A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature Essay

In Rabelais and His founding, the formalist critic Mikhail Bakhtin makes the genius reference to Canada that appears in the body of his work. Discussing the French hu hu slice raceists amusive rendering of Pantagruels northwesterly journey to the icy underworld, he points to the various(a) levels of correspondence amidst Rabelaiss text (itself a parodic reworking of Dantes godly Comedy) and Jacques Cartiers journal account of his 1540 voyage to Canada.It was Cartiers colonial venture, Bakhtin suggests, that had a especially complex and important effect on the European imagining of otro mundo the smart world (397-400). For Bakhtin, this effect was felt closely tellingly on what superpower be best described as the implications of the Word in the disused World imagination, for it was Cartiers discovery of the stark nakedfound World that prompted an essential reconsideration of the intellectual and imaginative structures that had until this point guaranteed the Old World a trustfulness in its linguistic centrality and a certainty in its imaginative enterprise.So radical were the lie downructurings necessitated by this brisk information that throughout the earliest explorations of the New World whole editions of journals and maps were destroyed or bought up and hidden because they were suasion to disseminate the wrong kind of information (Huggan, 7) or, in the to a greater extent cabbage moxie, to chatter the wrong verbiage, spread the wrong Word.But as journeys and journals accumulated, so, excessively, did the notions of Canada as a problematic new orbit and new quarrel, as a aim at which Old World and traditionally worded certainties were confronted by an receptiveness of place that refused to be fixed, refused to accommodate its particularities and paradoxes to the tropes or metaphors privileged by well-known(prenominal) verbal codes.Every journey across this new land became different(prenominal) imaginative mapping of what were at once the knowable and the radically unknowable realities of the place a number of the earliest cartographers had labeled, somewhat ominously, terra incognita the unknown land. such(prenominal) mappings were not a luxury, as Margaret Atwood has observed, but a necessity, for without the sense of certainty they provided, these early Canadians would not survive (Atwood, 18-9).Atwoods observations were not in themselves particularly revolutionary but were building on echoes of such notable antecedents as Northrop Frye, who saw in this confrontation both the source of our deep flagellum regarding the imminence of Canadian geography and of our national myths and mythic patterns (626), and Desmond Pacey, who defined the Canadian imagination as mainly a function of a opposition between an imagination grounded fixedly in Old World manner of speaking and a geography so various and inescapably impressive that in itself it offers an inexhaustible challenge (437-44).More recently, W. H. New has invited a full rethinking of the most basic terms of this challenge, suggesting that from Cartiers earliest contact the word land has to be seen as a particularly complex discursive terrain, a ground of contestation upon which an ongoing history of our relations with place and pose plays out. As New suggests, Canada in this sense becomes a semiotic site at which Fixity vies recurrently with fluidity, position with positionality, the place of social hearthst superstar with the condition of being there. For Sheila Watson, the condition of being in the her The figure displume (1959) is very much a process of doubling bottom on the assumptions and Words that have traditionally been part of the foundation of Old World thought and action. Faced with an inexhuastible challenge to survive, Watons timbers open the novel pin down in be quiet, the doubling blanket of the spoken into the lethal pits-and-snares of the unspoken or, worse s till, into the morass of the never said. An d is it is in this doubling back of language that Watsons fibers find themselves hooked not once (on the self-glorifications of protective silence) but twice, by the fear in which silence finds its most solid footing. The Double plunk opens with an act of matricide, an act that is itself a doubling back to (re)collect both simple (the story of Orestes, for instance) and biblical (1 Timothy) allusions for use in this new land. It is the most deep un-natural doubling, as son erases his own origin, his own naming, his own source.At the said(prenominal) time, it is an act that resonates deeply through a family that blend ins suspended in silence and that includes among its various acts of violence the suicide of Greta, who remains dumb despite her heart rate to use her congresswoman to shatter all memory of the girl who had stayed too long (32) and the blinding of upstart, a young boy who attempts to speak of and over against the repressiveness pliant his valley home. But as W atson reveals, this Canadian place is a nonpareil in which any move to double away from the exhaustive shin to find language is often a fatal slide.As the character known totally as the Widows boy shouts in response to the violence erupting in the silences around him Can a man speak to no one because hes a man? Who says so? Ive held my tongue when I should have used my voice like an axe to cut down the wall between us (116). The boys emphasis here is crucial, for what Watson demands to here in her Canadian place is not the language of another or the displacing silence of the timorous but a radical and potent questioning of the potentialities of a language that can articulate the freedoms that Cartier and others had (en)visioned for this place.As Barbara Godard explains, Watson remains sensitive always to the thinness and inarticulateness of ripe language (153) and is always in search of ways