Week 5 Flashcards
(10 cards)
R. Nischik, ed., The Canadian Short Story. Interpretations
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Precursors of the short story in the 19th century: Early Canadian short prose The modernist short story: fully emerging as a distinct genre in Canada in the 1920s Raymond Knister Sinclair Ross Ethel Wilson Hugh Garner Joyce Marshall Sheila Watson explosive development of Canadian literature in the 1960s (new supportive cultural politics) - anthologies the short story after 1960: Alice Munro / Mavis Gallant /Margaret Atwood contemporary English-Canadian short story and the challenges of Modernism, Postmodernism, and Neorealism Precursors of the short story in the 19th century: Early Canadian short prose The modernist short story: fully emerging as a distinct genre in Canada in the 1920s Raymond Knister Sinclair Ross Ethel Wilson Hugh Garner Joyce Marshall Sheila Watson explosive development of Canadian literature in the 1960s (new supportive cultural politics) anthologies the short story after 1960: Alice Munro / Mavis Gallant /Margaret Atwood contemporary English-Canadian short story and the challenges of Modernism, Postmodernism, and Neorealism “The crucial ascendancy of the Canadian short story began in die 1960s, raising the quality, diversity, and prominence of the genre in Canada to new levels.” (1) “Canadian literature, and especially the short story, had an explosive development in the 1960s, “the period known as the Elizabethan Era of Canadian literature or the Canadian Renaissance.” (16) “… the three leading writers of the Canadian short story happen to be female” (31) -gender-oriented writing style
Sheila Watson (1909–1998)
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born in New Westminster, British Columbia educated at the University of British Columbia and Toronto taught elementary school in a number of rural schools in British Columbia also taught at various universities including the University of Alberta Her first story “Brother Oedipus” was published in the Queen’s Quarterly in 1954. Further stories are “The Black Farm” (1956), “Antigone” (1959), and “The Rumble Seat” (1975). Her novel The Double Hook (1959), an attack upon the rural naturalism of much Canadian literature, received much critical and popular attention. -described as the first modern Canadian novel Sheila Watson: marks the transition from modernist to postmodernist paradigms -Name features of postmodernist writing and give examples from the two stories you have read for today! Slim oeuvre (two novels, five short stories and some essays in literary criticism) large significance for Canadian literature Her literary works stems almost exclusively from the 1950s, although most texts were published much later. Watson was particularly interested in narrative aesthetics and its renewal through a turn away from the realist, regional paradigms that had dominated Canadian fiction until then. - Watson’s style: multiple meanings produced by the use of intricate intertextual references and complex intransparency -audience? Watson probably aimed primarily at an academically educated audience. -Her allegorical compositions often draw on ancient mythology (four of her five stories refer to Oedipus; she also mentions for instance Antigone, Ismene, Atlas, and Daedalus), but also on more recent European ‘mythology,’ for example the Bible, Shakespeare, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Freud, and Jung.
Nischik on Watson
Watson’s “extremely dense, impersonal allegories feature fragmentary plots, in which splinters of meaning from the realm of mythology and literature are superimposed in a collage-like fashion on aspects of Canada in the twentieth century, thus creating an abstract, seemingly unreal level of meaning. Watson’s texts use a stripped-down plot and imagery, symbols, allusions, and associations, to construct an open, complex framework of meaning, which––in a self-referential and postmodernist manner––engenders literature on literature and emphasizes the text’s level of discourse (rather than plot).”
Myth in Watson’s work
-> Reception of Greek myth:
Until the early twentieth century, the interest in classical antiquity can easily be explained by bourgeois culture and its humanistic educational ideals
In later decades of the 20th c. there is no longer a corresponding cultural frame which helps us to explain Sheila Watson’s choice of mythological stories.
Today general cultural awareness regarding the classical era is rudimentary at best and the reception of classical antiquity seems to be no longer a relevant cultural option.
even today classical antiquity still plays a major role in Anglophone literature
different needs than, say, at Shakespeare’s time when writers believed in the imitation of the reverent classical playwrights
> In modernist and postmodernist literature not only the motifs, but also the modes in which a later text refers to an older myth may differ and range from precise parallels to vague allusions at different textual levels.
> Q: How does Watson deal with classical antiquity and with major earlier writers such as Shakespeare?
The fact that mythological tales belong to our Western canon and subsequently figure prominently in our cultural memory and
that they present fundamental human conflicts and transgressions of all kinds without offering simple solutions and morals
makes them useful in the most diverse cultural and historical contexts.
> As myths investigate processes of civilization and the discontents which always seem to accompany them, these tales are capable of surviving and constantly reactivating themselves. (-> cf. Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents”)
> Pache points out that while the poets of the Confederation period believed in imitation of the classical tales, contemporary writers parody the classical models.
- Canadian literature of the last 100 years: ongoing process of telling and retelling the classical tradition.
