Ten Canadian Writers in Context

Marie Carrière, Curtis Gillespie, Jason Purcell

• Publisher: The University of Alberta Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781772122848
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Colecciones literarias norteamericanas

Ten years, ten authors, ten critics. The Canadian Literature Centre/Centre de littérature canadienne reaches into its ten-year archive of Brown Bag Lunch readings to sample some of the most diverse and powerful voices in contemporary Canadian literature. This anthology offers readers samples from some of Canada's most exciting writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Each selection is introduced by a brief essay, serving as a point of entry into the writer's work. From the east coast of Newfoundland to Kitamaat territory on British Columbia's central coast, there is a story for everyone, from everywhere. True to Canada's multilingual and multicultural heritage, these ten writers come from diverse ethnicities and backgrounds, and work in multiple languages, including English, French, and Cree. Ying Chen | essay by Julie RodgersLynn Coady | essay by Maïté SnauwaertMichael Crummey | essay by Jennifer Bowering DelisleCaterina Edwards | essay by Joseph PivatoMarina Endicott | essay by Daniel LaforestLawrence Hill | essay by Winfried SiemerlingAlice Major | essay by Don PerkinsEden Robinson | essay by Kit DobsonGregory Scofield | essay by Angela Van EssenKim Thúy | essay by Pamela V. Sing

1

YING CHEN is a novelist, short story writer, essayist, poet, and translator, often identified with a second wave of écriture migrante (migrant writing) in Québec. However, she has always resisted fixed positions; despite living and writing between geographic and linguistic locations, Chen evades labels that would make her representative of the immigrant experience. She was born in Shanghai, China, in 1961. In 1983, she earned a degree in French language and literature from Fudan University and worked as an interpreter and translator, mastering English, Mandarin, Japanese, and Russian. She moved to Montréal in 1989 to attend McGill University, earning a master’s degree in creative writing in 1991, and now divides her time between British Columbia and France. Chen’s writing career began in the early 1990s when she began to write and publish in French, a decision that she considers an act of rebellion against the formal education she received in China during the Cultural Revolution. Inspired by her grandmother’s life and focused on memory and female subservience, her first novel, La Mémoire de l’eau (Leméac, 1992), examines four generations of women in modern China through a historical lens. Her second novel, Les Lettres chinoises (Leméac, 1993), is an epistolary novel composed of the correspondence between two lovers, one of whom lives in China and the other in Québec. Her third novel, L’Ingratitude (Leméac, 1995), marked a stylistic turn that has come to characterize the rest of Chen’s oeuvre. Through a bare but highly affective form, L’Ingratitude depicts a young woman who violently resists conventional cultural obedience exemplified by her mother; the book won the Prix Québec-Paris, the Prix de Libraires du Québec from the Association of Québec booksellers, and the Elle Québec Magazine Readers’ Prize. The novel was also nominated for the Governor General’s Award for French-language fiction and the prestigious Prix Fémina in 1995. Carol Volk translated L’Ingratitude into English as Ingratitude (Douglas & McIntyre, 1998), and it has also been translated into Chinese, Italian, Spanish, and Serbian. Her next novel, Immobile (Boréal, 1998), won the Prix Alfred-DesRochers de l’Association des auteurs des Cantons-de-l’Est in 1999. A prolific, widely read, and highly original contemporary writer, Chen has also published Le Champ dans la mer (Boréal, 2002), Querelle d’un squelette avec son double (Boréal, 2003), the essay collection Quatre mille marches (Boréal, 2004), Le Mangeur (Boréal, 2006), Un Enfant à ma porte (Boréal, 2008), Espèces (Boréal, 2010), La Rive est loin (Boréal, 2013), and La Lenteur des montagnes (Boréal, 2014). In 2002, Chen was made chevalière des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, and her work has been the object of much academic research. In spring 2009, she was Shadbolt fellow in the French Department of Simon Fraser University. Ying Chen visited the Canadian Literature Centre to deliver her Brown Bag Lunch reading on September 16, 2015.

