Theological Polyphony in Michael Crummey’s Galore by © Beth Downey A thesis submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, English Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Memorial University of Newfoundland May 2020 St. John’s Newfoundland and Labrador Abstract This thesis provides a close examination of religion in Michael Crummey’s Galore (2009), focussing particularly on the novel’s use of allusion—verbal, dramatic, and figurational—to harmonize its expansive polyphonic theology. Epiphany, encounter, the unexpected inbreaking of divinity into ordinary life is a central theme in Galore. It is expressed verbally and visually, often in terms that have meaning in several streams of spirituality all at once. These composite or bilingual figurations, which manage to allude simultaneously to more than one repository of spiritual meaning (for example Judeo- Christian, especially Catholic, iconography and Irish animist symbolism) are crucial features, ideal sites for excavating deeper theological insight into the novel. The two body chapters of this work engage the thesis topic at very different scales. Chapter 2, “A Miraculous Catch,” takes the wider view, examining theology in Galore as expressed through composite religious figurations of sea life. Chapter 3, “Fear, Trembling, and Carousing,” is devoted entirely to Galore’s central religious leader, Father Phelan. By analyzing a narrower subject in greater depth, this chapter works to both underline and expand upon the points made in Chapter 2, illuminating the two paradoxical themes—sacramentalism and agnosticism—that animate Galore’s core theology. These sacramental and agnostic “turns” are discussed throughout the thesis in relation to Christian traditions of cataphatic and apophatic theology. Finally, this work concludes with an overview of opportunities for further research into Galore and Crummey’s work more broadly, germane to the themes of this thesis and farther afield. ii Acknowledgements It simply is not possible to adequately thank or acknowledge all the people to whom one is grateful upon completion of a project like this. How many people assisted, encouraged, fed, inspired, tolerated, or even—this one always amazes me—prayed for you, during the years devoted to project they may or may not have had any stake in? To all the friends, family, teachers, and others who have loved me through this thesis, God love your cotton socks. Foremost among heroes is my supervisor, Danine Farquharson, who deserves all the praise and gratitude that can be heaped upon her. For practical guidance, patience, kindness, moral support of assorted varieties; for encouraging me in concurrent projects and shepherding me through my first foray into the conference track; for being both anchor and speeding wind, thank you. You are a queen. Special thanks to Sue Sorensen (Canadian Mennonite University) for assistance in locating valuable source material, and to Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin (Concordia University) for his boundless enthusiasm over my early work in this vein, which encouraged me to press on. Thanks to each and every one of my professors at Memorial, and to all those in the English Department Administration and SGS who have played essential, behind-the-scenes roles in my education, development, and success. Thanks to the examiners who gave their valuable time and attention to helping make this thesis the best work it could be, and to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the invaluable funding (CGS-M) without which this project may not have been possible. Hearty thanks as well to New Hibernia Review for publishing my very first scholarly article, derived from Chapter 3 of this thesis: “Fear, Trembling, and Carousing: Father Phelan in Michael Crummey’s Galore.” Last but most, thank you to my husband Scott, the best in the world, for everything. iii Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii Table of Contents iv Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Scholarly Context and Significance 5 Conceptual Framework: Notes on Allusion 13 Chapter Summaries 21 Chapter 2: A Miraculous Catch: Bilingual Spirituality in Michael Crummey’s Galore 24 The Monster Mash: Galore’s Leviathan in Christian and Irish Animist Context 26 Word Made Flesh: Fish as Emblems of Divine Wisdom 34 Judah’s Whale and Other Important Fish 37 Conclusion: The Miraculous Catch of Squid 51 Chapter 3: Fear, Trembling, and Carousing: Father Phelan in Michael Crummey’s Galore 58 Father Phelan in Context 61 Hungry Like the Wolf 64 “The Back of Beyond”: Phelan’s Ministry on the Margins 75 Conclusion: Phelan’s Ghost Parish 80 Chapter 4: Conclusion: The w/Word in Galore 84 Summary/Recapitulation 83 Limitations of Study and Futher Research 87 Works Cited 104 iv Chapter 1 Introduction My Jesus the cod, the cod, the cod, that Crusade army of the North Atlantic, that irresistible undersea current of flesh, there was fish in galore one time. Boats run aground on a school swarming so