- The older pattern of re-constructing the classical tradition gives way to its deconstruction, playful appropriation and opening up as a technique of gaining an independent voice.
- Modernists in the first three decades of the twentieth century were tempted by the cohesive dimension of mythology – T. S. Eliot in his famous essay “Ulysses, Order and Myth” underlined the importance of classical antiquity because it allowed writers to deal with the futility of the modern world
- Postmodernist writers such as Watson use mythical tales and invent completely new stories constructed of fragmentary puzzle pieces without trying to come up with a coherent retelling of the old tale. They appropriate mythic figures and motifs, abstracting them out of their specific, social, cultural and historical grounds of meaning.
Sheila Watson, “Antigone”
“Antigone” (1959) is Watson’s most frequently anthologized short story. Topic: outspoken and individualistic female Antigone who revolts against her uncle’s system of order and discipline by burying a bird on the premises of the mental asylum.
> Watson’s “Antigone”: appropriation and reshaping of a classical myth, namely Sophocles’ Theban plays (i.e. Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone; Sophocles, 5th century BCE)
- exploration of subjects pervasive in Canadian literature such as:
-discipline as a covert form of power;
-the shadowy line which exists between vague sites of safety and danger;
-the problems created by prohibitive measures such as borders and boundaries;
-the ambivalence of nature as a walled paradise ad an unruly wilderness;
-and the importance of ritual.
-antagonistic figures of the paternal uncle (who has no name in the story, but is considered by the critics to be Creon) and his obstinate niece Antigone. Watson constructs a literary paradigm which deconstructs commonly held assumptions about community and government in Canada
- Canada’s imperial beginnings and the continuation of their close ties with the mother country
-Canadians are believed to have a greater acceptance of limitations and boundaries, a greater respect for politicians and public authority, and a greater obedience to the law.
-Watson’s Antigone is a daring and stubborn young woman who challenges the state, transgresses the law of the land, and directly defies the orders of the ruler -> Watson’s political statement.
> Using ancient myth has two functions in Watson’s text:
a) It helps her to articulate political and societal issues in an indirect way, thus enabling her readers to deal with touchy issues which would have otherwise not been addressed;
b) at the same time Watson questions and denigrates ancient gods and myth in general by reducing the once powerful gods and semi-gods to inmates of a madhouse.
Dichotomy madness/disobedience (Helen, Antigone) vs. “sober common sense”/rationalism
Watson’s questioning of the enlightened world of modern medicine and psychiatry (the clinic is depicted as a prison) as well as the neat division line between madness and sanity.
> Valerie Legge (op. cit.): Watson juxtaposes a desire for order and stability within institutions, communities, and government – represented by Antigone’s uncle – against an ominous threat of madness and anarchy – represented by Antigone herself. Together with her cousin Antigone performs a strange ritual that her uncle has forbidden – the burial of a sparrow on the institution grounds.
> In Watson’s fictional worlds (in “Antigone” as well as in “Brother Oedipus”), institutions – familial and communal – which are highly structured, closed and hierarchically organized, become arenas for explosive confrontations.
- Importance of power and politics in Watson’s short story as well as in Greek myth.
> In Sophocles’ classical drama, Ismene, Antigone’s timid and fearful sister, pleads with Antigone to abandon her mad plan to defy Creon’s order that their brother’s body remain unburied, and that his remains provide carrion for crows. She counsels Antigone, “we are women; it is not for us/ To fight against men; our rulers are stronger than we.” Despite her sister’s warning, Antigone contravenes the King’s edict and carries out her “true duty” – her natural obligation to perform the proper rites of burial. For this revolutionary act, she is punished with death.
- Watson’s Canadian version of the myth: a far stranger funeral rite than the burial of an outcast brother is shown, the interment of a sparrow and a “bruised magnolia blossom” on the grounds of a mental institution (379–380)
- Watson’s Antigone trespasses the laws of a ruler, but goes unpunished
- “Antigone” is a transgressive narrative, a modern myth about a possible new world where men like her uncle are no longer to decide about the fate of men.
-Not only the references to Sophocles’ play, but also the ritual language and biblical imagery, the trumpets of Corinthians and of Revelations carry associations of challenge and of judgment which reinforce the main theme of the story.
- Antigone: openly and fearlessly questions and subverts established authority.
Watson’s appropriation of Greek mythology =:
a ludic and fragmented one
- represents a postmodern view of the world
mythical elements used playfully in order to reinterpret them and thus to create a new, postmodern kind of mythology
- her displacement of the tragic into the lunatic is not only her way of presenting a parody of the old myth, it also questions and negotiates the possibility of tragedy in a contemporary context where the notion of fate is not valid any longer.
Watson, “Brother Oedipus”
“Brother Oedipus” (1954) = a parodic version of Greek mythology transplanted into the environment of twentieth-century Canada Q: Who is the Greek Oedipus?