YING CHEN

Experiment and Innovation

JULIE RODGERS

YING CHEN has experimented with a variety of literary genres including the essay, poetry, short stories, translation, and theatre, but she has risen to prominence primarily as a novelist. Her novels can be roughly divided into two strands, both of which are represented in this anthology. The first, a series of three early texts, comprises La Mémoire de l’eau (1992), Les Lettres chinoises (1993), and L’Ingratitude (1995), which, despite their loosely shared Chinese settings, constitute stand-alone novels for the most part. The second and more cohesive cycle opens with Immobile (1998) and concludes with La Rive est loin (2013), with Le Champ dans la mer (2002), Querelle d’un squelette avec son double (2003), Le Mangeur (2006), Un Enfant à ma porte (2009), and Espèces (2010), filling the fifteen-year interval and giving rise to a substantial series of seven novels in total. As critic Martine-Emmanuelle Lapointe notes, what distinguishes the second cycle from the first is the increasing difficulty of ascribing to the texts not only a specific geographical location but a linear time frame (134). The lack of a fixed setting and time sequence is, however, not the sole reason for grouping these novels into a cycle; there is substantial thematic overlap and they are also linked by the recurrence in each text of the same unnamed protagonist who is married to an archaeologist known only as A.

For Émile Talbot, this fissure or divergence in Chen’s novel-length fiction indicates a shift in her artistic vision announced in L’Ingratitude but which comes to full fruition in the second series and is characterized by an increased preference for the symbolic. It is a split that Chen herself acknowledges in Quatre mille marches (2004) and restates in her most recent publication La Lenteur des montagnes (2014). Both of these texts, the former a series of short essays and the latter constructed as a letter of sorts to her son, offer key insights into the nature of Chen’s fiction and the issues with which it is concerned. In Quatre mille marches, Chen alludes to what she considers to be the second series, describing it as “un ensemble romanesque…ayant comme personage central une femme de nature ambiguë qui raconte ses vicissitudes désencadrées du temps et de l’espace” (97; “a fictional ensemble…having as a central character a woman of ambiguous nature who relates frameless vicissitudes of time and space”), and goes on to highlight the commonalities between the novels pertaining to this cycle (99). In La Lenteur des montagnes, there are several references to a second phase of writing. Indeed, Chen herself employs the word “series” to refer to her cohort of “romans ténébreux sur le temps, l’espace et les instincts” (26; “gloomy novels on time, space and instincts”) and delineates a rupture between the pre-1995 and post-1995 novels with L’Ingratitude serving as the hinge between the two cycles (86).

Given Chen’s prolific literary output and willingness to experiment with style, it is not surprising that there are many critical approaches to her work. Chen’s fiction has garnered attention for its discussion of, inter alia, the migrant experience; the condition of women; the question of human existence; the complex politics of identity; the ambiguous bonds of familial and conjugal relations; and the unstable nature of time, space, and movement. For the most part, the point of view of Chen’s fiction is female. There are only two instances in Chen’s oeuvre where we find a first-person male narrator: Lettres chinoises (from the first series) where we have access to Juan’s thoughts, and the final novel of the second series, La Rive est loin, where Chen gives a voice to the otherwise silent male character of A. This preference for a female narrator in addition to the choice of societal institutions that undergo critique in Chen’s writing (such as marriage and motherhood) has, understandably, led a number of scholars such as Saint-Martin, Porret, and Rodgers to interpret the author’s work from the angle of feminist theory despite the author’s own endeavours to reject critical labels and distance herself from any specific politics in her fiction: “Je n’ai aucun message à livrer…Je ne m’adresse pas au monde extérieur, mais m’achemine vers l’intérieur” (Quatre mille marches 60; “I have no message to deliver…I do not address the external world but move toward the internal”). In Quatre mille marches, Chen expresses frustration at being reduced to her origins and exhibited as a porte-parole for the Chinese migrant (41), a point reiterated in La Lenteur des montagnes: “J’ai décidé que je ne peux plus me tenir à quoi que ce soit de local, que je bois l’eau de toutes les mers, que je respire l’air de l’univers, que je reçois l’enseignement des maîtres de tous les temps sans être disciple d’aucun” (13–14; “I have decided that I can no longer hold myself to anything local, that I drink the water of all the seas, that I breathe the air of the universe, that I receive the teaching of masters of all times without being anyone’s disciple”). For Chen, the primary aim of writing is the pursuit of clarity and simplicity (24) and, one could posit, a holism that exceeds the boundaries of place and time. Boundaries and categories are, therefore, depicted in Chen’s fiction as limiting and regressive and a more expansive and outward-bound, nomadic vision of the world is favoured.