thick beneath them a man could walk upon the very water. (Crummey, Galore, 19) Michael Crummey is an award-winning Newfoundland poet and novelist with a fast-expanding oeuvre of historical fiction; yet of his novels the first, River Thieves (2001), remains the one to have garnered substantial and sustained scholarly attention (please see Scholarly Context section to follow). His acclaimed fourth novel, Galore (2009), is gaining ground, but criticism of that work remains comparatively limited. Excellent work has been published on the postcolonial workings in several of Crummey’s novels, but the absence of religious or spiritual analysis currently available on his work leaves open an important gap, particularly where religion has been central to the workings and history of colonialism. Crummey’s body of work, poetry and prose, demonstrates significant religious entanglement and a conscious negotiation with that entanglement, directly informing numerous themes of scholarly interest in his work, not limited to post-colonial studies. Such approaches to Crummey’s work include his treatment of myth, the “magical,” race, violence, literacy, memory, and many others. The bounty of material ripe for analysis in Galore and the limited scope of a master’s thesis naturally recommended it for focussed study—a going deep, rather than wide. Moreover, Galore lies at the intersection of virtually all my own core interests as a student of literature: Newfoundland, and more broadly Canadian Atlantic literature; Irish literature and folklore; religion/God in fiction and film; 1 even children’s literature, by way of folklore’s lingering “relegation” to the nursery (Tolkien, np). They all come together in Galore. But of all these charms, spirituality—a tone of genuine address to the numinous—was and is the linchpin for me. Living and working as I do in an increasingly “post- Christian” milieu, I find special interest in those writers who continue to address questions of faith, prayer, miracle, sin; those compelled still to crack their ink-pots over the feet of one whom philosopher and literary critic Richard Kearney has called “the God who may be” (2). Trying to articulate how other, more secular lines of inquiry into Crummey’s work could benefit from an available body of religious analysis gave rise to one or two false starts for my project. For instance, much of the extant scholarship labels Galore a work of magical realism almost out of hand, which is problematic (Chafe, “Michael Crummey,” np; Sugars, “Genetic Phantoms,” 7-36; Jensen, np; Fullmer, 36; Mackey, np.) Crummey has claimed inspiration from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude more than once; however, while the novel does conform to many conventions of magical realism, Crummey and others have contested the label (Crummey with Sugars, “Our symbiotic relationship,” np; Galloway, np; Martin, “Splashed and Swallowed,” 149). I question outright the efficacy of “magical realism” as a label, its justice and internal logic. Or at least, I question the scope of its legitimate application. Too often I feel it semantically denies “folk belief,” or the ancient religions of marginalized peoples, as authentic religions deserving robust theological engagement. The as-yet unexamined application of a “magic realist” label to Crummey’s work means that some important structural features are elided or altogether ignored; when read attentively, however, these features illuminate a more credulous theological core—an openness to religious inquiry and exploration—that runs throughout much of Crummey’s poetry and fiction.1 Indeed, Galore’s open-handed approach to 1 For examples in poetry, see especially Crummey’s 1998 collection Hard Light, and any of the following selections: Arguments with Gravity 44, 46-47, 59; Little Dogs “Early and Late,” 148; Salvage 54-56, 70-71; Under the Keel “Judas Rope,” 32-33, “Watermark,” 39-44, and “Confession,” 44-46. 2 the marvellous and to faith bind it up with several other works by Crummey of comparatively conventional realism written across the span of his career, such as The Wreckage (2005), “Miracles” (2013), Sweetland (2014), and a number of the short stories in his early collection Flesh and Blood (1998).2 Thus, if I wanted to work on religion and spirituality in Galore, it seemed at first as though some protracted exploration of the problems inherent to the magical-realism label might be prudent, to demonstrate not just what alternative reading methods might be useful to augment scholarly perspective on Crummey’s work, but also why these methods are more appropriate, and to elucidate the shift in logic that draws a reader from one perspective to another. Obviously, this apologetic undertaking quickly threatened to overwhelm the whole project. I set it aside, though I hope to return to it in the future. As a counterpoint to the language of magic-realism, critic and writer Samuel Martin presents the language of a sacramental or Eucharistic turn in Galore (Bleached Bones Rattling, 216-276).