Like “Antigone”, “Brother Oedipus” is again a highly intertextual short story.
Q: which intertextual references?
Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex,
Shakespeare: e.g. pp. 26–27: “The world…is a vast amphitheatre. We are actors in a rite.”
Hamlet: “What a scene about nothing”, Oedipus as Hamlet figure?
Ecclesiastes
Joyce
Puss in Boots
Watson’s Oedipus: an eloquent alcoholic, irresponsible artist figure highly aware of his verbal material (for example p. 16, “had I been tempted by metaphor”, and “I have gone back to the elemental womb, tomb – cave, grave. I have taken refuge in the arched earth cave.”).
Like Antigone, Oedipus is also intensely aware of the fragmentation of human existence, but whereas Antigone rejects hostile passivity, resignation and surrender, Oedipus displays these character traits.
> Again this story is organized around the dichotomy (artistic) imagination/passion v. rationality/sobriety.
> Deconstruction of the classical horizon of readerly expectations and Freudian clichés (as a child Oedipus “was most attached to our mother”, p. 15)
> a contemporary setting, which is reminiscent of the setting in “Antigone” and Sheila Watson’s own childhood.
> topic: The cutting down of the willow which damages the drainage system of Oedipus’ mother is hardly the stuff that mythology is made of ->parody What do we learn from this postmodernist version of Oedipus? Imagine the story and its male middle-class protagonist were called differently, would the story still have the same impact on us? What exactly is the role of the classical connotations?
Margaret Laurence (1926–1987)
> Canadian writer whose novels portray
strong women striving for self-realization while
immersed in the daily struggle to make a living in a male-dominated world
born in 1926 as Jean Margaret Wemys in the town of Neepawa, Manitoba
after her parents’ death raised by her aunt
educated at the University of Manitoba
Together with her husband, she travelled to England and to Africa, which was the background for her novels This Side Jordan (1960) which dealt with how old colonials and native Africans suffered through the exchange of power as Ghana became a nation, The Tomorrow-Tamer (1963) which is a collection of African stories, and The Prophet’s Camel Bell (1963) which is an account of her life in Africa.
Laurence’s next three novels were set in Canada and were woman-centred. In The Stone Angel (1964), an ancient prairie woman tells her life struggles. A Jest of God (1966; made into the motion picture Rachel, Rachel in 1968) and The Fire Dwellers (1969) are about two sisters, a Manitoba schoolteacher and a Vancouver housewife, each trying to achieve personal fulfilment.
Regarding herself as a religious writer, Laurence tackled moral and social issues, particularly in the “Manawaka” novels, set in the fictional Prairie town of that name.
She also published a short-story cycle about Manawaka, A Bird in the House (1970) from which “The Loons” (first published under the title “Crying of the Loons” in the Atlantic Advocate in 1966) is taken.
- like Rudy Wiebe a ‘prairie writer’, however: gender-conscious writing from a female perspective
Long Drums and Cannons (1968) is a study of Nigerian literature.
Margaret Laurence, “The Loons”
Like W. O. Mitchell, Rudy Wiebe and Guy Vanderhaeghe, Margaret Laurence is considered a prairie writer whose fiction is deeply rooted in regionalism and in a realistic mode of representation.
pioneer of gender-conscious writing from a female perspective in Canada.
short-story cycle A Bird in the House (1970): set for the most part on the prairie; written over eight years and according to Laurence “the only semi-autobiographical fiction I have ever written”
A Bird in the House recounts the making of an artist in a cycle of eight stories. The writer-to-be Vanessa MacLeod grows up in the 1930s in Manawaka, a fictional small town on the prairie, modelled upon the author’s own home town Neepawa in Manitoba.
-empowerment of female characters
-perspective of a grown-up, but the focus is nevertheless on the experiences of the growing child.
- The text delivers a realistic evocation of small-town life and social structures in the Canadian prairie, subtle character sketches, and a gradual thematic build-up in the manner of a Bildungsroman.
-accessible style
- a balanced, consistent tension between the experiencing and the reminiscing Vanessa, the latter learning to reconsider, as a “professional observer,” the judgments of her younger self
> Manawaka fiction: theme of multiculturalism (a central theme in Canadian fiction since Canadian society is very much multicultural itself and Canadian identity has thus also deeply been informed by multiculturalism)
> vivid portrayal of the struggles, desires, and relationships of women in a small prairie town
> bird motif from the title of Laurence’s short-story cycle persists in each of the stories, mostly as a metaphor for women’s entrapment in gender expectations and social roles
> point of view: Vanessa MacLeod tells the story of her childhood from an adult perspective, which splits the narrative subject into a reflecting, mature Vanessa and an experiencing and acting younger self.
