, quite recent developments. Their deconstruction of the origins of tradition has 62 obvious value for historical scholarship, but in many ways fails to account for the function these cultural traditions embody for their practitioners. In response to the recent trend of exposing the origins of tradition, Celeste Ray states "that a tradition is invented does not detract from its present meaning to those who emotionally invest in its practice"

(6). Following the expulsion of Highlands Scots, Highland culture and heritage were romanticized within both the Lowlands and England; ironically, the appropriation of

Highland symbols by Lowland Scots has been attributed to an effort to maintain distinction from England. Similarly, in MacLeod's texts Gaelic culture provides a source of collective bonding by maintaining a cultural distinction between Scottish descendants and those within an alienating urban culture. The appropriation of culture by Lowland

Scots included music, dance and Gaelic songs "wrapped in a tartan, and adapted to the tastes of both Anglophone and Gaelic-speaking urban middle class" (Dembling 182).

This resulting Highlandism, comprised of a pastiche of adapted cultural symbols and traditions, fuels concerns about the authenticity of this pan-Scottish heritage. Authenticity is often associated with a pre-Highland Clearances, eighteenth-century conceptualization of Scottish culture (Dembling 185). Scholars questioning the legitimacy of invented or

adapted Highland culture often neglect how its followers negotiate their identity through these symbols in response to the hegemony of a larger culture, making it a valuable

source of self-definition and resistance despite the 'invention' of certain aspects. Beyond the issue of authenticity there is the idea of creating a counter-discourse—a practical, provisional foundation to give shape to community and address power. Of course, it all

depends on who controls the discursive resources.

All cultural traditions have origins somewhere, and important to their comprehension

is not simply their (a)historical establishment, but why certain traditions, images, and 63 tropes are woven into the social tapestry, or tartan, of a society and how a heritage that can provide cohesion can simultaneously limit those under its influence—being defined by a past narrative can also mean being confined by that narrative. Consequently,

MacLeod's texts are concerned not with the origins of the Gaelic traditions his protagonists value, but rather, the way Gaelic traditions cultivate both unity and alienation. Drawing on Gaelic culture is a valued form of resistance to dominant ideologies for MacLeod. Therefore, his insistence on the Gaelic culture of his protagonists, which becomes intensified in the later stories, highlights asymmetrical power relations by exposing the cultural binary and economic stratification between Cape

Breton and Canada's urban centers. Through maintaining links with Scottish heritage, and the historical narratives of their exile, MacLeod's protagonists position themselves binaristically between agency and determinism. Though collective agency at times exists when characters adhere to a static heritage, as demonstrated by Archibald and Mrs.

MacKenzie, individual agency is restricted when attempts are made to relinquish their

Gaelic culture for a modern one. A typical example unfolds in "The Boat," where the protagonist, having left the region, is haunted by loss and guilt, as he signifies an end to his family's traditional way of life. Acutely conscious of his failure to keep traditions alive after the death of his father, he imagines his mother listening "when the rubber boots of the men scrunch upon the gravel as they pass beside her house," not stopping because "she alone of all the Lynns has neither son nor son-in-law who walks towards the boats that will take him to sea" (25). The tone of the story is merciless, picturing how the spirit of tradition looks upon those who abandon it: "And it is not an easy thing to know that your mother looks upon the sea with love and you with bitterness because the one has been so constant and the other so untrue" (25). 64

This examination of the construction of tradition demonstrates the degree to which regional identity acts as a unifying mechanism creating solidarity amongst the group or clan. However, there are subversive influences countering regional collective identity, including national assimilationist pressures. In No Great Mischief, for instance,

Alexander recalls how generations of Gaelic speaking children were "beaten for [their] own good" (19) in school to eradicate their language and, in turn, their culture. The use of physical force in schools to eliminate the regional practice of Scottish customs and Gaelic language was euphemistically referred to as a way of making children "good Canadian citizens" (19). Of course, assimilation efforts presuppose the existence of a national culture into which a group can assimilate. Urban and national society in MacLeod's texts is bereft of value, other than material, and characteristically callous and alienating.

Typifying MacLeod's juxtaposition of rural and urban life, and his deliberate partiality toward the rural, is "The Lost Salt Gift Of Blood." In the story, the protagonist returns to rural Newfoundland from Toronto to collect his young boy John, only to realize that he is better off living close to the land with his grandparents. John's life is quaint and rustic. He wakes at five in the morning and "has the makings of a good fisherman" (128). His routine would be out of place in an urban milieu, just as his father realizes that the coastal shore is "perhaps for me no place at all" (123). The following passage narrated by John's father is emblematic of MacLeod's portrait of urban settings:

come away from the lonely gulls and the silver trout and I will take you to the

land of the Tastee Freeze where you may sleep till nine or ten. And I will show

you the elevator to the apartment on the sixteenth floor and introduce you to the

buzzer system and the yards of the wrought-iron fences where the Doberman 65

pinscher runs silently at night. Or may I offer you the money that is the fruit of

my collecting and my most successful life? (139)

By idealizing and romanticizing the rural landscape, John's father realizes the city would provide an inhospitable and crippling environment for his energetic son. This sensibility that renders urban society inauthentic while privileging the rural landscape is typical of

MacLeod's narratives.

National identity, however, is formed in much the same way as its regional counterpart, in that traditions are invented to foster unity across a nation. Hobsbawm argues that:

The National Flag, the National Anthem, and the National Emblem are the three

symbols through which an independent country proclaims its identity and

sovereignty, and as such they command instantaneous respect and loyalty. In

themselves they reflect the entire background, thought and culture of a nation.

(11)

These symbols produce unity despite the multiplicity of identities, regions and races constituting Canada. However, the focus in the 1960's and 1970's on assimilation has recently given way to the celebration of cultural pluralism within the nation-state (Ray

28). The nation-state is often viewed as superior in status to its regional counterparts, but this does not make the regional level inauthentic. The definition of a nation is becoming more fluid than in former periods, when it was used as a sweeping generalization of a country's inhabitants—an outdated perspective which has become more of a myth of nationalism, or, as Benedict Anderson states "Nationalism-with-a-big-N": a form of ideology (5). Rather than see Nationalism as ideological, Anderson proposes that it be explored at a similar level to religion (5) and offers the following definition of the nation: 66

"it is an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign" (6). Anderson describes the nation as imagined because those within it will never be familiar with everyone in the community, yet it fosters a sense of cohesion amongst its inhabitants. This definition is useful for understanding how regional identity is constructed. Anderson argues that nationalism has yet to wane in popularity, and states

"nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time" (3).

There are more contemporary and critical approaches taken to the nation, and Bill

Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin warn that the nation is "always likely to collapse back into sub-divisions of clan, 'tribe', language or religion groups" (150). This is augmented by the fact that fewer than ten percent of nation-states are homogenous in their ethnic and cultural composition (Ray 21). One of the most significant flaws with the notion of Nation (over nation) is that it perpetuates a homogenizing identity, leaving little available space for the diversity within Canada, and the identity represented is often that of the mainstream culture rather than that of marginal groups. Consequently, such a homogenizing force fuels the desire for ethnic groups to resist assimilation as demonstrated within MacLeod's texts by the divergence of a homogeneous Gaelic clan identity from urban culture. Constructed and fortified by exile, regional identity is thus established and maintained despite pressures to conform to contemporary Canadian society. MacLeod's Gaelic world in part mirrors the homogeneity of the Nation, even as clan solidarity functions to resist assimilation into this culture.

Of course there is more to MacLeod's work than an opposition between Toronto and

Cape Breton, where Toronto stands as the epitome of a homogenizing Canadian tradition.

On one level, MacLeod presents a struggle of one nation (Canada-Toronto) against 67 another (rural Cape Breton). Cutting across that division is something larger and even more homogenizing:

the moment of the multinational network, or what Mandel calls 'late capitalism,' a

moment in which not merely the older city but even the nation-state itself has

ceased to play a central function and formal role in a process that has in a new

quantum leap of capital prodigiously expanded beyond them... (Jameson

"Cognitive Mapping" 283).

Concentration on late capitalism's style of translating all life into commodities, all time into a fragmenting present, helps make sense of MacLeod's radical gestures—inventing a historical sense, gathering images of corporate colonization, and constructing an

'outside.' Much of MacLeod's language points to processes that transcend 'nation,' including the mechanization of forestry, the global flow of a dehumanized labour force, commodity fetishism, and the violent cultural imperialism of the U.S. His target often has more to do with globalization (late capitalism) than the 'culture' of Toronto. In this light,

Toronto is simply a shallow veneer reflecting an image of global capitalism.

One possible explanation for MacLeod's persistent fatalism and emphasis on origins may be that the homogenizing force of 'late capitalism' is so total that he looks to an equally total form of response. In resisting mainstream and contemporary culture,

MacLeod's protagonists capitalize on the Scottish culture and ethnicity as a form of resistance. Characteristics captured under the rubric of ethnicity and common to

MacLeod's construction of regional clan identity include but are not limited to "shared customs, religious practices, linguistic traditions, geographical origins, and sometimes, common descent" (Ray 22). Occasionally included in the definition of ethnicity, and applicable to MacLeod's portrayal of Scottish ethnicity, is a relatively homogeneous 68 pattern to gender roles. By definition, ethnicity is not a biologically inherited trait, but a cultural choice (Ray 35), though for many of MacLeod's protagonists their ethnic identity does not arise from a learned heritage, but rather has a primordial, inborn quality.

Contemporary characters in his later texts are atavistic constructions of historical Scottish

Highlanders, making their Scottish heritage innate and not entirely exclusive to Scottish descendants living in Cape Breton.

Such sentiment emerges in MacLeod's novel No Great Mischiefwhen Alexander

MacDonald's twin sister Catriona visits Scotland. Living in a modern house located

"high upon one of the more prestigious ridges of the new and hopeful Calgary" (93),

Catriona is seemingly far removed from her Scottish history and heritage. However, on a visit to Scotland she is confronted and subsumed by her Gaelic past. Various peculiar occurrences befall Catriona, including visits by unexplained specters, one of which is wearing a traditional (though 'recently' invented) Highland kilt. Ultimately, Catriona is recognized as belonging to the place her ancestors left over two hundred years before.

MacLeod captures the organic link the Scottish descendants of his texts have with their past when Catriona, on a trip to Moidart, is recognized by a woman as belonging to the

"Clann Chalum Ruaidh" (161). The woman declares to Catriona "you are really from here. You have just been away for awhile" (160). The instinctive nature of their Gaelic heritage is reiterated when the woman's dogs recognize Catriona through their sense of smell as if those within the Ruaidh clan are branded with a common olfactory stamp.

With Catriona's discovery of her Scottish roots MacLeod additionally demonstrates the inextricable way he links history with the lives of the regional characters within his texts.

While this creates a satisfying identity for Catriona, and MacLeod is an expert at 69 exploring the emotional rewards of subjective identifications, it also turns her into an essence, embedded in an essentialized history.

MacLeod's insistence on the biological aspect of Gaelic identity is palpable in the near redundant emphasis in the novel to "always look after your own blood" (15). This phrase functions as a dictum adhered to by all in the MacDonald clan save for one. When

Alexander MacDonald from San Francisco (cousin to the Alexander from Cape Breton) avoids the draft by working in an Ontario mine alongside the MacDonald clan, he abandons his brethren when they need him most—during the fight with the French miners led by Fern Picard. MacLeod indicates earlier in the text that the urban Alexander, though similar in appearance to his clan, is not made of the same mettle. He writes, "the new Alexander MacDonald seemed, to casual eyes, just another one of us" (242), implying that there are differences when looking past such superficial similarities. And there is an early suggestion that "the new Alexander" does not align himself with his

Scottish ancestry, when in a conversation with Alexander, he asks, "Culloden was where they lost.. .right?...But they won some of the time?" (243). Using "they" instead of "we" illustrates his detachment from his Scottish history and genealogy. So, though MacLeod typically portrays Gaelic identity as innate, there are exceptions when characters immersed in urban culture lose sight of or are never introduced to their Scottish heritage.

The most problematic uses of tradition come when MacLeod ties the language of the clan directly to the body. For example, the extended discussions of the clan's physical characteristics (the colour of eyes, hair and skin tone) where the clan is tied to the flesh, as when a group of Cape Bretoners traveling by car happen across a child named

Pankovich while in Calgary. They see through that name to the inner MacDonald:

"What was your mother's last name?" 70

"MacDonald," he answered. "See," said the man to the car in general, "I told

you." And then another of the men reached into his pocket and passed him a fifty-

dollar bill. "What's this for?" asked my nephew named Pankovich. "It is," said

the man, "for the way you look. Tell your mother it is from clann Chalum

Ruaidh." (No Great Mischief 30)

The connection of myth to the body is equally tied to the spirit, reinforcing the essentialism reminiscent of Catriona's encounter with the spirit world in the old country:

"Many of the red-haired people also had eyes that were so dark as to be beyond brown and almost in the region of a glowing black. Such individuals would manifest themselves as strikingly unfamiliar to some, and as eerily familiar to others" (30). Genetics, myth, and spirit give an imaginary consistency to the world, but at the expense of agency or inclusion; the name "Pankovich" is just a surface distortion concealing an origin. Equally disturbing is when, in No Great Mischief, Catriona dyes her hair and then, as if she were being punished for exploring an emergent identity, cannot get back to the original colour which links her to the clan—"she attempted to dye the streak back to black, but could find no dye that would make it as black as it was before" (29). Once tainted by the

"artificial" there is no way back to the purity of Scottish womanhood. The tradition refuses to authorize change and punishes transgression, an attitude affirmed by the grandmother who asserts "with straightforward firmness, 'It is good enough for you, for tampering with the hair God gave you'" (29). In effect, while these gestures allow moments of collective solidarity to exist, they limit potential agency for MacLeod's regional characters.

