Literary Research / Recherche littéraire, nos. 39-40, 2003

LR/RL

Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 337-341

E.D. Blodgett, Five Part Invention: A history of literary history in Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2003; 400 pp.; ISBN: 0802048013 (hbk.); LC call no.: PR9185.2.B59; $52.00

Until the 1970s, the history of Canadian literature was the history of the long but finally successful struggle to establish Canadian writing as a legitimate object of study that could be taught in both high schools and universities; in other words, to establish it as a Literature. Consequently, our literary historians have been less concerned with contesting the merits of a work or the relative importance of its author than with recovering and disseminating forgotten books, filling in the many and wide gaps in the cannon, and establishing an infrastructure that would support future critical projects. At its worst, this approach lead to sub-par, jingoistic anthologies, such a C.M. Whyte-Edgar's A Wreath of Canadian Song (1910). But, at its best, it motivated the production of reference books, such as Carl F. Klinck's monumental and still valuable Literary History of Canada, that significantly expanded the material available to critics. Canadian literary histories tend either to represent themselves as objective treatments that either seek to rise above politics, ideology and criticism, or refuse to acknowledge and interrogate the limited perspectives from which they emerge. Klinck, for instance, tells us that the editors of the Literary History of Canada "wish to demonstrate, not to argue about, what and how much has grown up in Canada" (x). Whether pretending to disinterest or edging towards propaganda, our literary histories have, since Edward Hartley Dewart (Selections from Canadian Poets, 1864) introduced the first literary history of Canada by arguing that a national literature is "an essential element in the formation of national character" (ix), attempted to both provide us with accounts of our literature and shape our understanding of our nation. E.D. Blodgett's critique of the assumptions and biases that have conditioned the writing of literary history in Canada is, thus, an important and much needed contribution to the study of Canadian literature and the complex interaction, in this country, between the construction of canons and of national identities.

Blodgett begins:

The main task of [a history of literary history] is to argue that those truths that appear perfectly valid for histories conceived as the articulation of a specific group or even two groups with designedly shared preoccupations lose much of their validity when examined from a larger perspective. (4) [end page 337]

He accomplishes this requisite shift in perspective by understanding Canada as a state that contains many competing national and cultural groups rather than as a single national entity unmarked by difference. His study organises itself around five groups and their five distinct approaches to the writing of literary history: English-Canadians, French-Canadians, Native-Canadians, the Inuit and the immigrants from Europe who do not speak English or French as a first language. This five-part division allows Blodgett to provide an account of the development of each group's literary history or, as his title has it, their invention, and to show how the five narratives intersect, compete and, finally, undermine each other's claims. He proceeds in a loose chronological order beginning with the first nineteenth-century attempts at literary history, moving quickly through the first half of the 20^th century and, justifiably, lingering on the proliferation of works that occurred in the fifties, sixties and seventies as a result of the upsurge in both state-sanctioned and subversive national sentiment. Blodgett occasionally backtracks in order to insert a perspective that has been neglected by our cultural institutions into his narrative. In his eighth chapter, for instance, he pauses to give an account of literary histories of Canada by Europeans written between 1895 and 1961. After pointing out the limitations of the various traditions of literary history in Canada, Blodgett concludes with a demand for literary historians to acknowledge the plurality of the nation-state and "to construct literary history in Canada as a condition that is continually directed toward the recognition of the Other" (303), of the groups that have thus far been excluded from Canadian cultural history.

What makes Blodgett's study particularly valuable is the degree to which he draws on the work of a wide variety of theorists including, but not limited to, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Said and Jauss. Following David Perkins, Blodgett states "that literary history… is governed by profound metanarrative designs" (10). He argues that the protagonist of the narratives with which the various histories present us is the nation and that "because [each] narrative is structured by a metanarrative of a didactic character, it is possible to see it as a variant of the Bildungsroman" (16). This anthropomorphisation of the nation allows him to view narratives of national development through the lenses of psychoanalysis, and liken the emergence of national consciousness to Lacan's mirror stage. It is an original analogy that provides an exceedingly fruitful way of conceiving the writing of literary history and the development of literature itself in a colonial country like Canada. The passage from the Imaginary to the Symbolic or from dwelling intimately with the mother to acquiring the capacity for discourse and the ability to exercise power from the father captures the complex negotiations between multiple sites of power that [end page 338] characterise the development of Canada's national self-awareness. For Blodgett, this structure is equally relevant to the emergence of divergent national identities within the state and it can be seen in histories of the writing of marginalised peoples, such as the First Nations, the Inuit and the Acadians. Although productive, his broad application of concepts, such as the mirror stage, occasionally results in Blodgett emphasising similarities that are, at best, of questionable value.

