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The afterlife of survival: a thematic guide to contemporary Canadian short fiction SKELTON, Stella Felicity Barbara Available from the Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive (SHURA) at: http://shura.shu.ac.uk/16548/ A Sheffield Hallam University thesis This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. Please visit http://shura.shu.ac.uk/16548/ and http://shura.shu.ac.uk/information.html for further details about copyright and re-use permissions. THE AFTERLIFE OF SURVIVAL A thematic guide to contemporary Canadian short fiction Stella Felicity Barbara Skelton BA (Hons), MA, FHEA A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Sheffield Hallam University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2016 Acknowledgments Many people have helped with this: Dr. Jill le Bihan and Professor Steven Earnshaw, my supervisors, and Professor Lisa Hopkins. Professor Allan Weiss at York University, Toronto. A. B. Jackson, poet and friend. Tim Struthers, Alistair MacLeod, Mark Anthony Jarman, Thomas Wharton, Hiromi Goto, Daniel Chartier, Margery Fee, Jennifer Toews at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, U of T., Ailsa Cox, Catherine Bates and Rebecca Hill. Thanks, too, to friends, colleagues, and family for putting up with me and offering advice: Hannah and Dick, Su and Judd Skelton, Susan McPherson, Sarah Dredge, Annaliese Connolly, Matt Steggle, Richard Wood, Ana Maria Sanchez-Arce, Linda Lee Welch, and more. Dedicated to Terry Skelton 1932 – 2005 Matthew Skelton 1966 – 2009 Alistair MacLeod 1936 – 2014 For AW ABSTRACT Felicity Skelton Submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy ‘The Afterlife of Survival: A thematic guide to contemporary Canadian short fiction’ Margaret Atwood’s Survival: a thematic guide to Canadian literature was originally published by House of Anansi Press in Toronto in 1972. In spite of the mixed reception, Survival became a key text in the study of Canadian Literature. Although it is now taught as a historical curiosity, it is possible to trace the ideas in it, and their reconfigured functions, through contemporary Canadian short fiction. It is my contention that the ideas and themes which Atwood describes have rooted themselves in the Canadian imaginary, and that they have taken on a truth value which was originally disputed. Thus it is relatively easy to trace the continuing life of, for example, ‘Settlers and Explorers’ (Survival, Chapter 5) in contemporary Canadian short fiction. This is a synchronic study, not merely tracing the appearances of Atwood’s themes, but looking at how they are refigured in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, using stories published since 1972 to illustrate the argument. The potential impact of the research will be the re-evaluation of Atwood’s forty-year old text, which with Frye’s The Bush Garden were the ‘parents of CanLit’ (Fee, 2013, pers.comm.), and the exposure of the continuing arguments in literature in Canada about national identity, in the light of an increasingly multicultural population, and the growing neo-colonial awareness of the ‘behemoth to the South’ (Chilton, 2003). It will also bring a neglected body of work to international attention, and most particularly to the UK. Although Atwood, Alice Munro, and to a lesser extent, Alistair MacLeod are known both inside Canada and abroad, Mark Anthony Jarman, Thomas Wharton, Hiromi Goto, Lisa Moore, Joseph Boyden, Lynn Coady, Patricia Young, Lauren B. Davis, Diane Schoemperlen, Matt Cohen, D. W. Wilson and Leon Rooke are known only to dedicated readers of the short form, and these are the writers I have chosen to focus on here. The Afterlife of Survival: a thematic guide to contemporary Canadian short fiction Felicity Skelton CONTENTS Chapter 1 Introduction 1 Chapter 2 This White Planet: Rewriting Canada; stories by Alice Munro and Mark Anthony Jarman 37 Chapter 3 Making it home: Locations of the unheimlich in Alistair MacLeod’s short fiction 74 Chapter 4 Wilderness Haunting: National mythology of wilderness and the North in stories by Thomas Wharton, Hiromi Goto, Lisa Moore and Joseph Boyden 116 Chapter 5 Timber!!! Logging the Canadian male, and his women (and vice versa). Stories by Lynn Coady, Patricia Young, Lauren B. Davis, Margaret Atwood, Diane Schoemperlen, Matt Cohen, D. W. Wilson, and Leon Rooke. 