A problematic feature arises out of regional literature of this nature. In establishing identity as anti-centric and resistant to the homogenizing features of a National identity 71 and the even greater threat of late capitalism, writers fall victim to perpetuating their own rigidly homogenizing identity. Identity in MacLeod's texts illuminates a form of strategic essentialism as coined by Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak, who espouses that though differences exist within a group or region, it is often advantageous to essentialize unifying characteristics, thereby resisting the mainstream norm. For Spivak and MacLeod this can be positive, but by resisting assimilation into a national psyche and privileging the regional, stereotypes are often perpetuated, traditions invented, and identity essentialized. Herb Wyile explains the problematic way regional literary criticism, "in asserting a more localized literary sensibility and in reacting to a perceived Ontario- centrism in Canadian literary culture, has repeated the same totalizing gestures on the regional level" ("Post-nationalism" 271). This is illustrated by the homogenous identity pervasive within MacLeod's texts and his penchant for portraying a uniformly Scottish

Cape Breton rather than acknowledging the plurality of cultures and the polyphony of voices present on the Island. While this homogeneous Scottish identity is pronounced in

MacLeod's texts, he contests such a critique in an interview with Shelagh Rogers.

Comparing the two grandfathers in No Great Mischief, MacLeod aims to illustrate the heterogeneous characterization he gives and declares that "they're a nice contrast.. .All

MacDonalds are not the same... Like saying that all Highlanders are the same or all

MacDonalds are the same. That's like thinking of people as kind of cliches" (35).

Admittedly, significant nuances exist to distinguish his characters, but MacLeod nonetheless is drawn to the power and resistance formed from an essentialized Scottish identity.

MacLeod's attachment to a Gaelic essence is also noticeable in his attitude toward language. Vital to the Scottish cultural identity he constructs for his protagonists is the 72 value of the Gaelic language to the Scottish diaspora in Cape Breton and to those who have migrated off the Island for employment. Admittedly rare in Cape Breton, the language is not absent, though its deterioration since the nineteenth century is significant.

Gaelic is rarely spoken in contemporary Cape Breton, but its pervasiveness within

MacLeod's fiction indicates otherwise, making it one of the most significant ties connecting the Scottish diaspora with their lost homeland. Though other emblems of

Scottish history and culture are prevalent in parts of North America, Cape Breton presents the only region left continuing as a Gaidhealtachd, or Gaelic-speaking region

(Dembling 181). Estimates conclude that the remaining Gaelic-speaking population is only in the hundreds and "Cultural conservatism" within Cape Breton is credited as the reason why Gaelic and other surviving forms of Scottish heritage including music and dance are preserved (Dembling 180).

Gaelic language distinguishes regional characters from the center by stressing their difference, while alienating those within the community for whom the language has become obsolete, resulting in a linguistically stratified society. As the prevailing language in Cape Breton following the Highland Clearances, it was not long before

Gaelic began to deteriorate within Scottish communities in Cape Breton. MacLeod's texts are permeated with Gaelic, and though the decay of the language is emphasized, its frequent usage demonstrates several key themes. Language is used to reveal the growing generation gap within the populace and to reinforce the sense of exile for his protagonists. Older generations remain connected to their ancestral language, while younger characters are left with only a cursory knowledge. This is evidenced by Sal in

"The Tuning of Perfection" when she sings a traditional Gaelic song to Archibald, without understanding the meaning of the words. He advises her to slow down, as she's 73 singing it "like a milling song. It's supposed to be a lament for a loved one that's lost"

(285). When asked if she knows the meaning of the song, Sal retorts: "No. Neither will anybody else. I just make the noises" (285). Her disinterest is indicative of the cultural deterioration between generations since knowing the pronunciation of the words does not imply an understanding of their meaning.

This linguistic generation gap is created by the progress of an adapting and globalizing world. MacLeod acknowledges this by stating that "for the Gaelic speaking people, English was the language of progress. In order to get a job, you have to learn the majority language" (Rogers 25). This sentiment is echoed throughout his texts and is exemplified by the protagonist's grandfather in "Clearances" who feels "disadvantaged by language" (418) when difficulties arise selling his catch. "We will have to do better than this," he exhorts his grandson and continues, "We will have to learn English. We will have to go forward" (418). MacLeod compares them with the "French-speaking

Acadians" (418) and Mi'kmaq, demonstrating how, in MacLeod's texts, the Scottish descendants from Cape Breton share with other ethnic populations the necessity of giving up their language to assimilate and move forward, or ultimately remain isolated and regional. Typifying his romantic essentialism regarding language, MacLeod explains in the interview with Rogers that "your first language is the language of your heart, the language of your feelings. And then if you learn languages for your work, I don't think you learn emotional languages" (29).

As demonstrated, with MacLeod's romanticized images of bucolic nature and traditional Gaelic language and history, he has a strong tendency toward purity. This strain in his work becomes particularly restrictive when looking at family and gender in his texts and is therefore revealing about the price to pay for MacLeod's strategy. 74

Fundamental to the antimodern Folk paradigm that MacLeod subscribes to in his construction of clan identity is an emphasis on the "Innocence" that permeates the cultural expectations of Folk domestic life, promoting a rigid gender binary and sexual inequality (McKay 30). Within the Folk paradigm, traditional family values based upon antiquated and essentialized notions of gender archetypes inform social interactions. Ian

McKay asserts that the contemporary function of sexuality evolved from "a primary association with reproduction in families to a primary association with emotional intimacy and physical pleasure for individuals" (251). This 'modern' development destabilizes the traditional family unit, creating anxiety toward social change and industrial growth. The Folk ideology, therefore, in a perpetuation of antimodernism, idealizes and promotes static gender roles in Nova Scotia, and as McKay states

"Innocence as a gendered ideological formation meant a politics of cultural selection that emphasized those aspects of gender and sexuality which set Nova Scotia apart from a fast-changing North American world" (251). This retrograde gender binary is developed throughout MacLeod's texts, and reinforces the disparity between the metropole and periphery through differences between family values and family size.

The large size of Cape Breton Scottish families is emphasized by MacLeod, along with the advantages of cohesion and solidarity provided by the family unit at times advanced by a common Catholicism among Scottish descendants. The difference between the center and periphery concerning family size is made explicit within "The

Return" when Angus' father asks, regarding his grandson Alex, "is that the only one you have after being married eleven years?... I thought perhaps that was different in Montreal too" (85). The narrator underscores the dissimilarities between family values in Cape

Breton and those in Montreal, explaining that Angus' parents "lost three children at birth 75 but.. .raised eight sons" (87). Implicit is the sentiment that, within Montreal, urban professionalism and individualism are valued more than the solidarity created by an extended family. The generous size of regional families is reiterated throughout many of

MacLeod's texts. In addition to the family in "The Return," other examples include "The

Road to Rankin's Point," "The Closing Down of Summer" and the Ruaidh clann in No

Great Mischief. This complies with the "traditional family values" (McKay 252) and

"association with reproduction" intrinsic to Folk Innocence.

Underlying Folk Innocence and as a result of this focus on traditional family values, rigid gender binaries emerge, reinforcing gender stereotypes to resist "a modern world in which gender ideals and roles were confusingly blurred" (McKay 252). However, like men, women retain a close association with their natural environment as demonstrated in

"The Return" by the grandmother who "is very tall with hair almost as white as the afternoon's gulls and eyes like the sea over which they flew" (84). Nonetheless, while men of the Folk are "Rugged, hardy... braving the sea, clamping down picturesquely on their pipes" (McKay 254), women of the Folk and the women in MacLeod's texts are auxiliary to and supportive of their male counterparts. Women's subordination to men is evident in "The Vastness of The Dark" when James is told "Once you drink the underground water it becomes a part of you like the blood a man puts into a woman. It changes her forever and never goes away. There's always a part of him running there deep inside her" (44). Subordinate to men, and relegated to the margins, the women of the Folk found their 'natural' place in the domestic sphere. In the earlier stories ("In The

Fall", "The Boat"), MacLeod shows how women's lives are shaped by economic circumstances, but this emphasis on social construction diminishes in his later works.

Given the dangers of repression in the Folk tradition and its virulent presence in the 76 mythology of Cape Breton culture, Laurie Kruk's balancing act—attempting to rescue

MacLeod's depiction of women in the face of his patriarchal values—seems particularly problematic. She acknowledges that men and women "appear" restricted by conventionally prescribed gender roles, "the woman ruling the household and the man providing for his family by means of physically demanding, dangerous work" (141), but asserts that

in the harsh, maritime environment of the stories, these roles are equally

important. So while this segregation of the sexes into traditional roles clearly has

a restrictive aspect—often forcing the next generation away from the community,

to escape rigid gender roles through formal education and greater opportunities—

it also strengthens, grounds and ennobles those who stay. (141-2)

If they are equally important, these roles do not get equal time. Women, their variety of work and grades of subjectivity are nearly non-existent in MacLeod's oeuvre, except, tellingly, when reduced to mythic figures of nature as seen with the character of Agnes

MacPhedran in MacLeod's "Island." Moreover, the possibilities that exist for "the next generation," admittedly within the purview of modernity, are not seen as signs of progress1. My overall sense of MacLeod's depiction of women is well articulated by

Creelman's comments on "MacLeod's patriarchal construction of gender roles": "The feminine is thus presented as a passive space; a functional and necessary supplement to the masculine drive towards identity (138). Women in MacLeod's work appear as

'Kruk notes the opposition of masculine hands to what MacLeod describes as the "very white and disproportionately small hands" of the Toronto salesman from "The Vastness of the Dark" (143). Arguably, this simply repeats MacLeod's ongoing derision for what he sees as emasculated urbanites. The positive image of a masculine Cape Breton male compared to the feminized professional males of the cities is indicative of a problematic rhetorical use of gender types. At the conclusion of her essay, in what amounts to a naive attitude towards women and aboriginals, one which would tie them to nature, she writes that "MacLeod, drawing his artistic authority from the timeless act of storytelling, reminds us of our human rootedness [...] in a landscape, a community, a body. MacLeod's recurring focus on hands [...] connects his men and women to the natural order. By doing so he reclaims an ancient relationship that today is urged by many, from feminists, to native healers, to environmentalists" (148). 77 escapees from tradition, extensions of the masculine, or in one prominent instance, as images of natural femininity.

Though expected to be domestic, the traditional women of the Folk are likewise forced into the unrealistic and paradoxical characterization of "virginal but accessible"

(McKay 263). Such is the portrait of Agnes MacPhedran2 in MacLeod's "Island." In this story, Agnes' family inhabits "MacPhedran's Island" off Cape Breton and for generations the responsibility for the operation and maintenance of the Island's lighthouse has been their own. They live in relative isolation, save for the fishermen who dwell in the sea shanties during the fishing season. The youthful Agnes is a paradigmatic example of Folk femininity; she is both domestic and sexually available. At seventeen she falls in love with a young fisherman who comes to the island, and, in a definitive example of Folk domesticity, first views him from the kitchen window while "drying the dishes for her mother" (378). Agnes' characterization as an embodiment of Folk femininity is mitigated by the fact that she accepts the responsibilities as lighthouse keeper as she gets older.

This, however, is necessitated by the decline in her father's health and the desire amongst her extended family to maintain the "tradition" of a MacPhedran operating the lighthouse

(396). Her undertaking of 'masculine' labour, then, is not indicative of a deterioration of established gender roles, but rather an insistence on the maintenance of tradition. Though

Agnes accepts a job customarily performed by the men in her family, there is not a similar transcendence of prevailing gender roles for men. Men in the narrative are fisherfolk who McKay posits are "special bearers of traditional gender ideals" (262) and who sustain the gender binary and authenticate ideal Folk masculine potency. The explicit masculinity of fishing is demonstrated when Agnes explores the abandoned

2Creelman sees Agnes MacPhedran as an exception to MacLeod's typical patriarchal scripts, but this work, occurring on the level of myth in its stereotypical connection of woman to nature and sex is, arguably, not much of a deviation. 78 fishing shanties after a lobster season to discover discarded belongings and traces of the fishermen, causing her to feel as though "she were walking through the masculine remnants of an abandoned and vanished civilization" (398). "Island" additionally demonstrates the "sexual freedom" of the Folk, who, because of their proximity to nature, are more in tune with their sexuality and are less sexually inhibited than urban dwellers

(McKay 258). This is apparent when Agnes, older and living alone on the Island, acts out what appears to be a mythic fertility rite with four fishermen catching mackerel offshore.