Blodgett dedicates his seventh chapter, "The Question of Alterity, 1968-1993," to a discussion of the relation of non-anglophone and non-francophone European immigrants, First Nations peoples, and the Inuit to literary history. He justifies lumping these disparate groups together by arguing that their histories have a similar structure: "the cultures considered in this chapter share a history of crisis or catastrophe, which constitutes for them a beginning" (208). Although technically accurate, this statement is the type of rarefied abstraction that is functionally meaningless. Blodgett notes, for each cultural group the crisis involves immigration:

In many respects, their [native people's and immigrants] relation to each other is an inverse one: both are in a certain measure victims of history. It is not certain that the native peoples of the Americas desired immigration, and, had conditions been better, people of most, if not all, ethnic groups would have preferred not to emigrate. (208)

But, what is the value of asserting this similarity? How does this abstraction of the real and continuing disenfranchisement of distinct communities compensate for its violent erasure of difference and its forcible elision of the historical particulars on which the identities of these groups depend? These are questions which Blodgett neither asks nor answers. In a book that claims "to dismantle the essentializing tendencies of [Canada's] two dominant cultural groups" (19), Blogett's uncritical imposition of a metanarrative structure onto the histories of ethnic minorities, First Nations and Inuit is disappointing. It is also not the only instance of him violating his own injunction to embrace the plurality and multiplicity of our histories, and to undermine the totalising methodologies and perspectives that have produced the many exclusionary accounts of our nation.

In his introduction, Blodgett acknowledges the limitations of his study: "Like any other literary history, this book has its own plot and constructs a particular cannon… it begins and ends in Europe" (ibid.). His inclusion of minority and non-European histories is motivated by his desire to provide a critique of Canada's two dominant groups and their cultural institutions: "the actual trajectory of my history would appear to conclude with the analysis of First Nations, Inuit, and ethnic minority histories, but the point of the final [end page 339] three chapters taken together is to read Canada as alterity" (ibid.). In other words, Blodgett uses these histories to construct a frame around French- and English-Canadian literary history that marks the limits of its varied accounts and questions the truths it offers. This frame is "designed to place our thinking of Canadian culture outside the limits of all cultural exclusivity" (ibid.). Blodgett's work, however, is not and cannot be absolutely inclusive. He chooses the texts he discusses for "their perceived influence, on the one hand, and their scope, on the other" (ibid.). He does not, for instance, discuss George Melnyk's The Literary History of Alberta (1998-9) "simply because of its provincial status" (ibid.). His most glaring omissions, however, cannot be explained by the hyper-specificity of the works he over looks. There is, in Five Part Invention, absolutely no indication that Asian immigrants and their descendants live and write in Canada. Blodgett happily dedicates a section of a chapter to George Bisztray's Hungarian-Canadian Literature (1987), but ignores Ideas of Home. Literature of Asian migration edited by Goeffrey Kain (1997), Many-Mouthed Birds. Contemporary writing by Chinese Canadians edited by Bennett Lee and Jim Wong-Chu (1991) and Paper Doors. An anthology of Japanese-Canadian poetry edited by Gerry Shikatany and David Aylward (1981). It is unfair to ask Blodgett to add another chapter to an already capacious book, but perfectly reasonable to expect that he at least acknowledges that at some future point a history of the history of Asian-Canadian writing must be produced. Unfortunately, Blodgett simply does not mention the histories or anthologies of Asian-Canadian literature, proscribing it from his zone of interest. His study is so fiercely focused on cultural groups that originate either in Europe or North America that it replicates the very cultural exclusivity beyond whose limits it attempts to place the thinking of Canadian culture.

That said, Five Part Invention remains a valuable contribution to the study of literature in this country. Although flawed, Blodgett's work is the first of its kind and provides several unique insights into the manner in which Canadians have written the history of Canadian writing. His characterisation of English-Canadian literary history is particularly apt:

The English-Canadian metaphor, developed most emphatically in Frye's Conclusion to the 1^st edition of Klinck's Literary History of Canada is, as I argue, the New Testament desire for final deliverance from the bondage of history itself. The recourse to 'space,' then, so evident in anglophone history, implies an antipathy to time and history, which its practice bears out. (12-3)

Blodgett's mishandling of minority literature and his total omission of Asian-Canadian writing are disappointing aspects of a study that [end page 340] otherwise mounts a successful critique of the literary histories, both francophone and anglophone, that continue to have pride of place in Canadian letters.

Aaron Schneider

University of Western Ontario