158 Chapter 6 Conclusion 190 Appendix Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature Table of Contents 204 Bibliography 205 ILLUSTRATIONS Plate I Tabulae sceleti et musculorum corporis humani Albinus 178 Plate II --- --- --- --- --- --- --- 178 Plate III --- --- --- --- --- --- --- 179 Plate IV --- --- --- --- --- --- --- 179 CHAPTER ONE Introduction This thematic study of contemporary Canadian short fiction is based on the observation that the themes Margaret Atwood identified in Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, first published in 1972, have survived to the present day. There are several reasons for the afterlife of Survival’s themes. Firstly, Atwood’s guide was both read by the general public and taken up by schools and colleges, as both she and Anansi, the publisher, intended. Secondly, Atwood’s core thesis is to prove the existence of a Canadian literature and counter the ‘Colonial Mentality’ and the ‘belief that the Great Good Place was, culturally speaking, elsewhere’ (2004, 5)1. In Canada the question of national identity, although out of fashion now, still haunts the debates on literary production, and on wider culture. Thirdly, as Mark Anthony Jarman says of Atwood ‘she is such a presence that any book by her is there like your Chinese whisper’ (email correspondence, 11/2/15 pers. comm.). It is the contention of this thesis, therefore, that Margaret Atwood’s Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature has influenced not only the reading but the writing of English-Canadian short fiction since its publication in 1972. It may be difficult to prove the influence on an individual writer, but given the contentious reception of the text, it is remarkable that the literature written since shows such clear evidence of the same themes. If Atwood got it right, there is no reason why these themes should not be recurring, unless social and political forces since 1972 have altered the national context to such an extent that they no longer have any relevance. Clearly, the context is constantly shifting, and the changing emphasis in social policy and the tensions of political changes have an effect. However, some changes are foreseen by Atwood, such as the increasing influence of the USA, and others are not so radical that they have a major impact on the essence of what it is to be Canadian. Atwood attacks the American 1 Page numbers are those in the 1972 first edition, unless otherwise indicated. 1 influence on several occasions in Survival; for example: ‘For French Canada after the English took over [survival] became cultural survival, hanging on as a people … in English Canada now while the Americans are taking over it is acquiring a similar meaning’ (1972, 32). And on the Canadian consciousness she says ‘I’m talking about Canada as a state of mind, as the space you inhabit not just with your body but with your head. It’s that kind of space in which we find ourselves lost’ (26). The sense of having a self which is lost is an experience of the uncanny; ‘space in which we find ourselves lost’ is almost exactly what Freud suggests when he says ‘the uncanny would always be that in which one does not know where one is, as it were’ (2001, 931). For the First Nations, this lost space is the result of the seizing of land and destruction of their culture by European settlement. The position of the First Nations in relation to the state may be slightly ameliorated by Justin Trudeau’s policies, but they still have a long way to go before they can be regarded as equal partners in the Canadian project. The influence from America may be as overwhelming as Atwood feared in 1972, and though the emphasis may be perceived to have moved to a more gradual financial and cultural takeover and a more defensive stance on what the USA see as under-regulated immigration and unease about multiculturalism, Canada’s financial and cultural power is still under attack from the ‘huge aggressive neighbour to the south’ (Atwood 2004, 7)2. It is also true that Survival can be read as an extension of the work of Northrop Frye; in particular, the ‘Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada’, first published in 1965. Survival can be read almost as a summary, an easier read, but with the addition of Atwood’s ‘victim positions’ and her wry humour. The texts she discusses are not always the same, although her reading list reinforces an emerging canon of CanLit. Frye’s influence is clear throughout, and he is the forefather who has had the most influence on the academy and on the critics. The contentious nature of Survival failed to relegate it to the footnotes of literary criticism, in part because Atwood herself rapidly became, and remains, a 2In an interview at the Canadian High Commission in London in 2013, Leonard Cohen summed it up thus: ‘We watch America the way that women watch men – very,very carefully’. The comment also, incidentally, places Canada in a typical male/female hegemonic relation to its neighbour. 