A central preoccupation running through Chen’s fiction is that of existence and, conjointly, identity, be that as a migrant, a woman, a mother, a daughter, a wife, or a writer. However, although a consistent trope in Chen’s novels, little about the nature of identity is presented to the reader. On the contrary, identity for Chen is not fixed or defined, but is, rather, a creation forever in flux. Chen is interested in identity more as a process than as a product, proclaiming in Quatre milles marches that “l’important est de continuer à marcher et non d’arriver réellement” (32; “what matters is to continue walking rather than to really arrive”). Identity, for Chen, is malleable and multiple. As a result, the recurring unnamed female protagonist of the second cycle does not live one single, traceable, measurable life but instead flits back and forth between past and present, is reincarnated, experiences doubling, and even inhabits more than one species. (For example, she becomes a cat in Espèces). Chen destabilizes the fixedness of start and end points, origins and destinations, by favouring the liminal and positioning her protagonist between worlds, between time zones, between bodies, between desires. Chen extends this relentless liminality—a source of both internal conflict and empowerment for the protagonist—to the experience of the migrant and the writer, which reflects her own personal trajectory. In La Lenteur des montagnes she states, “La migration et l’écriture sont pour moi une seule et même expérience: descendre dans un tunnel en espérant effectuer une traversée, comprendre que, finalement, il n’y aura pas de traversée, que le tunnel est déjà la destination, que ma vie entière s’écoulera ici” (54; “Migration and writing are for me the one and the same experience: to go down a tunnel hoping to make a crossing, to understand that, finally, there will be no crossing, that the tunnel is already the destination, that my entire life will be spent here”). Such musings on liminality and unstable identities give rise to a reflection of difference or otherness. The recurring anonymous female protagonist is haunted by a sense of otherness that she frequently terms her “fâcheuse condition” (Le champ dans la mer 8; “unsettling condition”). Those around her, particularly her husband, try to tame her, correct her, and render her alterity less obvious. The protagonist seems torn between an urge to belong and a determination to resist assimilation, a trait that is characteristic of migrancy but could also be explained by her female otherness within a patriarchal society. Chen’s fiction, however, portrays difference as something that should be respected and valorized rather than feared, for, after all, as the Grandmother proclaims in La Mémoire de l’eau, “l’odeur des eaux mortes [est] partout la même” (115; “the odour of dead waters is the same everywhere”).

The two extracts that the author has selected for inclusion here exemplify many of the tropes and themes that characterize her work as a whole. L’Ingratitude, strictly speaking, constitutes the final novel of the looser first cycle but, as previously stated, announces the changes that are to come in the second series of texts of which Le Mangeur is the fourth. L’Ingratitude contains forward references to Le Mangeur with the mention of the fish: this is an example of intratextuality, internal referencing within a single body of work, and it is a narrative technique Chen employs in almost all of her novels, adding to the sense of collapsing boundaries that permeates her writing.

Both excerpts depict the parent-child relationship (mother and daughter in the case of L’Ingratitude and father and daughter in Le Mangeur). Ancestral lineage is a prominent theme in Chen’s oeuvre. The protagonist seeks to escape her origins through suicide (albeit failed) in L’Ingratitude, but openly embraces a return to origins through the ingestion scene in Le Mangeur depicted here. This problematic parent-child relationship, which recurs throughout Chen’s writing, serves as a metaphor for the migrant experience and the push and pull that her characters often suffer, drawn towards a new life but simultaneously remaining attached to the old one. Both excerpts also allude to the disintegration of time and memory characteristic of Chen’s work as well as the inversion of the life/death dichotomy. Death, in Chen’s fiction, is not necessarily finite but merely another stage in a life cycle that has the potential to continue well beyond it. A further hierarchy challenged by Chen in her fiction, and that appears in these extracts through the references to the fish and the bird, is that of the human/animal binary. Rather than privilege the human over the animal, Chen often connects her protagonist to a non-human state, thus displacing anthropocentrism, that is, the belief in the exclusive dominance of the human, and evoking a more dynamic transpecies relationality. Thus, in Chen’s fiction, human characters resemble animals—for example, the father’s aquatic condition in Le Mangeur and the female protagonist’s identification with the silkworm in Un Enfant à ma porte. This human-animal co-extensivity is pushed even further in Espèces with the female protagonist’s feline physical metamorphosis, during which she retains human psychological aspects.