In this section of the story, Agnes draws the men towards a mystical school of "boiling, bubbling mackerel" (400) with a gesture compared to a sexual invitation: "a beckoning gesture, as they might understand it" (399). As the men hauled the fish onboard, they

"filled the bottom of the boat and began to rise in a blue-green, flopping mass to the level of the men's knees. And then they were gone" (400). The sexualized "frenzy" (400) of the catch merges with the "frenzy" (401) of the fishermen's sexual encounter with Agnes, in an image evoking primal, elemental fertility full of substances and passion—"The clothes of the men were sprinkled with blackening clots of blood and the golden spawn of the female fish and the milky white semen of the male" (401). The Folk are depicted as nearly identical to the spirit of the sea, its nature, stereotypically gendered, and embodied in the female figure of Agnes.

The fixed gender binary expected of the Folk limits the roles of women within

MacLeod's texts, ostracizing those who reject conventional gender roles for more fluid interpretations of femininity. In "The Boat" the mother privileges the culture and labour intrinsic to her Gaelic identity and Cape Breton community. Though many of MacLeod's texts feature mining as the central industry employing his protagonists (which McKay asserts is not authentic within the Folk paradigm), in correspondence to Folk ideology, 79 fishing takes precedent within "The Boat." The fisherfolk, McKay posits, maintain their closeness with nature through the individualist practice of fishing and thus remain uncontaminated by modern society. The unyielding pressure to maintain regional traditions and preserve community is so profound that characters are defined by their limited agency to reject it, and those that migrate off Cape Breton experience cultural alienation and disapproval from older generations. In "The Boat" the mother condemns her daughters for resisting traditional gender roles and objects to their jobs waiting tables at a local restaurant "run by a big American concern from Boston," not of her "people"

(10). Her daughters, "tired of darning socks" and the confines of domesticity, migrate

"one by one" to large cities, and much to their mother's displeasure "none married a fisherman" (16). Thus, in abandoning their Gaelic culture, these women are rejected by their mother who remains faithful to her local identity. Her refusal to accept her children's distant urban lifestyle not only leads to her son's urban alienation, but also isolates her daughters and grandchildren. While the mother's actions appear extreme, and may not be fully endorsed by MacLeod, her passion for Cape Breton and its sense of tradition aligns with MacLeod's overarching nostalgic tone. Whether individual protagonists deserve the guilt they feel for their separation from home is in some ways beside the point. The protagonist of No Great Mischief, for example, has not done anything wrong, but he is trapped in foreign values so that he is now connected to the perils of modernity. I would argue that in the larger struggle animating No Great Mischief and Island as a whole—between modernity and tradition, urban life and the region—the mother's actions and passions most likely appear as essentially right, at least within the framework of MacLeod's central project of cultural recovery. 80

While powerful women exist in MacLeod's texts, more predominantly they are presented as homogenous and subordinate to men, making the trope of woman's inferiority to man recurrent in his work. This gender binary emerges in part due to the fact that resource industries are traditionally monopolized by men. Typifying the binate nature of gender roles in relation to resource labour is a comment made by the grandfather in "The Return." He criticizes Angus' profession as a lawyer in Montreal, and the newfound power of women within urban centers, when stating "I guess in some ways it is a good thing that we do not all go to school. I could never see myself being owned by my woman's family" (85). He and his wife disapprove not only of Angus' profession, but, since he is in a partnership with his father-in-law, also of the authority his wife and his wife's family possess. This partnership displaces Angus' authority over the traditionally masculine domain of labour and his position as head of household, contrasting the separate sphere ideology typical of the Folk.

David Creelman agues that, while MacLeod's stories are dominated by male protagonists, several female characters in his literary corpus mature into "complex figures" ("Strike" 89), citing James' grandmother from "The Vastness of The Dark" and the mother from "The Boat" as examples of female resilience. The strength of James' grandmother proceeds from her resistance to mining, emblematic in her encouragement of her sons to seek alternative employment. In doing so, she resists her husband's request to have his children work alongside him in the mines. Though the grandmother demonstrates great obstinacy in "The Vastness Of The Dark," the mother in "The Boat" is the most enduring and assertive female character in MacLeod's canon. She is "tall and dark and powerfully energetic.. .and of the sea, as were all of her people, and her horizons were the very literal ones she scanned with her dark and fearless eyes" (5-6). 81

However, despite her personal strength, she nonetheless upholds debilitating traditional

Folk values, and unlike the grandmother from "The Vastness of the Dark" uses her energy in an effort to fortify traditional labour and culture within her family.

James' grandmother and the mother from "The Boat" demonstrate personal strength, rather than passive subservience to patriarchy. However, they are drawn from the first two narratives within MacLeod's corpus which, as Creelman notes, becomes increasingly nostalgic in the later works. Rather, many female characters in MacLeod's corpus

"reinforce the confining gender roles of the patriarchal perspective" (Creelman "Strike"

88). Therefore, depictions of feminine strength are limited, and the passivity of women takes precedence. Creelman asserts that "the patriarchal assumptions that govern the fictional community have been inscribed into the ideological and structural center of the story, and into the center of the collection itself ("Strike" 89). However, the gender hierarchy in MacLeod's work is reflected historically within the post war era that provides the milieu for his narratives. The textual effacement of women is not a reflection of misogynistic sentiments on MacLeod's part, I believe; rather, his patriarchal focus and the absence of female protagonists are a reflection of the resource labour featured in his narratives. While MacLeod is preoccupied with the male sphere, the labour he depicts is historically masculine, so it follows that his narratives are constructed around male protagonists. Though MacLeod's portrayal of gender promotes separate spheres and a hierarchy between the sexes, these roles were not atypical for the period in which

MacLeod's texts are set.

As such, solidarity is created by the maintenance of a Folk identity and this includes subscribing to rigid gender stereotyping. However, these same stereotypes function deterministically to restrict MacLeod's regional inhabitants. By popularizing 82 homogeneous representations of masculinity and femininity, urban cultural producers of the Folk inadvertently celebrate nostalgic images of a family life to which they do not belong and which are not compatible with modern society (McKay 252). McKay cites folklorists Helen Creighton and Mary Black as examples of cultural producers promoting gender stereotypes which they themselves do not maintain. A similar claim can be made against MacLeod, who has worked within various resource sectors in Cape Breton, but as a retired English professor and celebrated novelist, is recognizably a member of the upwardly-mobile bourgeoisie rather than the regional Folk of his fiction. However,

MacLeod's penchant for romanticizing his portrayal of Cape Breton is not atypical.

According to McKay "Nova Scotia was all the more a land of Innocence and happy childhoods for those who had left. Wistful nostalgia for a lost youth was sharpened among Maritime exiles by the experience of outmigration" (263). Though MacLeod's nostalgic narratives do not always construct rigid gender stereotyping for women, more often, his pre-modern antiquated notions of sexuality and gender delimit women's experiences and render anything not categorically compliant with the Folk paradigm as non-normative.

But MacLeod's texts are too sophisticated to be contained within the essences that appeal to him (i.e. genetics, language, music, names, connections to nature, etc.)

Complicating matters is his repeated self-reflexive qualifying of facts, memory and history; there are the flirtations with essentialized identity, such as the multiple characters bearing the same name (Alexander MacDonald), a move which almost mirrors capitalism's vision of workers as interchangeable and replaceable. After the death of one of many Alexander MacDonalds in No Great Mischief, a manager at the mine responds with, '"It was only one man [...] The rest of you are still able to work. The job has to go 83 forward'" (121). But countering his own essentialist tendencies, MacLeod undoes the signifier's absolute connection with the body, having the American Alexander

MacDonald, as previously demonstrated, betray both class solidarity and his own clan by stealing from the French miners and disappearing into the night. In this case the identity provided by the name and genetics functions as a veil, masking American Alexander's flawed character.

More significant than MacLeod's often tepid critiques of identity is his attempt to provide a cognitive map of time. While his desire for origins would still time, his narrative practices invite the reader to think historically. Just as one needs a cognitive map of the city in order to orient oneself in space (Jameson "Cognitive Mapping" 282-

83), MacLeod's texts suggest both that subjectivity is constituted by historical contexts and that in order to make sense of life one needs to track the complex formative historical forces that have shaped one. Against the 'eternal present' of the postmodern paradigm,

MacLeod thinks of subjectivity and community through highly particular events (the cause and effect of Calum's impacted tooth and the narrator's becoming an orthodontist in No Great Mischief); family and clan genealogy (the extended explanations of the clan's founder, Calum Ruadh, and the two grandfathers in No Great Mischief); large historical events (Highland emigration; the impact of the Battle on the Plains of Abraham on the present); epochal juxtapositions (traditional modes of logging versus contemporary clear-cutting; traditional community of the clan versus the 'monadic' postmodern subject embodied in the narrator's attitude toward the middle-class in No Great Mischief). These historical events are not distant, but resonate through self and community in the present context—"The Calum Ruadh who seems so present in thought and conversation in 84 today's Toronto was, as I mentioned earlier, my great-great-great-grandfather. And he came from Scotland's Moidart to the New World in 1779" (No Great Mischief 19-20).

In order to get out of the illusion of the eternal, fragmentary present, MacLeod, his characters, and the reader are invited to create a context and internalize a cognitive map of time:

Houses and their people, like those of the neighbouring towns and villages, were

the result of Ireland's discontent and Scotland's Clearances and America's War of

Independence. Impulsive, emotional Catholic Celts who could not bear to live

with England and shrewd, determined Protestant Puritans who, in the years after

1776, could not bear to live without. ("The Boat" 4)

Such examples permeate all of MacLeod's texts, punctuating events, creating an 'outside' to the given moment and allowing a subject to see him or herself in the process of formation, coordinating where he or she stands in the social order in terms of language, class, culture, and modes of production. The message seems to be that each person must develop a historical sense or simply wander aimlessly into the service of global capitalism. Building his texts out of historical, contextualizing elements, MacLeod challenges his own impulse towards fixity.

One can see in MacLeod's work a deep sensitivity to the way symbols, objects, and events shape consciousness and cultural clan identity. For him the world is, rightly, seen as a contest between sign systems—both urban and traditional. Ultimately, MacLeod's construction of clan identity involves a tendency toward the romantic and essential, thereby subscribing to many facets characteristic of the Folk ideology. Though this

Gaelic identity provides much cohesion for its practitioners against the oppression of a larger, urban-defined national society, it deterministically marginalizes his protagonists 85 from the very center they sought to consolidate against, and often leads to the alienation of those who are outside of its trajectory because of outmigration or because of generational differences. This renders the construction of identity fundamentally ambivalent in MacLeod's texts. However, MacLeod's strategy of creating a material context beyond the self and against capitalism is to be applauded. The difficulties arise when the narrative he constructs becomes debilitatingly binary and reactionary, leaving little room for emergent identities and therefore restrictive of the agencies of regional characters. 86

Chapter Three

For MacLeod, Cape Breton identity emerges from a shared Gaelic culture which draws on a romantic narrative of the Scottish diaspora. Gaelic heritage provides both collective identity and solidarity as his protagonists face pressure to conform to mainstream urban culture. This productively imparts a rich identity steeped in history and tradition; however, MacLeod's nostalgic version of Scottish cultural identity risks entrapping his protagonists in a search for origins. The desire to anchor the present to a single historical narrative risks impeding emergent identities and fails to address the complexities of iate capitalist' culture. Such cultural identity is not, however, the sole means of identification for the regional characters within MacLeod's corpus. His concept of labour and the working class, which is intertwined with the cultural formations already discussed, plays a large part in his sense of collective identity. In fact, Janice Kulyk

Keefer suggests that No Great Mischief 'is an "elegy" to labour, essential to his vision;

"The elegy is sung," she writes, "not just for a brother, and not even for a heroic miner, but for a form of labour, an ethic and an aesthetic of work which has vanished, and with it, the values and meanings that formed the very identity of the clan Chalum Ruaidh" 87

(Keefer 79). Labour does (sometimes problematically) appear as elegy, and (sometimes, more subtly) it offers a promise of Utopian change. Labour, in all its manifestations, provides an important entry point into MacLeod's analysis of modern culture. Just as

MacLeod's exploration of history is complex, offering on the one hand nostalgic narratives and on the other hand the possibility of radical forms that transcend such rigidity, his depictions of labourers and labour processes offer a perceptive image of how places and communities produce meaning and how men in particular find identity and agency. The way he focuses on labour, formally, is potentially as progressive as his focus on history, providing ways for examining the whole—at both the level of form and content; but as with his historical narratives, his discourse on labour often ends up reinforcing traditional binaries: the inauthentic professionals of urban centers, namely

Toronto, Calgary and Montreal, juxtaposed with the authentic labourers of Cape Breton.