> “The Loons” touches upon themes typical for Laurence’s fiction in general: the nature-culture paradigm, the acceptance of death, the complexity of human relations and myth
> The protagonist of “The Loons” portrays its protagonist Vanessa at the age of eleven (romantic stereotypes), fifteen (more realistic view of things), and nineteen (comprehends the events in their full complexity).
Q: Does the tone of the narrative in the story change according to Vanessa’s age and point of view?
> multiculturalism: the Métis population of Manawaka, especially the Tonnerre family. The Métis are a nation within Canada whose people are of Cree or Ojibwa and European descent. They emerged as a group in the eighteenth century when trading companies explored the Western territory.
Louis Riel (1844–1885)
the Red River Rebellion of 1869–1870, a conflict over land ownership which led to battles at Batoche and Duck Lake
Louis Riel’s pivotal role in two rebellions (1870 and 1885), in which the Métis fought for recognition and land settlement claims and were engaged in battles with the Canadian government
After a highly political trial, Riel was hanged in Regina in 1885.
He has become a symbolic figure not only of the Métis but of “Aboriginal resistance to Canadian assimilation” in general and has turned into “a legendary figure––even a hero––of mythological proportions” (Bumsted in New 2002, 974).
> In Laurence’s Manawaka the Métis occupy a position between cultures, and historically they have had difficulties settling their land claims and attaining legal status as a nation in Canada because, unlike Native Canadians or the Inuit, they are not considered a “purely” indigenous group. > “The Loons”: Piquette Tonnerre, Vanessa’s classmate, but despite the closeness in age, a friendship between the two girls is impossible because of class and race barriers. Q: How does Vanessa imagine Piquette’s life? How does she understand Piquette’s reality?
Big Bear and Poundmaker were two important Cree chieftains, while Tecumseh, who was chief of the Shawnee Indians, became a Canadian national hero when he helped the British to defend the Canadian border against the USA in the war of 1812.
Father Jean de Brébeuf was known to every Canadian child. As a Jesuit missionary, he came to Canada (or New France as it was called at the time) in 1625 and lived with the Hurons at various times. During one of the battles between the Hurons and the Iroquois, he was captured and tortured to death by the Iroquois.
> Emily Pauline Johnson (1861–1913) was a writer of English and Mohawk ancestry who combined the oral traditions of the Iroquois with those of English Romanticism. Her renditions of Native culture were later criticized for being idealistic, theatrical, and inauthentic. One should also bear in mind, however, that she also had to cater to and audience with a very limited and clichéd knowledge of “Indians.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) wrote his long poem “The Song of Hiawatha” at a time when the fictional romanticizing of Indian culture had reached a climax and white authors appropriated Native culture to project their own visions, hopes, and images onto it.
“The Loons”: reflects on the effects of crucial cultural misrepresentations (based on the Anglophone point of view) as the young Vanessa’s consciousness mirrors the stereotypes of her cultural surroundings (Scottish-Canadian).
Vanessa turns Piquette into a Hollywood Indian or storybook character (“junior prophetess of the wild”) and appropriates her to fit her fantasies of what Indians are like.
clichéd notions of Indians derived from canonical texts that at the end of the 19th c. romanticized and misrepresented First Nations People, work such as Pauline Johnson’s The White Wampum and Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha”.
While birds in Laurence’s fiction often symbolize freedom, the loon (quintessential Can. bird!) in this short story stands for freedom lost.
> The loons signify a realm before and beyond civilization.
When the two girls meet again four years later, Vanessa recognizes the “real” Piquette for the first time:
> Only when Vanessa is 19 and returns back to her hometown after her first year of college, she is able to realize that Piquette was “doomed to disaster” from the very start and never had a fair start in society that entirely marginalized her.
Q: How do you interpret the end of the story?
Atwood Margaret (1939– )
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born in Ottawa, Canada grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto As a child, because of her father’s work as an entomologist, she spent the spring, summer, and fall months of each year in the Ontario bush. Atwood received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master’s degree from Radcliffe College. Having completed her PhD exams and much of her thesis on late-Victorian fantasy, she taught at several Canadian universities, including University of British Columbia and Sir George Williams University (Montreal), while continuing to write poetry and fiction. Throughout her forty years of writing, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and many honorary degrees. She is the author of more than thirty-five volumes of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction.
Nischik on Atwood
Nischik (op. cit., 26–27):
Atwood is “the acknowledged figurehead of Canadian literature not only because of the exceptional quality of her writing but also due to the prolificacy and versatility of her output. … she has written a considerable body of short stories, in which she is on the whole more experimental than either Munro or Gallant as far as genre conventions are concerned, extending and blending them for instance with those of poetry and the prose poem. … Atwood places her stories in a specifically Canadian context, even more so than Munro. … In addition…Atwood confronts the differences between the sexes and the difficulties of gender relations.”