2 recognisable public figure in Canadian literary production, as a poet, a novelist, a short fiction writer, and essayist. This work nevertheless takes Atwood’s Survival rather than Frye’s ‘Conclusion’ as its starting point, the driving force, for the following reason: among its contemporary ‘guides’, Patterns of Isolation (Moss, 1974) is still to be found on many PhD and some undergraduate reading lists, and Butterfly on Rock (Jones, pub. 1971) is referred to much more seldom, although there were reprints during the 1970s. Atwood’s text, however, appears on many, as does Frye’s3. Atwood’s alone is still re-issued for a general readership, is reviewed by the popular press, and is the only one of the four available on Kindle. Neither Butterfly on Rock nor Patterns of Isolation appears to have been re-issued, and The Bush Garden was re-issued with an introduction by Linda Hutcheon in 1995. Survival has been re-issued three times. This suggests that where Frye’s text is encountered by university students, Survival has been consistently widely available since its first publication. The reasons for this may not be simple, but Atwood’s fame – some would say, notoriety – and the fact that she is known outside Canada and that her novels are read across the globe, makes her a canonical author in Canadian literature. Her pre-eminent position in the Canadian literary sphere causes admiration and suspicion and resentment among less well- known Canadian writers. Her novels, poetry, essays and forays into digital fiction and other online experiments keep her in the public eye, and not just in Canada. In a typical salvo, Mark Anthony Jarman includes a funny but jaundiced story in his collection 19 Knives (2000), titled ‘Love is all around us’. I hop the WestJet and Margaret Atwood is the stewardess, Margaret Atwood pointing out the four emergency exits, Margaret Atwood asserting that no one has ever really seen those plastic oxygen masks yet we cling to our belief that masks are actually there, waiting for us like a parent, our Lacanian masks waiting to drop. Margaret Atwood says, Maybe my message is bleak because it needs to be bleak. She says the seat belt parts fit into each other like a hook into an eye, my hook, your eye. ... I sigh and peer out the plane's tiny window, look down miles and see Margaret Atwood's giant face on the side of an orange United Farmers of Alberta grain elevator. Her giant face is live, mischievous, moving, gnomish (21-22). 3For example, the lists at York (Toronto), New Brunswick, Calgary, Wilfrid Laurier, Queen’s, Algoma, and McMaster. 3 The mention of ‘Lacanian masks’ suggests that it is Atwood who has given Canadians their identity, and in Survival she says [T]he large number of mirrors and reflection images contained within [Canadian] literature suggest a society engaged in a vain search for an image, a reflection that will answer it ... To know ourselves, we must know our own literature; to know ourselves accurately, we need to know it as part of literature as a whole (16). This is a good description of Lacan’s Mirror stage: we acquire the mask of identity by seeing ourselves as other, and as others see us4. Identity is a crucial focus for any debate about Canadian culture, and the formation of the canon is partly based on the desire ‘to know ourselves’. Survival performed the function not only of introducing the Canadian public to its own literature, but of suggesting some definitions of what it means to be Canadian. After several encounters with Atwood on his trip, in a cowboy hat, on the tannoy system, singing in a club with a guitar, the recorded voice on his answering machine and more, the narrator of Jarman’s story concludes: Then Margaret Atwood is fading, a statue folded into a blizzard, she is sinking under the ice, she is going west on a jet. It's snowing and snowing; snow is general over Canada. Peggy! Peggy! we call from our wretched snowcaves, shivering, shrinking into our winter skin. Don't go! Without you we are lost (25 italics in original). It is worth mentioning that the narrator’s journey is to visit Kurt Waldheim; the connection is implicit. While Waldheim rose to international prominence as Secretary-General of the UN, his dubious record during World War Two meant that his standing was compromised. In Atwood’s case, her influence on Canadian Literature has been seen by some as potentially malign (see, for example, Gutteridge 1973, Moss 1974). Although heavily ironic, the last line is a recognition of the lasting influence of Atwood’s writing on Canadian self- identification and on its literature. The focus here, however, is not on Survival itself, but on how the themes appear in the short fiction published since the first edition. It is not part of this project to go back to short fictions published before 1972, to assess Survival’s 4 see, for example, Fink (trans) (2005) Écrits, , 75 passim 4

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