Modernistilr Antimodernisrnr and Dense" (35)

T' a great distance from each other, they can never subdivide themselves into different trades and employrnents, and each devoting himself to a particular business or ar1, 91- ST['DIEIs ercise his whole ingenuity to bring that particular occupation to perfection; and...hence arts are in general in the most flourishing condition, where the population is the most Modernistilr Antimodernisrnr and dense" (35). The importance that Rae attaches to population density may derive in part from Robert Gourlay's Statistical Account of Upper Canada (1883) (see ccxl), which, bowever, he does not mention. tlre Song Fishermen t3 In this and other regards, Rae's analysis was ignored, partly, James suggests, for the rea- son identified by Walter Bagehol rnhis Economic Studies (1905): failure to "'recognize that there is a distinction between the main mode in which capital grows in such coun- ry Bart Vautour tries as England, and the mode in which it grew in all countries at first"' (qtd. in James t74). in is strongest in this l4 The evidence that Rae did indeed have Howison mind section of They are a numerous company, these pretenders to simplicily. First Principles, for tn Sketches of Upper Canada Howison comments at some length Williams, The County and the City (20) on the weaknesses ofthe barter system and the scarcity of"specie" (coins and paper -Raymond currency) in the province (see 6l-62 and 115). Antimodernism and the New Modernist Studies Literary modernism did not simply arrive Works Cited in Canada. It did not alight at Halifax or Montreal from a transatlantic voyage, nor did it cross the forty- ninth parallel as a funcfioning, consolidated entity. Rather, articulations of Goodwin, Craufurd D.W. Canadian Economic Thought: The Political Economy of a Devel- literary modernism in Canada emerged through a complex set of material, oping Nation 1814-1914. Durham, NC: Duke UP; Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1961. temporal, and spatial conditions. Traditional scholarship on modernism's Howison, John. Sketches of Upper Canada. Ed. D.M.R. Bentley. London, ON: Canadian "avant-gardist" beginnings has either insisted upon or assumed an imme- Poetry Press, 2012. diate and total break from other literary articulations as a constitutive part James, R. Warren. "Rae's Life" and "Rae as a Social Scientist." -/oftn Rae, Political Econ- ofmodernism. This model often rhetorically projects a from omist: An Account of His Life and a Compilation of His Main Writings' Ed. R' Warren break "older" James. 2.vols. Toronto: U ofToronto P,1965. l: l-192. or "outmoded" traditions despite the healthy persistence of some of those Leacock, Stephen. My Recollections of Chicago and The Doctrine of Laissez Faire.EdCarl other literary traditions throughout and beyond what is usually regarded as Spadoni Toronto: U ofToronto B 1998. modernism's tenure. while there are certainly instances in which a distinc- Neill, Robin. A History of Canadian Economic Thought. London and New York: Rout' tive break has announced modernism's arrival (the modernist manifesto is ledge,1991. perhaps the most ubiquitous tactic used to enact such a break), there are New Principles on the Subject of Political Economlt. Yo)tl' Rae, John. Statement of Some other instances in which the march to modernism has been gradual, political An Account oTitit ti1e and a Compilation of his long, tnJohn Rae, Economist: and interactive Main Writings. Ed. R. Warren James. 2 vols. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1965' with literary forms that seem, at first glance, to bi antithet- ical to a recognizable Trofimenkoff, Susan Mann. "Ann Cuthbert Rae (Knight, Fleming)." Dic tionary of Canadi' modernism. an BiographyS:734-35. attempting to trace diverse narratives of the emergence of mod- enristIt:n literature in canada while at the same time reconfig*i"g how mod- ornism_gets categorized, it is necessary to engage with the discourse of I antimodernism. While the critical conclpt of antimodernism is fairly well estabrisied under an histori""l i;il;isd;ffi;--often co.ncept ", employed by critics to point to the commodification of ..tradi- )n-- and "authenticity"-there is a body of scholarship that points to a of dififerent modes through which antimodernsim fiurctions. T.J. Lears, for example, sees antimodernism as ',the recoil from an ivilised'modern existence to more intense forms ofphysical or spir- r6 t7 itual existence" (xv). Lyrda Jessup suggests the term "describes what was For McKay, critical engagement with the discourse of antimodern- in effect a critique of the modern, a perceived lack in the present manifest- ism-the words and things-must be careful and self-aware. In "Helen ing itself not only in a sense of alienation, but also in a longing for the tlpes Creighton and the Politics of Antimodernism," he elaborates: