Canadian Historical Writing

Reading the Remains

R. Hulan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137398895
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Canadian Historical Writing presents an archaeology of contemporary Canadian historical writing within the theory and practice of historiography. Drawing on international debates within the fields of literary studies and history, the book focuses on the roles played by time, evidence, and interpretation in defining the historical.

1

From Romance to Revision

Historical Writing in Canada

The river flowed both ways. The current moved from north to south, but the wind usually came from the south, rippling the bronze-green water in the opposite direction. This apparently impossible contradiction, made apparent and possible, still fascinated Morag, even after the years of river-watching.

—Margaret Laurence1

The lovely image at the beginning of Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners (1974) introduces the narrative by evoking the classic image of the river of time. As the main character Morag’s search for personal independence moves forward by looking back in time, remembering and reconstructing her life, the story travels across the land and circles back from the Red River of her childhood to the narrative present’s “River of Now and Then” in Ontario. The cultural significance derived from the role of rivers in the colonization, settlement, and eventual creation of Canada, as depicted in Donald Creighton’s Seven Rivers that Made Canada, is captured in Morag’s analogy: “Land. A river. Log house nearly a century old, built by great pioneering couple, Simon and Sarah Cooper. History. Ancestors.”2

In The Diviners, Morag visits the past, returning with “snapshots” and “memorybank movies” that serve to structure the novel. Remembering the past means gathering and arranging images like souvenirs of a journey to the other land evoked in David Lowenthal’s The Past Is a Foreign Country. Although Lowenthal borrowed this phrase from the opening line of L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between, the idea owes much to Herbert Butterfield’s essay The Historical Novel (1924). For Butterfield, a historian, the writing of history and historical fiction shared an understanding of the past as a “far-country” with customs and languages different from our own. Butterfield was concerned with the images and atmosphere conveyed in writing about the past because he understood memory to work by making images in the mind: “History, then, means the world looking back upon itself, and storing up memories that are pictures. History is any tale that the old world can tell when it starts remembering. It is just the world’s Memory.”3 Throughout his essay, Butterfield distinguishes “history, the past as it really happened, the object of study and research” from “the history that men write and build up out of their conscious studies.”4 The novelist’s craft closely resembles the historian’s as both make pictures of the past. Memory, imagined as primarily visual, is also representational, and the writing of history is the image-making faculty of memory on the page, thus both history and historical fiction are often valued most for the vividness of their representations, for “bringing the past to life.”

The Diviners is not the only work of Canadian literature that structures the narrative to reveal the experience of human time, nor is it the only novel concerned with situating the individual settler’s experience of time in a particular time and place, nor is it the only one redolent with the desire for an absent Indigenous connection, the “ancestral and inheritable national unconscious” that Cynthia Sugars shows continuing to motivate contemporary views of the past.5 As the literary nationalism of “Canlit” was taking hold in the 1960s and 1970s, stories and novels by Canadian authors, including Laurence, explored the dimensions of human time while attending to the particular of Canadian settings, and the prevalence of reflective first-person narrators in the fictional memoir, the form perfected by Alice Munro, witnessed the exploration of identity and place responding to Northrop Frye’s question, “Where is here?”

In “The Documentary Poem: A Canadian Genre” (1969), Dorothy Livesay explained the Canadian preoccupation with place and time by identifying the “documentary poem,” a genre distinct from both epic and narrative, as the characteristic form in Canadian literature dating back 150 years. Describing the documentary as an approach that displays “a conscious attempt to create a dialectic between the objective facts and the subjective feelings of the poet,”6 Livesay defined the Canadian long poem as a “genre which is valid as lyrical expression but whose impact is topical and historical, theoretical and moral.”7 Significantly, although Livesay concluded that Canadian culture had given rise to a literary genre that concerns both the present and the past, the essay does not address historical fiction, the genre that perhaps most clearly bears these characteristics. Instead, Livesay traces this “Canadian genre” back to the Victorian period when poetry dominated literary culture. Reading Isabella Valancy Crawford’s Malcolm’s Katie, Livesay finds evidence of an “interplay of the characters with the natural world they set out to dominate” that distinguishes the central love story from other Victorian poems of its kind. Since then, there has been considerable debate about the sections of the poem that personify the natural world using “indigenous” imagery; yet, in Malcolm’s Katie, Livesay sees the poet imagining the creation of a new Eden and the replacing of old myths with new as a pattern with “deep significance” in Canadian literature.8 The documentary impulse that Livesay identified is a preoccupation that stakes a claim to cultural legitimacy: giving meaning to experience in this place gives legitimacy not only to that experience but also to the literature that represents it. This idea has remained constant enough to generate and sustain the critical concepts and interpretations necessary to account for its influence. Thus almost twenty years later, Alan Filewod recovers “the idea that a documentary impulse is inherent in Canadian literature,” then applies it to Canadian drama, and updates it within a postcolonial frame.9 Noting that “new theatre companies produced well over a hundred documentary plays” in the decade after Livesay’s essay was published,10 he traces parallel traditions of historical drama and agitprop in “a long line of plays that seek to revise Canadian history, a list that begins in the early nineteenth century and continues to the present day.”11 From this perspective, television docudrama, such as Canada: A People’s History (2000–2001), is the latest offering in a longstanding Canadian tradition. The popularity of novels about Canadian history by prominent writers such as Margaret Atwood and Timothy Findley, among many others, in the late twentieth century and new millennium further illustrates the appetite for representations of the past.

