The afterlife of survival: a thematic guide to contemporary Canadian short fiction

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The afterlife of survival: a thematic guide to contemporary Canadian short fiction
SKELTON, Stella Felicity Barbara
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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