The insistence on these binaries sustains the center-periphery disparity and undermines any new ways of addressing the future. MacLeod's sense of working-class consciousness opens up a powerful way of registering the social whole and complements the Utopian aspects of his sense of history. But as the possibilities of history are undercut by a nostalgic perspective, MacLeod's heightened sense of working-class consciousness is limited by its own elements of nostalgia emphasising loss, clannishness, a fixation on the irreducibility of work, and a refusal to think beyond the clan. Significantly, in sections of

No Great Mischief ami some of the short stories, most notably "The Closing Down of

Summer," MacLeod complicates such constrictions to suggest the Utopian possibilities of a labouring class-consciousness to expand the limits of the clan. 88

As Chapter Two suggests, a 'cognitive map' of time is tied to the possibility of agency. Similarly, a 'cognitive map' of place is necessary to trace out the lived environment: how it is produced and made meaningful through connection to work places, labourers and their families, and geography. While MacLeod's nostalgic impulses sometimes diminish his work from the perspective of a labour, Marxist or feminist critic, his stress on situating oneself in the dynamics of place is necessary for a larger vision of the world—one that would allow for more effective participation. Jameson points out that the postmodern world has lost a sense of external reference points as nature and pre capitalist modes of production disappear. Postmodernism for Jameson is defined by:

the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary

social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past,

has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates

traditions of the kind which all earlier social information have had, in one way or

another, to preserve. (The Cultural Turn 20)

MacLeod's romantic narrative of the Scottish diaspora resists postmodern fragmentation, as does his emphasis on traditional work as a foundation of Cape Breton culture.

The traditional life of Cape Breton in MacLeod's fiction occupies an unstable position as old ways are eroded by 'late capitalism' and the decline of traditional resource industries (mining, fishing, and, to a lesser extent, farming). MacLeod's narrative of the

Scottish diaspora includes images of Cape Breton and deep ties to the land, but without mining, fishing, and agriculture the basis of the culture is largely lost. David Creelman underscores how writers like Alden Nowlan and MacLeod occupy a unique relationship to traditional labour. Nowlan and MacLeod, he points out, "produced most of their fiction 89 after the Maritime region itself was reshaped by the wave of economic reforms in the late

1960s ("Setting" 111). Having experienced in their childhoods the harsh yet vital traditional culture, both find it transformed—via "federal-provincial equalization payments, government assistant programs, and a new focus on regional disparities"

(111)—into an example of the modern welfare state. From this pivotal historical position, in a landscape stripped of its old masculine culture by a new culture defined by social services, the intrusion of modern education, health services, and government assistance programs, MacLeod no doubt feels an urgency to recover a lost sense of labour and the communal solidarity such work produced. This position, inhabiting this side of the welfare state, also suggests his deep opposition to all things "modernistic1." MacLeod's texts, most strikingly No Great Mischief, "The Closing Down of Summer," and "The

Vastness of the Dark," want to recover the meaning of that resource work and the way it produces a whole way of existing and seeing. No wonder then that he often attempts to draw sharp distinctions between a consciousness tied to urban forms of work and a consciousness tied to traditional labour. The latter counters the disorienting sense of historical amnesia spread across modern and traditional societies alike. Significantly,

MacLeod's delineation of working-class consciousness alerts the reader to formal processes of recovery, and fosters an awareness of unseen conditions shaping perception of place.

'Creelman, while seeing MacLeod's later works as lapsing into nostalgia at times, finds the early stories existential in tone {Setting 145), frankly addressing the individual's harsh realities while promoting a liberal ideology. The later stories and novel, by contrast, folding under the perceived hopelessness of modernity, resort to a form of conservatism, underwritten in part by mystical fantasies {Setting 136) of a connection to the past. I would argue though that though the early stories, while revolving around individual protagonists, nevertheless foreground a collective discourse open to a socialist (non-liberal) reading. 90

To gain a deeper understanding of their contexts, many of MacLeod's characters struggle to attribute structuring meaning to historical events and dates such as the battle of the Plains of Abraham and the date of the original clan member's journey to Nova

Scotia in No Great Mischief. In the historical void created by 'late capitalism,' such attention to "historical reconstruction," as Jameson calls it, is potentially restorative and radical: "the positing of global characterizations and hypotheses, the abstraction from the

'blooming, buzzing confusion' of immediacy, was always a radical intervention in the here-and-now and the promise of resistance to its blind fatalities" (The Cultural Turn 35).

Connected to MacLeod's 'abstraction' of historical narrative is his concern with the history and production of place, and how the region is built through physical labour.

Labour—in particular mining (No Great Mischief, "The Vastness of the Dark," "The

Closing Down of Summer"), but also fishing ("The Boat," "Vision") and farming

("Second Spring," "In the Fall")—and its relation to the region permeate all of

MacLeod's stories, binding characters to the land and creating a specific form of holistic consciousness, opposed to the fragmentation of urban consciousness.

"The Vastness of the Dark" offers a sharp contrast of the two oppositional modes of consciousness, one based on modern, urban forms of work and one based on traditional modes of production. Each produces its own sense of place, self, and community, although the modern mode is more about the negation of place and community, privileging the self over the depth of relationships and environment. "The Vastness of the

Dark" is a complex story tracing a young man's attempt to divest himself of his family and his roots in Cape Breton working-class culture. Ironically, as the protagonist, James, makes his way farther from his home, coming into contact with a crass Ontario salesman, 91 he grows conscious of the sacrifices of the labouring class, specifically the miners, and begins to identify with his region. The story provides a strong example of MacLeod's inclination to capture the big picture: the fabric of tradition, the fragmenting processes of capital, and where the two intersect. He repeatedly imagines the narrator formally organizing his world: "On the twenty-eighth day of June, 1960, which is the planned day of my deliverance, I awake at exactly six A.M." (26). MacLeod also invokes various qualities of the activity of memory: "I can see very vividly in my mind how he must be"

(26); "As long as I can remember he has finished dressing while walking" (27); "I think of when I lay on my stomach in the underground for the first time" (34); "And I remember November 1956" (51); "And I remember again the cars before our house"

(53). Here the narrator compiles the particularity of his lived experience and shapes it into a proto-narrative form, beginning to place himself within events and events within a larger vision of regional history. He dramatizes the development of what Jameson calls

'historical faculty.' The theme of the story suggests that such contextualizing is an important way of thinking not easily achieved.

In the beginning, the narrator both marks and mocks his eighteenth birthday—"such a momentous day" (26)—as he plans an escape from the confines of his home and rural

Cape Breton community. Despite the initial importance of that most individual of dates and his desire to remove himself from a narrow sense of his birth place, he is continually brought back to broader contexts of time, place and his working-class culture. Fixed by a larger system of dates and places, the narrator contextualizes the limited view of his bedroom and the occasion of his birth date as the story progresses. In MacLeod's texts, meaningful, formative memories are often not at the center of consciousness; rather, 92 inscriptions of events seem to exist in the unconscious or are even embedded in the culture and in the very grain of the region, waiting to be discovered or rediscovered:

And I remember November 1956: the old cars, mud splattered by the land and

rusted by the moisture of the sea, parked outside our house with their motors

running. Waiting for the all-night journey to Springhill which seemed to me then,

in my fourteenth year, so very far away and more a name than even a place. (51,

my emphasis)

"Springhill" is a place, an event, and a way of life shaping his experience, but it only comes into play consciously to reorganize his priorities and values, as he reaches the age of eighteen and attempts to sever his ties with the culture of rural Cape Breton. It is worth pointing out that some of MacLeod's most profound constructions of class consciousness occur through first-person narrative voices uprooted and alienated from their traditional working world. This includes James from "The Vastness of the Dark," the now

Midwestern voices of "The Boat," "The Lost Salt Gift of Blood," and the orthodontist from No Great Mischief But whether the first-person account comes from a current traditional worker such as the miner of "The Closing Down of Summer," a conflicted urban professional such as the orthodontist of No Great Mischief or the migrating young man from "The Vastness of the Dark," what generates the heightened sense of working- class culture is an original sense of connection to the working world and a sense of crisis demanding a recovery of the meaning of traditional reality. Remembering "Springhill," the narrator creates a larger context which roots him deeper in his region and the labour intrinsic to both him and his community. "Springhill" is a sign of the way work, community and the region come together in the formation of collective and individual 93 identity. Labour, in this context, resists the abstracting processes of capitalism. It is fixed to a particular area, so that the intersection of region and industry helps create MacLeod's version of Nova Scotian identity.

These locations have gravity in MacLeod's texts: allusions to historical places and events revolving around labour belong to the unfolding landscape of the story and to a manifestation of a referential world available to the reader. Just as characters find themselves creating 'cognitive maps' of both socio-economic and geographic regions, in a parallel way the reader is encouraged to look outside the text to actual historical landmarks. "Springhill" is a particularly resonant example that evokes a history of hardship, poverty, and two devastating mine disasters, one in 1956 leaving thirty-nine men dead, and another in 1958 leaving seventy-four dead. Here, as elsewhere, MacLeod foregrounds the elements that go into giving places shape and meaning. His texts are full of gestures which disrupt the narrative flow and point to a referential world. On his way out of town, the narrator's grandmother shows him an "ancient sugar bowl" and its

"Mementoes and messages from places that I so young and my grandmother so old have never seen" (43). These records document and help bring to consciousness an image of family, labour, capitalism, and the specificity of place:

Within it there are dusty picture postcards, some faded yellow payslips which

seem ready to disintegrate at the touch, and two yellowed letters tied together with

a shoelace. The location on the payslips and on the postcards leap at me across a

gulf of dust and years: Springhill, Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, Yellowknife, Britannia

Beach, Butte, Virginia City, Escanaba, Sudbury, Whitehorse, Drumheller, Harlan,

Ky., Elkins, W. Va., Fernie, B.C., Trinidad, Colo.—coal and gold, copper and 94

lead, gold and iron, nickel and gold and coal. East and West and North and South.

(43)

The impressive list of the mines worked by the narrator's family, the circulation of money, and the resources taken from the earth, is a lesson for James, providing valuable material for his growing historical consciousness. But as MacLeod meticulously underscores the process of developing a new consciousness, the lesson seems directed beyond the text to the reader: a heightened understanding of class demands a dialectical engagement with history, placing the particular into larger contexts. James understands himself through an awareness of specific historical situations, in this case Cape Breton's relationship to capitalism, and the construction of meaning through detailed contextualization.

In MacLeod's texts, the greater meaning of a place can easily be missed by characters in an increasingly modernized environment; binding threads could vanish as family connections are broken, work and workers disappear, and people are removed from their original communities; meaning only re-emerges through a holistic understanding. He makes this point throughout his canon but again most emphatically in "The Vastness of the Dark," with his coming-of-age protagonist:

And I am overwhelmed now by the awfulness of oversimplification. For I realize

that not only have I been guilty of it through this long burning day but also

through most of my yet-young life and it is only now that I am doubly its victim

that I begin vaguely to understand. For I had somehow thought that "going away"

was but a physical thing. And that it had only to do with labels like the silly

"Vancouver" that I had glibly rolled off my tongue; or with the crossing of bodies 95

of water or with boundaries or borders. And because my father told me I was

"free" I had foolishly felt that it was really so. (55-56)

James discovers that places and people are not disconnected physical things comparable to commodities. Not so much a matter of moving away, freedom, and in turn, agency is connected to registering the histories and relationships that give a place meaning. In other words, for MacLeod, authentic freedom is not a 'freedom from,' but a greater involvement in one's irreducible contexts, in this case a working-class culture.

This is an important distinction in ways of thinking illustrated in many of MacLeod's texts. On the one hand there is the capitalist mode of experience in which all aspects of life—people, buildings, places, objects, relationships—are subject to potential exchange.

As Gary Day points out in his study of literature and class, capitalist consciousness, flourishing on the surface of life, reflects practises in which labour as the real engine of society and value is repressed. The complexity of work and how it shapes and is shaped by culture is essential to MacLeod's writing. This emphasis on capitalist processes and differing ways of perceiving rather than focusing on the individual diverges from the existentialist-liberal readings of the early stories proposed by Francis Berces and David

Creelman. For Creelman, following Berces, MacLeod emphasizes James's existential choice, even if that choice is no more than the bleak capacity to "submit to the cultural practices that constitute his past" (Creelman Setting 131). MacLeod's texts, even an early story like "The Vastness of the Dark," are open to something approaching a socialist reading. MacLeod specifically challenges such a capitalist world where "money does not differentiate between different kinds of labour but views the variety of physical and mental work purely in terms of time" (Day 12). Capitalist consciousness ignores the 96 particular in favour of an abstract measure of exchange. Money represents the ultimate abstraction of human experience, as Day demonstrates throughout Class, and increasingly becomes a way of thinking:

Money provides a common measure by which commodities can be exchanged. It

does so by representing commodities not as they are but by what they have in

common in the human labour used to produce them. In order for money to

represent what commodities have in common, it must ignore what is individual

about them. (12)

Particular characteristics (of people, labour, places, and goods) are repressed in favour of abstract equivalences, epitomised by money.