As the persistence of historical representation and these changing modes and styles suggest, the past has continually interested Canadian writers and readers. The experience of time and the sense of place serve as related themes in Canadian literary history. Because concern for the cultural relevance of the past reaches back in Canadian literary history, the historical novels appearing in the late twentieth century can be seen in the context of a concern with the past that reaches beyond both temporal and generic boundaries. Consciousness of the past is not, and has not, been confined to the genre of the historical novel, and while it may be going too far to suggest that historical consciousness infuses Canadian culture, an interest in the past can be traced throughout Canadian literary history. Looking back, the turn to historical fiction in the late twentieth century seems more like a return, like the return to narrative that has also been remarked in contemporary historiography. What has changed over time is the style in which the past is presented and how the audience receives the literary work, not the level of interest in the past. Like the contemporary study of history, literature about the past has expanded beyond the nineteenth-century project of constructing a single narrative for the nation; instead, contemporary historical fiction written in English envisions Canadian histories made up of the different voices and viewpoints of a complex, multicultural society.

Canada Comes of Age (Again)

“Why, then,” Margaret Atwood asked in 1996, “has there been such a spate of historical novels in the past twenty years, especially in the past decade?”12 The occasion for this remark was the delivery of “In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction” at the University of Ottawa on November 18, 1996, as part of the Bronfman lecture series established to “feature personalities who have made significant contributions to the study of Canada.”13 Later published in the American Historical Review and as a monograph by the University of Ottawa Press, Atwood’s presentation answers her question by looking back at her own life growing up in a country that seemed to have neither literature nor history. She recalls how her generation was “handed a particularly anaemic view of our past, insofar as we were given one at all”: “The main idea behind the way we were taught Canadian history seemed to be reassurance: as a country, we’d had our little differences, and a few embarrassing moments—the Rebellion of 1837, the hanging of Louis Riel, and so forth—but these had just been unseemly burps in one long gentle after-dinner nap.”14

Canada Comes of Age, the title of the schoolbook she recalls, furnishes the metaphor explaining the return to history.15 By grounding it in her own experience, Atwood develops a demographic dimension to her argument, associating the appeal of historical fiction with the maturation of Canadian writers and their culture: “I think there is another reason for the appeal, and it has to do with the age we are now. Nothing is more boring to a fifteen-year-old than Aunt Agatha’s ramblings about the family tree; but often, nothing is more intriguing to a fifty-year-old. It is not the individual authors who are now fifty—some of them are a good deal younger than that. I think it is the culture.”16 For Atwood, speaking in her “city of origin” where she had been born “fifty-seven years, three days, and several hours” before,17 it would seem, the generation to which she belongs literally embodies the nation and mirrors the nation’s maturation.

Like Livesay, Atwood constructs a literary history that looks back to poetry such as E. J. Pratt’s Titanic and Gwendolyn MacEwen’s Terror and Erebus along with her own The Journals of Susanna Moodie, while her list of historical fiction begins in 1970 with Kamouraska and lists The Wars, The Diviners, Bear, The Temptations of Big Bear, and The Scorched-Wood People as examples from that decade. The list from the 1980s and 1990s is longer, including novels as varied as Black Robe, Perpetual Motion, Ana Historic, Fugitive Pieces, Murther and Walking Spirits, and In the Skin of a Lion. The number of books set in the past attests to the popularity of historical fiction, which she sets out to explain in historical and cultural terms, and the range of periods and genres in which these works were written illustrates the perennial appeal of historical fiction despite the perception of a return to the historical in the contemporary period. The choice of subject matter in the literature discussed also reveals the dominance of the colonial archive, a topic that will be discussed in the next chapter, but the prevalence of moments in the history of the nation that have been identified as significant (European exploration, settlement and colonization, pioneer life, and the World Wars) confirms interest in the history of the nation. Although the lecture criticizes the national initiation story, encountered by this generation in Canada Comes of Age, it is this generation of writers that, curious about the past they think they never knew, is confident enough to write about it. According to Atwood, Canadian writers set to the “digging up of buried things” in order to discover the Canadian past, drawn by “the lure of the unmentionable—the mysterious, the buried, the forgotten, the discarded, the taboo.”18 Underneath the boring veneer of “peace, order, and good government,” these archaeological metaphors suggest, there are skeletons of other pasts waiting to be discovered and unearthed. The Canadian past as something repressed, even within its own historiography, and historical fiction signals its return.