Ying Chen is one of the most experimental and radical Canadian writers of the twenty-first century. Deceptively simplistic, her novels dismantle societal systems and unsettle reader expectations on a number of levels. Her narratives contain several layers and intersect with each other thus giving rise to a multitude of possible interpretations. Her definition of subjecthood as unstable, moveable, and attached to multiple communities is one that explodes the normative and conservative vision of the unified, self-contained individual. In fact, the emphasis on plurality in Chen’s work renders her a writer very much of our time. With its rapid technological advances, increasing globalization, and hybridization of identity, the twenty-first century is one where, as Chen herself observes, “le changement est une loi absolue dans un monde sans absolu” (La Lenteur de Montagnes 12; “change is an absolute law in a world without absolutes”). Chen’s fiction, by encouraging us to think outside established parameters, can therefore help us to make sense of our complex and constantly mutating postmodern realities. In fact, one could even posit that Chen’s vision of existence is powerfully ecosophical (merging ecology and philosophy). Chen imagines a more ethical future where the monolithism of classical humanism is disrupted and a new in-between subject that is connected to various temporal, physical, and environmental forces can flourish.

Works Cited

Chen, Ying. Le Champ dans la mer. Paris: Seuil, 2002. Print.

———. Un Enfant à ma porte. Paris: Seuil, 2009. Print.

———. Espèces. Paris: Seuil, 2010. Print.

———. Immobile. Arles: Actes Sud, 1998. Print.

———. L’Ingratitude. Montréal: Leméac, 1995. Print.

———. La Lenteur des montagnes. Montréal: Boréal, 2014. Print.

———. Les Lettres chinoises. Montréal: Leméac, 1993. Print.

———. Le Mangeur. Paris: Seuil, 2006. Print.

———. La Mémoire de l’eau. Leméac: Montréal, 1992. Print.

———. Quatre mille marches. Paris: Seuil, 2004. Print.

———. Querelle d’un squelette avec son double. Paris: Seuil, 2003. Print.

———. La Rive est loin. Paris: Seuil, 2013. Print.

Lapointe, Martine-Emmanuelle. “Le mort n’est jamais mort: Emprise des origines et conceptions de la mémoire dans l’œuvre de Ying Chen.” Voix et Images 29.2 (2004): 131–14. Print.

Porret, Véronique. “La féminité est-elle subversive ? D’une psychanalyste français à une psychanalyse chinoise.” 2007. Web.

Rodgers, Julie. “Comment peut-on être moi quand on est Mère? Une étude de la maternité dans Un enfant à ma porte (2009) de Ying Chen.” International Journal of Canadian Studies 45/46 (2012): 403–16. Print.

Saint-Martin, Lori. “Infanticide, Suicide, Matricide, and Mother-Daughter Love: Suzanne Jacob’s L’obéissance and Ying Chen’s L’Ingratitude.” Canadian Literature 169 (2001): 60–83. Print.

Talbot, Emile. “Rewriting Les Lettres chinoises: The Poetics of Erasure.” Québec Studies 36 (2003/2004): 83–91. Print.

Le Mangeur (excerpt)

SI EN CET APRÈS-MIDI, pendant un instant, je m’étais sentie confrontée à une difficulté de choix, je n’aurais pas hésité longtemps entre les bras de mon ami et le ventre de mon père. J’avais, parmi toutes les...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 YING CHEN
• 2 LYNN COADY A.K.A. THE WIT
• 3 MICHAEL CRUMMEY
• 4 CATERINA EDWARDS
• 5 MARINA ENDICOTT
• 6 LAWRENCE HILL
• 7 ALICE MAJOR
• 8 EDEN ROBINSON
• 9 GREGORY SCOFIELD
• 10 KIM THÚY
• ESSAY CONTRIBUTORS
• PERMISSIONS