By contrast, MacLeod's short stories, like "The Vastness of the Dark," explore the irreducible qualities of people, relationships, places and things: the complexity of the lived environment. Such explorations occur directly as a response to a world defined by abstract exchange values. The salesman of "The Vastness of the Dark" views women as exchangeable. But while having sex with a Springhill woman, he has his pleasure disrupted by the intrusion of her emotional history; the miners, the epitome of human commodification in Marxist theory, are with the invocation of "Springhill" given an irreducible aura, meaningfully bound to the region. "The Closing Down of Summer" similarly demonstrates an awareness of the translation of work into the exchange economy. In the story, the narrator, a miner, reflects upon the way his labour creates commodities: a "battery of appliances"—"Little about me or about my work is clean or orderly and I am always mildly amazed to find the earnings of violence and dirt in which

I make my living converted into such meticulous brightness" (191-92). Within this 97 context of exchange, the narrator insists upon the irreducible qualities of his work. He compares it to the experience of sex (197) and inimitable styles of sport or art. He thinks,

"I would like to explain somehow what it is like to be a gladiator" (198). He understands that his job, more of an art or science, has its own unique forms or languages and he wishes his children could see how "articulate" his labour is, "that they might appreciate the perfection of our drilling and the calculation of our angles" (199). This turns out to be impossible. The experience of being a labourer, the identity of the Cape Breton miner, somewhat problematically, has to be lived.

The culture of exchange contrasts with the miner's sense of inimitable work, the narrator of No Great Mischiefs feel for a lost heroic masculinity, and James' encounter with the complexities of "Springhill." Each narrator, in fact, develops or exhibits a

'historical faculty' defined by the ability to integrate the immediate perception and the larger structuring context. In contrast with these expanded readings of culture and heightened senses of class consciousness, middle- and upper-class urban workers, associated by MacLeod with the urban centers of power, tend to perceive only surface and spectacle. There is an exception though. Urban workers connected to traditional life like Alexander, the narrator of No Great Mischief, exhibit a conflicted position, being acutely aware of a lost past. This is far from a superficial frame of mind. The personification of the surface mentality emerges in "The Vastness of the Dark" with the appearance of a salesman of questionable character: "so much salary, so much commission plus other 'deals' on the side" (49). In his flashy car, branded with "Ontario license plates" (55), he picks up James hitchhiking as he attempts to escape Cape Breton.

An extreme example, the man from Ontario, inhibited from complex perceptions as his 98 vehicle glides over the surface of places, is preoccupied with money, sex, and his own chatter: "He goes on and on," James notes; "I have never listened to anyone like him before" (49). The narrator observes in the salesman a style of perception made superficial by its mindless speed, confidence, desire for instant gratification, and a reduction of everything to commodities. Essentially, he embodies a mechanical consciousness:

It is as if he knows that he knows everything and is on top of everything and he

seems never to have to hesitate nor stop nor run down nor even to think; as if he

were a jukebox fed from some mysterious source by an inexhaustible supply of

nickels, dimes, and quarters. (49)

In his haste to exploit, the salesman cannot see the meaning of the poverty he experiences. He remarks, "This here little province of Nova Scotia leads the country in illegitimacy. They don't give a damn" (51). In contrast, the narrator's growing capacity for contextualizing creates a more profound understanding of reality. This profundity depends on connecting surface geography, the meaning of the region, to the meaning embedded within: "The mention of the name Springhill and the realization that this is where I have come is more of a shock than I would ever have imagined. As if in spite of signposts and geography and knowing it was 'there,' I have never thought of it as being

'here'"(51).

Although the salesman is a stereotype, MacLeod exploits this 'type' to capture the

'late capitalist' production of a fragmentary, commodified subjectivity and solidify his center-periphery binary. The salesman is himself a commodity preoccupied with commodities and as such he possesses a cliched view of social life. Stepping into the car,

James risks succumbing to the limited subjectivity fixed to late capitalism. Inside the car, 99 watching those outside looking in "casually" (55), James feels trapped, temporarily experiencing himself as an isolated self:

For it is as if I am not part of their lives at all but am here only in a sort of

moveable red and glass showcase that has come for a while to their private

anguish-ridden streets and will soon roll on and leave them the same as before my

coming; part of a movement that passes through their lives but does not really

touch them. (55)

James counters the blinkered capitalist consciousness as he maps out connections: the person in the "anguish-ridden street," the sex-worker in the context of poverty and kinship relations (55), the place in relationship to its past and its socio-economic conditions, and the relationship of the geography to other settings such as the mines across North America. This understanding of labour and the production of his region allows him to insert himself, his perceptions and history, into a formative context.

Problematically, while the urban center offers a spiritually impoverished existence, the home region offers economic poverty as resource industries decline, eroding communal life. MacLeod's characters are caught in a bind that appears hopeless. In Chapter Two, I suggested that MacLeod left little room for agency within the narrow patriarchal forms of clan solidarity. Even in "The Vastness of the Dark," the narrator, in the end, has his emergent identity undermined by uncertainty. When asked where he is going he says, by the conclusion, "T don't know. I'll have to make up my mind'" (58). MacLeod never points to a new direction, nor does he give shape to an emergent identity or a way out of such rigid binaries of center/periphery, isolated urbanite/clannish Cape Bretoner, or capitalist/Folk. Nevertheless, MacLeod understands that labour must be a part of any 100 holistic account of social life. Such a complex understanding can hint at what a forward- looking agency might look like.

The holistic condition of consciousness, complementing his extensive historical sense of time, allows MacLeod to think globally. He juxtaposes the movement of Cape Breton workers with the dramatic flow of new migrant labourers from around the world working the fields in Ontario. He explores the relationship between the middle class and the working class and their vulnerability to global markets. He stresses the presence of potent forces shaping modern life and reinventing traditional cultures, forces including Canadian corporations, the market processes in Toronto and Japan, and so forth. Painting such a picture is an achievement in itself. As Day and Jameson point out, dealing with social wholes and class issues is often taboo in North American literature and culture.

Significantly, MacLeod progressively sketches out the possibility of a working-class consciousness, but often closes off the possibility of any change, dwelling instead on a lost past, maintaining patriarchal values, and undervaluing emergent identities.

Furthermore, barely a place opens up for women's subjectivity, traditional or modern.

In fact, MacLeod's image of the worker is simplified and idealized by the marginalization of women. His depiction of work parallels the "conventional vocabulary of masculinity" (260) discussed by McKay in his critique of the innocent image of the

Folk. "Where," asks McKay, "did this masculinisation of the Folk leave women?":

Innocence entailed a concept of natural gender roles. Women's natural role was in

the home. Although the actual conditions of the North Atlantic fishing economy

required many women not only attend to the household but also to prepare the fish

for market, in the imagined Nova Scotia of the Folk women were assigned only 101

the supporting roles of waiting for their hardy men and uncomplainingly attending

to their needs. (260)

The near absence of images of women working allows MacLeod to further create his own homogeneous idealization of the worker—one uncomplicated by the role of women.

They scarcely exist, except mythically, as seen in "Island," or in the background occupying conventional roles such as the mother and the disappearing daughters of "The

Boat," the wife of "The Closing Down of Summer" and the sister and grandmother in No

Great Mischief. Men who leave, including James of "The Vastness of the Dark," the neo-

Midwesterners of "The Boat," "The Lost Salt Gift of Blood" and the narrator of No Great

Mischief 'are not creating positive new traditions or values so much as losing old ones.

Newness is the target, but this creates a condition of stasis in MacLeod's overall outlook, leaving him open to the charge of essentializing Cape Breton identity.

No Great Mischief gives MacLeod's most extended exploration of labour and the tense interface between the center and periphery, the urban and rural, the middle class and the working class. It highlights the importance of working-class consciousness, the potential power of group solidarity, and working-class agency. The text depicts the possibility of an empowered working class capable of challenging corporate power, its laws and enforcers. But the novel also neutralizes some of these achievements, with its focus on the past and rejection of any kind of positive change. The narrator, Alexander

MacDonald, exemplifies MacLeod's depiction of the alienation felt by those who migrate from their rural origin. As an urban professional, Alexander occupies a painful position, inhabiting modernity but aware of his disconnection from tradition; educated and unburdened by hard physical labour, he is rendered an observer of his own past. His 102 profession as an orthodontist is not so much an achievement as a sign of loss, just as education tends be seen as a form of cultural contamination.

Alexander traces his movement from a marginal, but authentic, Cape Breton working- class clan to a privileged but alienated upper-middle-class position in Ontario.

Significantly, his loss of authenticity begins before he physically exits his home region to become an orthodontist in the center of power. After his parents tragically die on the

Atlantic ice, Alexander and his twin sister Catriona remain in Cape Breton with their grandparents, but unlike their older siblings, including Calum, they are sheltered from harsh physical labours and given a 'privileged' academic education. The twins' out- migration actually begins the moment they commence their education, before they physically leave the region, as 'book-learning' is the equivalent of a competing ideology.

MacLeod often deals with the importance of education in the construction of self, exploring, for example, the influence of literature on consciousness in "The Boat," and the musings on the absurdity of Cape Breton stock working as lawyers, etc. in "The

Closing Down of Summer." But here, for Alexander, education leads to a sophisticated, detached subject, alienated from his working-class roots, but always longing to return to what feels like his real home—his Ontario family is barely mentioned.

Alexander's detachment and alienation is in part an effect of his role as observer, appropriate for a first-person narrator. But MacLeod expertly exploits the distance inherent in such a narrative point of view, solidifying the center-periphery binary as he contrasts Alexander's middle-class office work with the muscular physicality of Calum: describing Calum's harsh rural childhood, his life as a miner, and his broken body at the end of his life. He also contrasts his own introspectiveness and uncertainty with Calum's 103 assertive life of action, and the uprooted busyness of Toronto with the earthy stability of working-class culture. He is not so much defined by his new world as by his distance from a traditional body, traditional work and is in a similar discomfited position as those big Cape Breton men now finding themselves in Toronto offices, discussed by the narrator of "The Closing Down of Summer." Alexander repeatedly documents the bodies of others—his patients, field workers, miners, his brothers—while his own corporeality remains stifled by his sedentary work (the exception, of course, is when he joins the collectivity of the miners for a time in his youth). However, his life is rooted in a tradition based on physical labour, and thus, this loss of a physical body remains fixed in his memory, a situation which constitutes much of the anguish in the novel. He has a double vision, incarnating the detached, hyper-reflectivity of the bourgeois subject and the remnants of the collective, labouring culture.

To have an authentic body means being connected to the labouring body, reinforcing the solidarity and close kinship ties of the clan—the communal body. Living in Southern

Ontario, in the all-absorbing shadow of Toronto, he has none of this. Toronto, the place he uncomfortably inhabits in his work, the center of capital, lacks consistency. The impermanence of the urban landscape no doubt propels his desire to reconnect with Cape

Breton, a place that offers stability in MacLeod's fictional world. The city seems caught in a busy, mindless placelessness, all of which might be seen as a perversion of the real labour, community, and tradition of Cape Breton:

Now in Toronto in the late September sun, I stand and hesitate in the country of

Queen Street West. Here beyond the expensive restaurants and the region of

towers, the battle between restoring and destroying goes on. "For Sale," say some 104

signs. "For Rent," announce others. The cranes with their wrecking balls are silent

but poised, surrounded by the mounds of rubble which they have recently erected.

(58)

Amidst this state of perpetual transition, Alexander finds himself working in a profession that reflects a similar ephemeral quality. MacLeod emphasises Alexander's

'urban' professional work with inessential cosmetic cases. While he must have more serious patients, this emphasis reminds the reader that the potentially positive aspects of modernity remain in the background of the text, reinforcing a binary between the good rural world and the superficial urban world. As an orthodontist, he reconfigures facial structures to enhance a superficial, physical beauty. Though the origin of his choice of profession is positive—he witnessed Calum performing primitive dental surgery on himself—he is uncomfortably aware that his profession is fuelled by superficial appearances. His work serves as an archetype of the inauthentic labour of the city compared to authentic working-class labour. If the salesman from "The Vastness of the

Dark" translates complex culture into pure surface, the orthodontist abets patients' false desires, "that I might give them what they want and think they need" (81). He makes changes too often directed only to surface, transitory 'beauty' by changing "their jawlines so that they might look more like current pop stars" (82). Here, as elsewhere, MacLeod underscores the superficiality and misconstrued desires of the middle and upper middle classes: "Sometimes they bring pictures of what they would hope to be along with them.

Shyly they bring pictures forth from within their purses or from inside pockets of their expensive jackets" (82). By rejecting their genetic background to look like stars rather 105 than their parents and grandparents, these patients contrast the more serious, authentic labouring body found in Cape Breton.

MacLeod's urban world, and often those who inhabit it, are characterised by appearance, money, and the absence of historical consciousness. For example, at an orthodontists' conference in Texas, the narrator's desire for a more complex understanding of politics, identity, and economics emerges as he discusses the identity of the Ukraine with an American colleague. The Texan is in many ways as stereotypical as the Ontario salesman of "The Vastness of the Dark." A perfect foil for the protagonist, he thinks only of money—"you've got to go where the money is" (59)—expresses simplistic

Cold War attitudes towards socialism—"I hear the Communists are taking over the medical system in Canada" (59)—and embodies a disconnection from his personal history—"Who cares? It's all in the past" (60). For the unimaginative American,

Ukrainians do not exist or are simply Russians—he "looked it up on the map" (59).