of physical or spiritual experience embodied in utopian futures and imag- ined pasts" (3). Robin Kelley notices that terms such as "folk," "authen- Cultwal historians of interwar Nova Scotia (and perhaps Atlantic Canada tic," and "traditional" are the bread and butter of antimodemism and "are more generally) must place this peculiar variant of antimodernism at the cen- socially constructed categories that have something to do with the repro- ter oftheir analysis. To do so is both diverting and dangerous. The "debunk- duction of race, class, and gender hierarchies and the policing of the ing" of the "invented traditions" originating in the interwarperiod [...] is easy and entertaining. But "exposing" such brazen inventions and easy targets is boundaries of modernism" (1402). However, it is Ian McKay's rendering not the key challenge. The more daunting task facing the cultural historian is of antimodernism that is most useful for the following examination of the to reconstruct the more subtle politics of cultural selection and to understand tensions between literary modernism and nostalgic constructions of Nova the ways in which contingent and partial readings attain the status of obvious the Song Sheets, as Scotia found within Song Fishermenb McKay's work truths. (3, emphasis in original) is focused on antimodemism as an operative mode of cultural and social production in Nova Scotia. Part of the "more daunting task" must also be to re-read and recover nar- In The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism ond Cultural Selection in ratives within antimodern cultural formations that are counter to dominant Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia,McKay argues that, in the interwarperiod, strategies of conservative and commercial antimodemism. This type of rural Nova Scotia tended to be represented by the urban middle class as "a analysis, I think, should also tease out where those counter-narratives can subset of persons set apart, the Folk, characteized by their own distinctive be located within a broad range of polifical, social, and economic condi- culture and isolated from the modern society around them" (9). Not sur- tions of cultural production. The task of re-reading antimodernism prisingly, "innocence" was a dominant motif. Cultural producers in inter- becomes increasingly daunting when the term is taken out of the vast cat- war Nova Scotia, he suggests, worked very hard to portray the region as egory of "cultural history" and placed within a literary-historical approach, "essentially innocent of the complications and anxieties of twentieth-cen- which forces the literary historian to contend with McKay's conception of tury modernity" (30). It is important to note the classed assumptions antimodernism alongside the recognized rubrics and revamped articula- behind this mode of antimodernist cultural production. "Innocence," tions of literary modernism. McKay writes, "denotes the local development of antimodernist concep- If a critical account of the emergence of modernism in Canada clings to tions of history and society through a network of words and things diffrrsed the disciplinarity of a strictly literary-critical or literary-historical trajec- and by the urban middle class and corresponding, in a complex, indirect, tory (if there are such strict things), the concept of antimodernism may eas- general sense, to its social and cultural interests" (31). In otherwords, in ily come into conflict with recent developments in "New Modernist the case of interwar Nova Scotia, the urban middle class is seen to deploy Studies."2 Recent scholarship on modernism has generally worked against tropes of innocence that contribute to the construction of a Folk mlthol- reinforcing the ascendancy or sovereignty of the "high modernism" of the ogy. The middle class, in turn, claims Folk my'thology as its own historicity Anglo-American kind (such as the Pound-Eliot-Joyce nexus). Instead, as and satisfies a sense ofbelonging.l More recently, McKay and Robin Bates the argument goes, the very principles upon which modernism is catego- in suggest in The Province of History: The Making of the Public Past rized need to be rethought and expanded to include articulations that have Twentieth-Century Nova Scotiq that a "semiotic alchemy of antimodem- come from outside the cultural authority of high modernism. Recent years into ism" was used to "convefi [Nova Scotia's] position within the Empire have seen an expansion of modernist categorizations rather than the cre- misty pseudo-Gaelic nostalgia" (37S). Indeed, this essay means to interro- ation of new literary categories that risk being segregated into their own gate a rather foggy construction of "fishermen" as it gets deployed by a disciplinarity. Part of the reasoning against creating new disciplinarities

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