to disturb the proofreaders conventional consciousness of haggling and their so-calle d corresponding realities (153). Watsons warning, and her practice in The Double Hook, is for the need to interrogate language in the modern world, to bring language back doubled onto itself as a act of demythologizing and dismantling Watsons novel proposes in its own paternity an understanding of language and reality that finds its most profound articulation in the doubling onto itself of language itself.In this doubling back of language upon itself, another act of performanceing ones origins, Watson signals her departure from realistic verisimilitude (154) and from the strictures that bound, not freed, Cartier and posterior explorers, to the language of their realities and their worlds. In the fold of the hills / under Coyotes affectionateness (11) language lay outs to redouble its energies, unfold its potentials to mean beyond the literal into the placard encounterings of allusion and echo and irony.When James flees his ranch on horseback following the murder of his own mot her, he becomes, briefly, a perverted image of the classic westbound hero riding off into the sunset and silence of the horizon. But as he soon recognizes, his is not a semiotic site rigid in that system in his place, in his language, a person only escapes in circles no matter how far the rope spins. In other words (in new words), he must double back and begin to fill the silence, to dismantle the double back language (silence) that has reified around the edges of his folded valley.In his doubling back, he must meet again with Felix, a character whose own languages the vernacular of the valley, the ritualized formality of religion, the silken transcendence of music has itself been emptied of meaning, lessen to cliche He wondered If a bitch crept in by my outfit would I let her fall on the hot iron of it? Ive got no words to clear a woman off my bench. No words except Keep moving, scatter, get-the-hell-out. His mind sifted ritual phrases. Some half(prenominal) forgotten. Your e welcome. Put your horse in. Pull up. Ave Maria.Benedictus fructus ventris. Introibo. Introibo. The beginning. The whole thing to live again. Words said over and over here by the stove. His produce knowing them by heart. Gods servants. The priests servants. The shape lifting. The bread breaking. Domine non sum dignus. Words coming. The last words. (41) Doubling back into his own languages through words ritualized and words said over and over, Felix lives, in this moment, trapped like James, forever in the ellipses of the half forgotten and in the promise, always frustrated, of words coming. In the end, though, it is Felix, with the assistance of upstart, who brings the novel back from the creases of its own doubling, back to the glory of language made meaningful with its own resonant doubleness, allowing it to be both glory and fear, articulation and reflection, the said and the unsaid. It is Felix, who steps to the side of nonesuch in the moment of her deliverance to assist in the miracle, and who, even the new mother admits, didnt do bad for a man specially for a man who never raised a hand to garter one of his own mares in foal (116).Fishing with upstart in the now meaningful silence that follows the birth, there is a conversation between the two generations of valley men during which the older mans sense of responsibility and wonder serves as a corrective to the younger ones suspicion and fear When a house of full of women, Kip said, and one of them Angel, its best for a man to take his rest among the willows. When a house is full of women and children, Felix said, a man has to get something for their mouths. (117)Caught again in a silence, Kip pauses to reflect on Felixs refocus of the valley, his doubling of the reality of the presence in the house (and children) that effectively reinscribes corporation over isolation, family over individual. When Kip speaks again, it is to accept his role in the stigmatization that had scarred his face I keep th inking about James, Kip said. I kept at him like a dog till he beat around the way a porcupine beat out with his tail (117). Pausing momentarily before he answers, Felix slips past the ritual responses, the conventional platitudes that have defined him in the past.Rather than parable or primitive dismissal, he engages the younger man with a reflection upon Jamess burden and, more importantly, a question that at once engages Kip but also looks to his future in the valley James got more than a porcupine has to answer for, he said. Howre you going to select up a funding now? To pick up living in the valley is, as Angel makes clear when she names her new baby Felix, is through the model of the older man, who passes on the will to speak and the will to be heard to a valley.Moving beyond language into love, and through love back to harmony and rebirth, Felix reimagines the silence of the valley, shaping its contours with words and allowing the connecting moments of quiet to reverber ate with meaning, to double back into the words of the father-figure in order to find a path to the future. Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. Survival A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto Anansi, 1972. Frye, Northrop. Literary History of Canada. Toronto U of Toronto P, 1965. Godard, Barbara. surrounded by One Cliche and Another Language in The Double Hook. Studies in Canadian Literature 3 (1978) 149-65. Huggan, Graham. Territorial Disputes Maps and Mapping Strategies in contemporary Canadian and Australian Fiction. Toronto U of Toronto P, 1994. New, W. H. Land Sliding Imagining Space, Presence, and Power in Canadian Writing. Toronto U of Toronto P, 1997. Pacey, Desmond. The Canadian Imagination. The Literary Review 8 (1965) 437-44. Watson, Sheila. The Double Hook. 1959. Toronto McClelland and Stewart, 1989.