Alexander by contrast, emphasising a finer sense of identity and the dynamic nature of representation, answers, "No, they're not Russians. The maps change" (59). Despite his insertion into the thick of modernity, Alexander's concern for history, global and local, sets him apart from urban characters like the Texan. Alexander is not exactly then what

Creelman calls him: "the text's most completely developed example of the modern man2"

(143). Similarly, Keefer's depiction of him is too harsh, asserting that "MacLeod insists upon the superficiality, triviality and even dishonesty of Alexander's life as defined by the so-called work he does; it possesses none of the value and usefulness of the time-

2Creelman sees in No Great Mischief such an extreme demonization (Setting 145) of the modern that it weakens the novel. He points out several instances: how the modern urban characters are "an inferior type of individual" (the Texan, the American cousin 143); Alexander's repeated derision of the 'modernistic" (Setting 144); and the sentiment that "modern families" are "materialistic, spiritually impoverished whiners, who cannot appreciate the wealth and opportunities afforded them" (Setting 145). 106 honoured ways out of poverty (Keefer 74). Alexander's position is too authentically conflicted and complex to be dishonest and superficial.

Coming to the urban center to work as an upper-middle-class professional, still bearing his Cape Breton history, but living out its antithesis, the narrator has a heightened consciousness of his receding working-class roots. Both cultures, capitalist and working- class Cape Breton, make claims on him. Existing in the hub of this ideological arena, he is well placed to register the tensions between tradition and modernity. While Alexander embodies a complex intersection of cultures, it is important to note that the players, over all, are rather rigidly defined. There is no question of what counts as good or bad. The traditional Cape Breton world is committed to communal values, the authentic labouring body, and a larger, more complex view of history, while the urban world is defined by the likes of the Texan, the Ontario Salesman from "The Vastness of the Dark" and disconnected tourists such as those from "The Boat." In the same negative vein, the urban centers are also places where traditional people are repeatedly represented losing their true selves. Examples include No Great Mischief, "The Boat" and "The Closing Down of

Summer." It is not necessarily problematic that MacLeod explores the effects of modernity on urban subjectivity. However, the dearth of complexity among urbanites is troubling. Limiting urban subjectivities and avoiding descriptions of urban communities such as neighbourhood societies, churches, professional organizations, worker organizations, political affiliations, including women's associations, etc., keeps his overall vision trapped in a rigid binary between holistic authentic Cape Bretoner and shallow city dweller, rather than creating points of communication that might challenge the homogenizing forces of capitalism. 107

Representations of urban professionals throughout MacLeod's oeuvre reveal conflicted subjectivities, isolation and displacement, and the loss of a more fulfilling masculine identity. When, in MacLeod's fictional world, authenticity exists only through physical labour in the resource industries, it implies the end of an authentic self for anyone who does not fit that paradigm. Whatever urban professionals do—orthodontists, lawyers, doctors, etc.— in MacLeod's texts, it is not represented as real labour. This sensibility is best illustrated in No Great Mischief 'when Alexander's grandfather exclaims, following his grandson's graduation from university, "Good for you, Hie bhig

Ruaidh. This means you will never have to work again" (107). Orthodontistry, and with it all professional urban employment, lacks the powerful sense of physicality and group solidarity associated with the exploited labourers, most notably the fishers and miners of rural Cape Breton. Alexander's grandfather is grateful his grandson will not have to spend his years "pulling the end of the bucksaw or pushing the boat off the Calum

Ruadh 's Point in freezing water" (107), but the subtler message is, from MacLeod's point of view, Alexander has given up more than he has gained.

Such professional work is typically associated with a form of spiritual and physical deterioration. Commenting on his lost Cape Breton accent, Catriona asks Alexander if he ever distinguishes between "the language of the heart and the language of the head"

(193). He responds: "in my world nothing like that matters. It is almost as if we are beyond language" (194). Establishing his professional 'world' as alien to cultural nuances, and going so far as to deem this world "beyond language," MacLeod paints a bleak portrait of urban professionalism. Catriona's response punctuates the negative attitude towards the urban professional: "Perhaps that is part of the reason why people in 108 your profession have such a high rate of suicide" (194). Her statement implies that without the rural cultural framework, experience is rendered disconnected and meaningless. Furthermore, this is not the only time that MacLeod connects suicide to the medical profession. In "The Return" the subject of suicide amongst the professional class is again broached. The character Alex, who moved from his Cape Breton community to become a doctor, commits suicide at twenty-seven. MacLeod provides little information about Alex, and in limiting this characterization, the focus is drawn to a suggested connection between leaving Cape Breton, becoming a medical professional and committing suicide.

Another consequence of the out-migration and professionalism is the cultural dilution it causes for those who leave. The disconnection from Gaelic culture caused by upward mobility appears in "The Return" with the character of Angus. Angus, a Montreal-based lawyer originally from Cape Breton, visits home after a decade away, accompanied by his wife and ten-year-old son, Alex. Though Angus looks forward to this holiday, tensions arise as he cannot blend into the culture so important to the identity of his Cape

Breton community. He discovers that his professional lifestyle alienates him from his family. Explaining to his mother why he did not pursue mining, the traditional employment in his family, he claims that both he and his brother Alex (the doctor who committed suicide) "wanted to go to college so we could be something else" (86). Angus' mother argues that her sons who chose education over the traditional labour of their community are "more lost than Andrew who is buried under tons of rock two miles beneath the sea and who never saw a college door" (87). In other words, out-migration and urban professionalism are an affront to the solidarity of the clan. This attitude 109 intensifies over time in MacLeod's fiction. In an early story like "The Boat" outside influences (books, work outside the region) appear as positive, if unlikely, desires. By the time of No Great Mischief, such influences almost always bear a negative gloss.

MacLeod's own position as a writer and a member of the middle class is much like that of the narrator of No Great Mischief. He has been largely cut off from his roots, explaining the intensified elegiac tone, but this loss has heightened his sense of what is being lost, allowing him to articulate Cape Breton values.

Only physical labour of the type associated with the traditional Cape Breton resource sector appears legitimate. These authentic labouring bodies are depicted vividly, presented as a badge of a superior class. Their presences are unique, tragic and powerful.

For example, MacLeod presents the powerful "big hands" and "calloused fingers" of

Alex's grandfather as he marks the boy with coal dust in "The Return" (93). The father of

"In The Fall" draws out the deep marks of work on the body: his "left hand is larger than his right and his arm is about three inches longer than normal.. .because he holds his stevedore's hook in his left hand when he works upon the waterfront" (99-100). These characters, despite the oppressive conditions, emerge with great physical and inner strength. This is again demonstrated by the grandfather of "The Vastness of the Dark," whose ancient, "misshapen fingers," "splayed and flattened too-broad thumb" nevertheless nearly crush his grandson's hand with a handshake (44-45). MacLeod is always conscious of the honour of the labouring class.

In No Great Mischiefthis awareness of the authentic labouring body is a central theme, revealing class divisions and the ambivalent position of the professional work of

Alexander MacDonald. Ultimately glorifying traditional work, and the clan solidarity it 110 promotes, MacLeod sets up his narrative with a harsh, unfavourable light on Calum, although he eventually embodies the heroic image of labour in the text. The initial appearance of Calum strongly suggests an alcoholic, bent on destroying himself. His damaged body is illustrated through the "gash above his left eyebrow" (8), "his huge and broken knuckles" (9), and his trembling hands, barely able to grasp his drink (10). He lives in a dreary apartment, is barely able to survive, and the reader is encouraged to identify with the narrator's detached attitude and what appears, at first, like his middle- class politeness, as he separates himself from his brother's disturbing alcoholism:

[Calum] offers me some of my own brandy.

"No," I say. No I don't think so. I'd rather not. I have a long drive ahead of me. I

have to go back." (13)

As Calum's history unfolds, it becomes evident that his condition results from work and prison, rather than an indiscreet alcoholism. Calum is actually an authentic character by MacLeod's standards, a heroic leader of elite Cape Breton miners, damaged by sacrifice and dangerous work. Although he appears helpless in the passages above, he symbolizes Cape Breton masculine identity and agency associated with the clan. He breaks the law and flouts its conventions, when, for the sake of his profound sense of honour, he strikes the policeman who interferes with clan members returning home for the funeral of a MacDonald killed in the mines (124), and, more significantly, when he represents himself after being charged with murder (259). In both cases he asserts a power and capacity for representation against the Law, a set of rules presumably designed by and for the centers of power. Calum effectively negotiates on his own terms with corporate representatives after the Ruadh clan returns to Cape Breton for a funeral. In this Ill section of the novel, Calum deals with the superintendent from Renco via telephone: '"I don't know," he said. "Maybe we'll just stay home for a while'" (130). Clearly a strong leader, Calum communicates with his men in a way that suggests a subtle, almost physical unity as he negotiates the deal. They come to agreement without words, just gestures and a sense of understanding:

As the superintendent spoke, my brother's eyes made contact with the eyes of

the others in the room. He raised his eyebrows in the form of a question as he held

the receiver in his hand. And he seemed imperceptibly to nod his head even as his

eyebrows asked the question.

As his eyes moved from face to face, his men nodded slightly. (130)

Calum does not act as an isolated subject. He is self-reliant and capable of an agency that transcends the dictates of the centers of power, but he draws his strength and is grounded through his lifelong solidarity with the assenting collective body, represented by the men in the room. The identification with the clan and the clan's identification with him, which forms and supports his values, allows him a more dynamic agency than that of the ambivalent narrator, conflicted as he is by the effects of urban life. Calum's potential for agency is again made evident when he and Alexander recall the death of their parents on the ice. The narrator says to Calum:

"If you had been with them you would have gone down too."

"I look at it differently," he said. "If I had been with them I might have saved

them." (209)

The narrator remains, like many of those characters leaving Cape Breton for urban life, a contemplative and passive subject. 112

Significantly, MacLeod's opposition between urban professionalism and rural resource labour emphasizes his use of dangerous physical labour as a focal point of masculine identity. He creates an iconic figure of leadership in many of the male characters of his narratives, epitomised by Calum and the narrator of "The Closing Down of Summer." He also underscores what is often forgotten in a culture which more commonly glorifies entrepreneurial 'risk': the actual risks and sacrifices made, for example, by Nova Scotian miners. If workplaces like "Springhill" produce a monument with which to identify, men of action like Calum add to the effect, providing powerful images of tradition, solidarity, and an affirmation of masculine identity in a world where such work is increasingly displaced by office jobs. This masculine ethic is mainly focused on the working class as tied to the Cape Breton clans, rather than other working- class groups. But conceivably other traditional people and clans would fall into

MacLeod's category of the authentic. The French clan depicted in No Great Mischief, for example, despite rivalries with the Cape Bretoners, exhibits honour, solidarity, and ties to tradition. These clans contrast dramatically with the images of the urban professional class occurring throughout MacLeod's texts. Between the working clan-class and the urban professional there seems to be no point of communication, creating a reified divide between tradition and modernity.

One may migrate to the center in search of inauthentic labour, but this means losing one's authentic body and soul, history, place, and community. Alternately, one may return to the heart of rural Cape Breton, grounded in a landscape, culture and community full of meaning, but living under oppressive conditions. For the most part, MacLeod seems unable to push his way out of this binary structure, repeatedly exhibiting nostalgic 113 images of a patriarchal culture. Nevertheless, MacLeod's construction of labour not only creates points of identification and solidarity, a myth of patriarchal agency, paralleling the mythic history of the Scottish diaspora, but also opens up holistic ways of depicting and challenging the processes of capitalism. He seems to ask how it is possible for labourers, even a workforce that is displaced from its roots like the miners of No Great

Mischief, to maintain their solidarity and identity despite inhabiting a territory designed to undermine it.

In No Great MischiefthorQ are a number of fronts from which modernity assails the solidarity of Cape Breton miners, and to a lesser degree, other clans. MacLeod places

Renco in the context of late capitalism, framed in a discourse of corporate ownership, global capitalism, the rationalisation of nature and people, and echoing the destitution of the modern city, as described by MacLeod (transitory, unstable, commodified). In the

Ontario mine, place is in the process of being denatured and rendered homogeneous, perception is reduced if not fragmented, and people are used as equipment. It is virtually a totalized environment, aggressively mechanized both inside and out:

In addition to the frenzied activity beneath the headframes of the region there was

also a great deal of action on the surface of the land itself. Roads were being

constructed and crews of labourers hacked and slashed at the forest and blasted at

the surface rock... Trucks groaned in and out with lumber and revolving cement

mixers. Hammers banged and saws of various kinds whined and shrieked...