History and Historical Fiction

If historical fiction signals the return of the repressed in Canadian society, the digging up of buried things, then why can examples of historical fiction be found in every period, and why do these examples deal only with well-known moments or experiences in Canadian history? By digging up the past and writing about it, Atwood suggests, writers contribute to the health of the society in which they live. In a more explicit way, the pioneering feminist historian Gerda Lerner compared the individual psyche to the collective memory of the body politic in order to argue why history matters: “Just as the healing of personal trauma depends on facing up to what actually happened and on revisioning the past in a new light, so it is with groups of people, with nations.”19 Recalling what has been repressed, therefore, maintains a healthy body politic, one unified by regard for others: “By perceiving ourselves to be part of history, we can begin to think on a scale larger than the here and now. We can expand our reach and with it our aspirations. It is having a history which allows human beings to grow out of magical and mythical thought into the realm of rational abstraction and to make projections into the future that are responsible and realistic.”20

This type of collective memory allows us to experience another order of time beyond our individual lives and to imagine the past, even a past we have not experienced. For Lerner, history is “a mental construct which extends life” and “encourages us to transcend the finite span of our life-time by identifying with the generations that came before us and measuring our own actions against the generations that will follow.”21 Similarly, literature invites readers to imagine life beyond their own immediate circumstances. For many literary scholars, even though history and historical fiction both engage the imagination, fiction is believed to convey historical truth more effectively than History can. In The English Historical Novel (1971), Avrom Fleishman takes this position: “Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena, whereas history is based on documents, and the reading of print and handwriting—on secondhand impression. Thus fiction is nearer truth. But let that pass. A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.”22

In this passage, Fleishman articulates a view that resonates with the approach of the nineteenth-century writer Alessandro Manzoni in his essay On the Historical Novel (1850). Manzoni was skeptical in his approach to Romanticism, particularly as it concerned the nature of the imagination. A committed, if not devout Catholic, Manzoni’s idealism veered away from the doctrine of imagination espoused by his Romantic contemporaries toward an ideal truth verging on the metaphysical. Poetic truth was, for Manzoni, to be found in the correspondence of language to the objective and universal; it was the destination of all language, rooted in history. Poetic invention, on the other hand, relied on the subjective and arbitrary work of the poet’s imagination. Invention, for Manzoni, was born of necessity in the classical drama: without “historical circumstances,” the poet must invent, and Manzoni understood this practice not as a form of poetic “license,” but rather as “a procedure proper to poetry.”23 Throughout the essay, Manzoni explores these ideas through the opposition of truth and fantasy. Manzoni considered the foundations on which history and fiction were built to be so different as to be completely contradictory, a “critical flaw” that led him to reject the genre. Yet it is unlikely Manzoni would have endorsed the implications of Fleishman’s comparison. For Manzoni, the novelist and the historian would remain practitioners of different arts, and only the historian’s dedication to objective and universal experience could approach the truth. The historical novel could create an illusion; it could never approach the ideal as Manzoni believed history could. Moreover, the form’s inherent skepticism was difficult for Manzoni to accept.

In The Historical Novel (1937), Georg Lukács would enter this discussion by applying Hegelian dialectics to explain the relationship of history and fiction to twentieth-century readers.24 As a Marxist, Lukács saw history as a process of transformation, and historical fiction, which emerged to witness change in human societies, could be understood only through an analysis of its relation to the forward-moving progress of world history. “What matters,” he wrote, “is that we should re-experience the social and human motives which led men to think, feel and act just as they did in historical reality.”25 Achieving this task requires historical faithfulness rather than historical accuracy. In this respect, Lukács found no better model than Walter Scott, whose ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1. From Romance to Revision: Historical Writing in Canada
• 2. Timothy Findley and the Burdens of Metahistory
• 3. Margaret Atwood in Search of Things Past
• 4. Armand Garnet Ruffo and the Persistence of Memory
• Epilogue
• Notes
• References