Heavy earth-moving equipment rumbled constantly... (135-36)

Renco embodies an image of containment, as the men spend much of their time within its grip: behind the guarded and gated perimeter of the mine property, in their 114 bunkhouses, and inside the depths of the mine itself. As a further assault on tradition and community, such local mining operations are situated within the alienating and destabilizing context of globalization, effected by the components of a global marketplace. In addition to emphasizing their absence of control over the global marketplace, MacLeod places the miners' plight in the context of the struggles of dispossessed workers and oppressed people around the world. MacLeod evokes western imperialism in Vietnam and migrant field workers: "This land was not their own. Many of them are from the Caribbean and some are Mennonites from Mexico and some are

French Canadians from New Brunswick and Quebec" (1). He also explores the effects on the region of movements in Toronto or Japan, the sudden "promise of a contract to deliver 52 million pounds to the Japanese" brings the Cape Bretoners to Ontario (132), and concrete symbols of exchange on the mine sites themselves: "Financial transactions were conducted at the bank, which was in a hastily erected trailer, and the armoured cars clanked in, bringing the money to meet the various payrolls and also to take the money out" (136).

The mine appears as a part of the capitalist machinery, but also as a condensed version of many of late capitalism's overall effects. It functions both realistically and as an allegory of Tate capitalist' spaces. An important part of MacLeod's achievement in texts like No Great Mischief'an d "The Closing Down of Summer" is the way his narrators attend to the global system from the point of view of labour. Chapter Two argued that MacLeod's sensitivity to history helped ground traditional groups that might otherwise be swept away in the processes of 'late capitalism.' His story of the Scottish diaspora, meant to create a communal identity, tended to romanticize and distort the 115 historical record, but it nevertheless emphasizes the importance of thinking holistically.

The devotion to labour in MacLeod's writing unfolds with some similarities. It creates a heightened consciousness of the whole from a working-class clan perspective, solidifies clan identity, and emphasizes the need to see beyond globalization to launch a critique or create a more authentic culture. As demonstrated with the discussion of "The Vastness of the Dark," MacLeod suggests, as the young protagonist maps the larger picture of his world, that an expanded way of seeing emerges from a working-class tradition rather than from an urban, capitalist one. In this way, MacLeod reverses and mocks a powerful aspect of the Folk mythology articulated and critiqued by McKay. Within the Folk paradigm Nova Scotians embody "Innocence" (234), live close to the earth,

"picturesquely removed from the twentieth-century mainstream" (234). In MacLeod's work the traditional man is, by contrast, more attuned to the connections of global movements than the one-dimensional capitalist consciousness which ironically may be seen as a perverse form of innocence.

The men's unnatural jobs must be viewed against the backdrop of their connection to the natural landscape of Cape Breton. Exploring Renco, MacLeod details the homogeneous, disorienting effect of the mine: "Underground, beneath the surface of the earth, the weather was always the same. The sun never shone, and there was no reflection from the moon.... Besides the water, there were no natural sounds other than those of our own voices" (141). The workers are locked in a hallucinatory environment: "It was easy to lose track of time and space because life underground dictated, for us, what happened on the surface" (141). Nature provides a divide from the denatured, real and symbolic, disorienting spaces underground. One of the ways MacLeod creates a vantage point 116 external to the almost total environment is the way he vividly contrasts the far exterior

(those elements associated with uncommodified nature) and the lifeless interior— arguably an allegory of capitalism. Alexander, the narrator, repeatedly describes the recuperative shock to the body of the miners as they finish a shift. Their re-emergence to the outside, "always something of a surprise" (139), foregrounds the hold work has on their bodies. With lyrical language, MacLeod shows the men recovering: "the wind.. .blowing, causing the still-standing trees to moan and sigh as their moving limbs rubbed against each other" (141). MacLeod emphasises the physical and emotional jolt:

"We would shut off our miner's lamps almost in embarrassment" (141) as they leave behind their equipment and experience nature: "we blinked our eyes in an attempt to accustom ourselves to the fierceness of the sun" (141). In a lengthy description, only part of which follows, the narrator emphasises how the worker is marked by the capitalist machinery and how the natural body is then reborn, as they remove "hats," "oilskin rubber coats" and, finally, gloves:

We would take off our rubber gloves, sometimes pulling the fingers inside out to

give them some chance to dry, or else we would merely shake the water droplets

out of them.... Regardless of the hardness of our hands, our fingers were always

pink and crinkled from the heat and moisture of the gloves. They would appear

almost like someone else's fingers at first.... When they were exposed to the air

they would assume their normal colour and texture once again. (140-41)

Through descriptions of nature and the recovery of one's own skin, MacLeod delineates a territory apart from the equipment and operations of Renco. On the surface, they are reacquainted with an alternative consciousness of time and space contrasting the 117 rationalized time of the clock and the shift, as well as a renewed consciousness of the body.

The use of nature and the body in this context is effective. MacLeod creates a position outside of the 'denatured' realm of modernity. These alternatives point back to tradition:

"In the country of the clann Chalum Ruaidh the moon governed the weather and the planting of potatoes and the butchering of animals and, perhaps, the conception and birth of children" (140). Not that this undoes nature's value, but the gesture evokes the mythology of the Folk, which views Nova Scotians as closer to the earth and more associated with body than mind. MacLeod presents a complex attitude, refreshingly focusing on class—the moon is "the lamp of the poor" (139)—nature, and the worker's body, but also on a patriarchal, folk tradition, as when, after emerging from the mine, upon seeing a new moon, "Calum would bow or almost curtsy in the old way and repeat the verses taught to him3 by the old Calum Ruadh men of the country" (139). The return to nature and the implicit binary oppositions of city and country, center and periphery should be regarded with some wariness, even if an evocation of the natural has strategic power in this context.4 In MacLeod's return to a pre-modern geography there are obvious boundaries and distinct territories for each nationality. In the late capitalist world this is not so. Yet in the mine, it remains possible to envision sharp geographies: the division of tribes—French, Cape Breton, Irish, and Newfoundland—into separate bunkers. These

The song Calum sings, sometimes in English and sometimes in Gaelic, reinforces a connection to the traditional patriarchy: "In holy name of the Father One / And in the holy name of the Son / In holy name of the spirit Dove / The holy three of Mercy above" (139). 4Hardt and Weeks, in the Introduction to The Jameson Reader write "in certain respects the completion of modernization and the real subsumption of society and nature under capital means that the world has become more homogenous" (16 my emphasis). They add that the true historical consciousness vanishes as older modes of production are lost by which to compare with the present. ("Our historical faculty... used to be based on our recognition of different modes of production existing simultaneously" 16). 118 clan identities offer a source of pride and create resistance to homogenizing forces. Just as different ethnic groups use language to maintain their own values within the homogenizing system of capitalism, the miners create a unique set of purposes, suggesting that nothing is total. The narrator, Alexander MacDonald, observes that the corporate purposes are irrelevant for the clann Chalum Ruaidh: "We worked mainly for ourselves, our victories and losses calculated within our individual and collective minds, and our knowledge of individual and collective contributions a shared and basic knowledge" (146). This echoes an attitude expressed in "The Closing Down of Summer," where the narrator discusses an implicit, untranslatable knowledge of work and the highly personal—to the elite miner—satisfaction of the sportsman or "gladiator" (198). The short story also suggests idealistically, as with Calum's leverage over Renco, that the miners possess an unusual amount of autonomy when dealing with corporate power:

"Renco Development on Bay Street will wait for us. They will endure our summer on the beach and our lack of response to their seemingly urgent messages" (202). However realistic or fanciful this is, it expresses the need for identity and agency and articulates the hybrid interests that make up the world of the mine.

The world seen through the lens of labour, for MacLeod, maps out and affirms difference against homogenizing forces of late capitalism. His sense of difference also precludes a conventional universal class consciousness and revolution, where workers are united by a shared "social relation to production" (Day 6). MacLeod delineates a form of class conflict and consciousness, but his is not a Marxist understanding of class. As Day points out, Marx saw class structure objectively, "one class owned the means of production, while the other class owned nothing but their labour power, which they were 119 obliged to sell in order to survive" (Day 6). The have-nots became a class based on this relation to production. Marx's revolutionary working class, as a universal structuring category, is very much a part of modernity and supersedes traditional, pre-modern affiliations. MacLeod toys with the Marxist idea of a universal class based on the miners' relation to social production and their relations to pre-modern, traditional life. But in the end tradition is the dominant value. The Cape Breton miners of No Great Mischief'an d

"The Closing Down of Summer" challenge the exchange mentality, maintaining a sense of self and community by connecting to the past and sometimes to capitalist processes: as discussed earlier, Calum and the narrator of "The Closing Down of Summer" achieve agency, physical satisfaction and pride on the job. These are qualitative values eluding exchange values. In effect, difference and quality emerge within the sphere of capitalist processes. Hence, MacLeod underscores the tensions among traditions within the mines—rather than a universal class, which would subsume difference into the total style of 'late capitalism.'

Employing the metaphor of games also used in "The Closing Down of Summer," the narrator of No Great Mischief imagines the work force in terms of the different ethnic groups within the mines competing with each other as different teams. The "Irish and the

Newfoundlanders"; "the French Canadians"; and the Scots (147) are not assimilated into a unified group, but are divided by functions, expertise, shifts, cultural background, and, in some cases, language groups. Going into another group's bunker "would have been like going into the dressing room of the opposing team" (147). From a Marxist viewpoint, the competition and animosity among tribes is misdirected and self-defeating. A revolutionary working class based only on the social relation to production would enlarge 120 the team and change the rules of the game. The distinct cultures provide MacLeod with an outside vantage point and a dialectical relationship to capitalist culture.

When he considers the unity of workers, MacLeod's priority is culture and clan rather than class and economics. This point is reinforced during the union of various labouring groups through music and dance. This critical, impromptu event begins inconspicuously enough as Calum welcomes an outsider into the camp, James MacDonald, "a James Bay

Cree" (151). After bringing him in and feeding him, they discover that James is an exceptional fiddler and distant relative. The divisive metaphors of nation, ethnicity, sports, and competition give way, when he is invited to play, instigating moments of

"perfect unison" (153):

He was, as Calum said, "a wonderful player" and my brothers brought out their

own fiddle and took turns playing with him. And then out of the bunkhouses of

the French Canadians came their leader, Fern Picard, with some of his men. They

watched us for a moment from a distance, and returned with their own fiddles and

their spoons. Two of them brought harmonicas and one of them a button

harmonica. They sat on benches beside us, which we had never seen them do

before, and joined in the music. (152-53, my emphasis)

MacLeod provides an image of unity that transcends individual clans, substituting them temporarily for a universal clan culture, an origin underlying diverse ethnic backgrounds.

Here music functions as a universal language, making culture the essence of the labourer.

Later when the boss comes in and ends the party—'"What the hell are you guys doing?' said the superintendent as he unexpectedly appeared from around the corner of one of the bunkhouses" (155)—the absurdity and arbitrariness of his power before this collective of 121 men becomes apparent, even as they obey his edict. But it is culture, in this case language, dividing him from the clan members. When someone from the collective shouts, "Cousin agamfhein," the superintendent is taken aback, "He was a man who understood neither French nor Gaelic nor Cree and he did not like hearing phrases in languages he did not understand" (156).

When the various nations of labourers come together, bound by music, just beneath the surface of the different and divisive languages is a common understanding, as if

MacLeod were revealing a deeper language and a universal clan consciousness. Because of its importance as an exploration of clan consciousness, I quote this section at length:

The music dipped and soared and the leather-soled shoes snapped against the

reverberating wood. Sometimes a fiddler would announce the name of a tune and

the others would nod in recognition and join him in "The Crooked Stovepipe" or

"Deeside" or "Saint Anne's Reel," The Farmer's Daughter" or "Brandy

Canadien." At other times titles seemed lost or perhaps never known, although

the tunes themselves would be recognizable after the first few bars. "Ah yes," the

fiddlers would nod in recognition, "A ha," "Mais oui" and they would join one

another in the common fabric of the music. Gradually the different titles from the

different languages seemed to fade away almost entirely, and the music was

largely unannounced or identified merely as "la bastringue;" "an old hornpipe,"

"la guigue:" "a wedding reel"; "un reel sans nom." (154)

MacLeod shows the different groups out of their bunkers, engaged in a moment of collective recognition of an original, underlying cultural ground. He depicts the groups as a collective body rather than competing individuals or "teams." The text expresses the 122 desire for a unifying communal culture. This singularity of culture provides another venue from which to judge the exchange values of capitalism. Unlike the Marxist version of class which looks to the future and engages with modernity, the affirmation of a universal culture, like the lost tower of Babel, has its origins in a tenuous, if not irretrievable origin in the past. It is significant that while the various cultural groups maintain a connection with the original spirit evoked by the music, the character least connected to tradition recreates the social divide and hostility among the clans. The draft dodger, Alexander MacDonald, sharing an identical name and similar appearance (248) to the narrator, buys beer for the men and then slips back to camp to steal Fern Picard's money. The offence ends in a fight and Picard's death. Not surprising given MacLeod's focus on the past, No Great Mischief gravitates towards nostalgia, as the 'music' of the technological workplace destroys the messages of the emergent collective bond: "That night we went to work with the sound of music still in our ears.... Later the pounding of the steel drill bits into the stone contributed to our mild nausea and seemed to evoke a similar pounding within our heads" (156). In a return to the nostalgic mode, the narrator adds that "when we came to the surface in the morning the music seemed to have happened a long time ago" (157).

MacLeod's commitment to realism—to a detailed description of the harsh realities of mining life, the socio-economic threats to Cape Breton, and the global contexts affecting both—registers many of the complexities of the clash of tradition and modernity. One of the achievements of his writing, through the perspective of the labouring clan, is his ability to conceptualize a total context, defined in large part by the movement of globalization and the resistant, traditional region of Cape Breton. This tension, grounded 123 in working-class life, creates a larger way of seeing, comparable to the historical faculty discussed in Chapter Two. Although the problem of romantic idealization and essentialism arises, he complicates the nostalgic impulse. His extensive focus on mining, for example, with its connection to modern industry, is far more historically accurate5 than the producers of the Folk myth with their construction of the average Nova Scotian as "fisherfolk...the core of Innocence ruined by the calculations of the ruthless capitalists of the city" (McKay 242). While there is a quality of innocence to the Cape Breton miners, it is complicated by an emphasis on the capitalist context, class and clan division, intra-clan betrayal, and the possibility of a universal clan consciousness. Nevertheless,

MacLeod's exploration of labour exhibits a strong nostalgic turn.6 The world of tradition offers a powerful dialectical position against the encroachment of 'late capitalism.' But

MacLeod's image of tradition (locked in an ongoing struggle with modernity) tends to create an impasse. His binary thinking appears incapable of turning to the future, keeping consciousness locked in a gaze towards a receding past.

In addition to the sense of loss experienced by the narrator of No Great Mischiefwith the passing of the universal cultural foundation, MacLeod ends the novel with the striking figure of the dead Calum gazing backwards to the origins of his birth. The final images of the narrative emphasize a heroic return to an essentialized Cape Breton. In a maudlin tone

5As McKay points out, the more rustic occupations were "far outnumbered by industrial workers in every decade after 1900. The 'typical Nova Scotian' adult was more likely to be a coal miner or an urban wage earner than one of the fisherfolk" (242). One sign of MacLeod's idealization of the clan in general and the miners in particular is the near absence of political structure within the clan or among workers. It is as if there are no intra-clan or intra- worker politics which might break up an innocent image of clan or worker solidarity. While the tensions between the miners and Renco are mentioned, the connection of labour to unions (United Mine Workers of America), union leaders (J. B. McLachlan), and sympathetic political leaders, (Clarence Gillis) is non existent. Politics implies working towards the future in concrete historical circumstances. The absence of such markers is surprising given MacLeod's concern for historical detail. Arguably, though, progressive union struggles and political interests would undermine MacLeod's nostalgic reflections on the miners and the general backward looking mood of his texts. 124 the narrator eulogizes the dead Calum: "This is the man who, in his youthful despair, went looking for a rainbow, while others thought he was just wasting gas" (283). A moment later, after Alexander and Calum cross the Causeway to Cape Breton, back to the authentic periphery, Calum is taken out of history and associated not just with rainbows, but also the Celtic eternal ring he wears: "I turn to Calum once again. I reach for his cooling hand which lies on the seat beside him. I touch the Celtic ring" (283).

The question arises as to why MacLeod resists exploring more fully the Utopian gestures implied in his work. Why does he insist on maintaining the hopeless binaries between center and periphery, inauthentic professional and authentic labouring body?

One answer is that any expansion or mutation of the clan ideal means challenging the security provided by an empowering image of solidarity, even if this solidarity always places the clan in a hopeless and subordinate position. The subordinate position of the periphery is of course really taken as vastly superior to the forms of life emerging in

Toronto. The images of closely knit families and supportive communities, of strong patriarchal figures, the sense of connection to the earth and body—these are spurred no doubt by genuine longings. As a mark of the traditional culture's rigidity, as conceived by

MacLeod, it is not just that the clan is generally defined in opposition to an equally static image of the urban center, but that MacLeod sees culture, labour, and the body of the clan as radically unique and therefore subject to contamination when coming into contact with any outside environment. To incorporate aspects of the consciousness of the urban center, to think through class beyond the limits of the clan or nation, to somehow redefine the meaning of solidarity other than as underdog, seems nearly impossible for MacLeod save 125 some important Utopian gestures and acknowledging that even his binary oppositions shed light on the processes of late capitalism.' 126

Conclusion

This thesis has argued that MacLeod's No Great Mischief and the short stories collected in Island are limited by an overly nostalgic mode that sustains a rigid center- periphery divide, constructs an essential sense of origins (the Scottish Highlands, Cape

Breton, the authentic worker) and identity, and perpetuates highly patriarchal communal- family relationships. Because MacLeod's texts express a world view suspicious of change, allowing for no productive engagement with modernity, the choices available to his characters are limited. He leaves little room for emergent identities for his male protagonists, while female protagonists are practically non-existent. They have only a few recurrent choices: they can move to an urban center and become isolated and alienated fromthei r community and culture; they can carry on the waning mining tradition as exiled labourer; or they can stay in Cape Breton and witness the decline of traditional labour. MacLeod's work powerfully expresses authentic desires for meaningful work, community, and culture. However, while findingimage s of these in the past, he leaves little room for positive change, addressing the capitalist system, colonial 127 divides, and patriarchal histories that keep his fictionalCap e Bretoners in perpetual subordination.

Each chapter of this thesis has examined MacLeod's desire to locate an essence of

Cape Breton. Chapter One placed MacLeod's founding historical narrative in context, exploring its exclusion of events and attitudes that counter his highly romanticized postcolonial version of Highland history. The story MacLeod draws on—the oppressive

Clearances and the subsequent Scottish diaspora—operates as a guiding myth throughout

No Great Mischief and many of the short stories, and failure to remember the myth's original power or assimilate it leads to the decay of the pan-Scottish culture. But forced displacement is only part of the Scottish Highlander's history. As demonstrated,

MacLeod ignores the large number of Scots who willingly migrated to North America for the promise of cheap land and a freer future. Most important to his romantic history is the idea of the Scot as essentially oppressed by the Landlord class, creating an implacable structure that gets replicated in the contemporary center-periphery relations between

Cape Breton and a hegemonic mainstream Canada. To the degree that his characters seek a fixedidentit y aligned with the foundational narrative and its resulting center-periphery binary structure, the possibility of changing those structures appears bleak, no doubt accounting for the profoundly elegiac tone of No Great Mischief and stories such as "The

Closing Down of Summer" and "The Vastness of the Dark," to name but a few.

Of course MacLeod's aim is laudable. His works respond to the devastating effects of severe economic decline in Cape Breton. Global capitalism's erasure of tradition, the dwindling of resources and the out-migration of its population to urban centers all threaten a highly distinct culture. But a major thrust of MacLeod's response to this crisis, 128 as demonstrated in Chapter Two, focuses on essentializing Cape Breton. For MacLeod, there is an essential character to the region grounded in a fixed notion of, for example, patriarchal family relations, traditional stories, songs, and the Gaelic language. Those characters who remain true to the traditional forms are considered more authentic selves than those who stray, contaminated by outside influences, including new music, new forms of work, and modern education. MacLeod's nostalgic and elegiac construction of

Gaelic cultural identity creates a particularly binding image for a region that, from his point of view, is coming unglued. But his cultural forms lack flexibility, clinging to rigid, patriarchal values that have the potential to alienate as much as support, leaving little room for emergent identities.

New or alternative identities connected to modernity are depicted, sometimes with great sympathy, as on the verge of falling or already fallen. One recalls, for example,

James of "The Vastness of the Dark" and the narrator of No Great Mischief .

Significantly, Alexander MacDonald, the narrator of No Great Mischief, begins his fall from the original culture as soon as he begins to assimilate modern education—well before he is lost in his urban professional existence. Chapter Three of this thesis explored how MacLeod categorizes different kinds of work: urban professionals, migrant workers, the salesman, and miners, in particular. Mining (and to a lesser degree fishing and farming), associated with a patriarchal version of masculinity, clan solidarity, and meaningful labour epitomizes the authentic life for a male. Professional work appears as superficial, disconnected from community, and unsatisfying. Aside from the urban professional/rural labourer binary, other forms of work and women's labour to be sure are practically non-existent. In JVb Great Mischief the power of the working clan, rather than 129 the working class, is emphasized at the expense of other productive unions—unions among diverse clans or a coming together of the working class.

For the most part, this thesis has emphasized the limiting attitude of MacLeod's nostalgia and fatalism and the equally narrow prescribed roles his texts allow for women, men, family life, and culture in general. Nevertheless, all of this is bound up with a genuine desire for well-grounded communal relationships, meaningful work, and a sense of history capable of bestowing meaning on the self and the collective identity. If the world in any way resembles the late capitalist machinery described in Fredric Jameson's critique of late capitalism then such longings are understandable. MacLeod deals consciously in his texts with issues that Jameson claims appear, often unconsciously, as

"an underlying impulse" in all works of art, "whether those of high culture and modernism or of mass culture and commercial culture." All art reveals on some level

"our deepest fantasies about the nature of social life, both as we live it now, and as we feel in our bones it ought rather to be lived" (The Jameson Reader 146). With an insistence on contextualizing social reality, MacLeod's writing performs something like

Jameson's idea of'cognitive mapping,' challenging the limits of immediate perception.

Drawing on Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City to develop the concept of mapping,

Jameson writes that Lynch "taught us that the alienated city is above all a space in which people are unable to map either their own positions or the urban totality in which they find themselves" (Postmodernism 51). The illegibility of a city is a mark of its alienating effects. "Disalienation in the traditional city," Jameson argued, "involves the practical reconquest of a sense of place and the construction or reconstruction of an articulated ensemble which can be retained in memory and which the individual subject can map and 130 remap along the moments of mobile, alternative trajectories" (51). In the postmodern world 'reeonquest' of the city is not so simple, but the project of'cognitively mapping' is still sound: people need ways to gain their bearings amidst the complexity of the late capitalist world.

MacLeod's work, whatever its blind spots, sets out to address this complexity.

Although the surface of his texts often remains trapped in a binary opposition between center and periphery, MacLeod nevertheless expresses how the meaning of the region emerges in relation to powerful absent forces. Whether Toronto stands in for a demonized place or a more generalized capitalism (I think both), MacLeod's cherished Cape Breton is shaped by and must account for such exterior forces that cut across and through its physical and psychological geography. For individual subjects to be effective agents, they must be able to insert themselves into this larger field and not simply rest satisfied with the circumference of the region itself. Spatially, in MacLeod's texts, Cape Bretoners need to be aware of Toronto, Vancouver, Boston, Japan, and the global market that recasts the totality of life in terms of commodities and perpetuates a reified consciousness. In other words, to protect the irreducible qualities of a traditional way of life, the clan must be aware of and resist the fluid processes of globalization and its homogenizing reduction of all values to exchange values; it must also be aware of and resist the resulting creation of a self that sees only surfaces rather than larger social contexts. MacLeod's fictional world is at an advantage for developing the bigger picture of the modern life, as No Great

Mischief and Island depict the processes of production and the connection to the earth, the contexts of labour, and the making of culture: these processes, often vividly 131 portrayed, are shown also in relation to the demands of the global marketplace and world politics.

Moreover, in addition to mapping the spatiality of the modern world, MacLeod emphasizes the importance of time, shaped by narrative. As I have shown, he generally operates according to a limiting nostalgic mode as he constructs his history of Scottish

Highland migration and, later, the current out-migration—the latter exodus to the urban centers, due to shifts in the economy and declining resources, re-enacting the original

Scottish Highland dispersal. Nevertheless, his general story of Cape Breton respects the political moment as it demonstrates how individual subjects and communal subjects, both potential agents of history, need to develop a 'historical faculty' (Jameson) if they are to insert themselves into the contemporary political landscape. It is important to MacLeod that his characters understand that the immediate perception takes shape in the context of a historical narrative, one that sheds light on the Cape Breton community, the kinds of work it respects, the way individuals identify with each other, and the way they articulate and attempt to fulfill a sense of destiny.

MacLeod's fiction is too neat and at times even maudlin. But what matters is the presence in his texts of the formal processes of narrativizing. What can be extrapolated from his texts are his productive formal possibilities, which emphasize connection and contextualization: the gossip about personal and personal-historical events; the preoccupations with monumental dates and events, and relation of them to the present; the almost statistical compilation of place names; the use of nature (especially potent in a denatured world) as a dialectical point of departure for thinking about the construction of the labouring body; the stark, realistic description of regimented work, etc. Such 132 elements, which are the foundation of MacLeod's short stories and novel, are themselves

(above and beyond content or story) directions for holistic perception, imagination, and thought, "the practical reconquest of a sense of place," and a new form of agency that this phrase implies. Despite MacLeod's drawbacks then, he also proposes productive ways for inserting and orienting subjects into the dynamic complexity of the modem world. 133

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