The
South Will Rise At Noon
by Douglas Glover
Goose Lane Editions, 2004
by Michael Bryson
See also:
Douglas Glover won the Governor General’s
Award for fiction in 2003 for Elle. About that novel, the GG
jurors said: "This headlong, intense interior monologue combines
humour, horror and brutality with intelligence and linguistic dexterity
to forge a revised creation myth for the New World."
 Elle
told the story of a 16th-century French maiden thrown off a
ship in the Gulf of the St. Lawrence for sexual improprieties. Abandoned
for dead, she manages to survive through the winter with the aid of
local Native people. The following Spring, she is picked up by the crew
of a passing vessel and returned to France, where she takes up with
writer, monk and physician, François Rabelais (1494-1553), author of Gargantua
and Pantagruel. Along the way, in the wilds of Canada and later, she
[imagines she] is transformed into a bear.
And some people say Canadian literature
is all about wheat fields and small town alienation. ‘Tis not so. Some
of our writers, thank ye quivering quills, have managed to escape Canlit’s
tradition of esthetic Calvinism: emotional restraint, naive realism, the
victim-as-survivor metaphorical universe Northrop Frye called a
"garrison mentality" and Margaret Atwood made popular in Survival,
her "thematic guide to Canadian literature."
Sure, Elle’s protagonist survives,
but her struggle is not a quest for self-definition in opposition to the
natural forces lined up against her (as per Atwood’s representation of
Susanna Moodie in her 1973 poetry cycle The
Journals of Susanna Moodie, for example). Rather Elle revels
in the comedy of an unlikely life (Glover has based the story, in part,
on historical record). Elle is among that category of Canadian
novels distinguished because they are rare: Novels that stem from a
tradition of novel-writing that brings together narrative and ideas in a way
that shows less concern for mimesis, or any attempt to mimic so-called
reality, and instead foregrounds the artifice of art. In recent decades,
this tradition has been called post-modern. In fact, it is way,
way pre-modern. There is also another word for it: Rabelaisian.
Qua?
Let’s look at the question from a different angle. In Survival,
Atwood said Moodie in Roughing It In The Bush was determined
"to preserve her Wordsworthian faith" in the beauty and bounty
of the natural world despite "the difficulty she has in doing so
when Nature fails time and time again to come through for her"
(51). Atwood wrote: "If Wordsworth was right, Canada ought to have
been the Great Good Place. At first, complaining about the bogs and
mosquitoes must have been like criticizing the authority of the
Bible" (50). Atwood gathered evidence to support her one-sided theory: To be Canadian is to be a victim, to be a
Canadian writer is to struggle against imperial esthetics that are
insufficient to communicate post-colonial reality.
A closer reading of Roughing It In The Bush,
however, reveals
that far from complaining about mosquitoes, Moodie inscribed herself as
one who learned to "defy" the mosquitoes -- along with the
"black flies . . . snakes, and even bears" (329) -- and milk a
cow despite her fear of the beast:
Yes! I felt prouder of that milk
than many an author of the best thing he ever wrote. . . . I had
learned a useful lesson of independence, to which in after-years I
had often again to refer (183).
If Canada isn’t the "Great Good
Place," neither is it a void that makes victims of all of us. All
it is, is a place like any other: A complicated mix of the comic and the
tragic, the ordered and the chaotic; bound together by high-strung
ideals and pulled apart by the need to face reality with a pragmatic frame
of mind. It is, to borrow a favourite word of Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin, "carnivalesque." Rabelais would have agreed; variety is
more than the spice of life; it's reality. Promoting any particular pattern minimizes
the influence of phenomena that falls outside the pattern.
C'est Canada: A little bit of everything, as humourist Will Ferguson re-affirmed
recently:
"What I find most interesting about this country is its sheer
variety" he told The National Post (October 20, 2004). In his
works like Why I
Hate Canadians Ferguson has probed this nation's popular mythologies. If
Canada was build by giants, lumberjacks, courier de bois, railway
men, arctic explorers, etc., who carved a country out of a
wilderness (and, yes, pushed aside multiple First Nations in the process), why
do Canadians at the turn of the 21st century tend to
Canadians look back on their past and see midgets and victims? Why does
Canadian history emphasize the country’s unimportance in
virtually every area except international hockey?
Trolling the ‘Net of this subject, I
found someone tackling similar questions: Our former Governor General,
Romeo LeBlanc. Here’s an excerpt from a speech he gave while in office
in 1996:
We all see Canada as a model of
openness, tolerance, and generosity, a country of perseverance and
progress. You have heard similar words before. Some would say they
are clichés about our national character.
But there is a rival cliché.
People used to talk of Canada as inward-looking, timid, anonymous.
Margaret Atwood found in our
literature, French and English, a "sombre and negative"
tone, and a preoccupation with mere survival. Northrop Frye, and I
quote the Canadian Encyclopedia, saw in our literature "a
'garrison mentality' of beleaguered settlers who huddled against the
glowering, all-consuming nothingness of the wilderness." I am
sure he was not speaking of Toronto.
So we may ask -- what is our true
nature? Generous and open, or a garrison mentality hiding from the
world?
http://www.gg.ca/media/doc.asp?lang=e&DocID=64
What is our true nature? Conflicted
surely. As the soul of every nation can’t help but be.
An example from recent history. Some
media commentators called George Bush’s November 2004
re-election "a decisive victory," but the popular vote split
51 per cent for Bush and 49 per cent for John Kerry. Even in Texas, 40
per cent of the electorate voted against the conservative, home-town
hero. The headline of a recent column in The Globe and Mail by
William Thorsell said it plainly: "America is a country still at
war with itself" (October 25, 2004), though Andrew Coyne pointed
out in The National Post on the day after the election that talk
of a "divided nation" may be overblown. Isn’t that what
elections are all about? Yes, but more importantly, that’s what
the soul-life of a nation is all about. It’s our conflicts that unite
us; the challenge to find common strategies to solve common problems
that bond us; the impossibility of ever resolving all conflicts into a
still point of unity that keeps our common story moving forward.
 Which brings me (finally) to the book
at hand: The South Will Rise at Noon, Douglas Glover’s
2004 novel that was also his 1988 novel (it has been re-released in a
quality paperback edition by Goose Lane Editions).
As the title suggests, The South Will
Rise at Noon is a novel about the American Civil War. Goose Lane’s
marketing copy calls the novel:
. . . the first full-length
embodiment of Douglas Glover’s famous historical imagination.
Here, the past is a crazy pentimento that the present never
completely conceals. Disarmingly intimate and energetic, The
South Will Rise at Noon is wild and sad, hilarious and
cautionary, farcical and strangely moving.
The first two sentences of the novel
are:
Looking back, I should have
realized something was up as soon as I opened the bedroom door and
found my wife asleep on top of the sheets with a strange man curled
up like a foetus beside her. Right away I could see she was naked.
Glover’s publisher summarizes the
rest of the plot thus:
Tully Stamper, just out of jail,
stumbles home to Gomez Gap, Florida, and into bed with his sleeping
ex-wife and her new husband, Otto Osterwalder. Otto, a flamboyant
movie director, has cast the townspeople in his melodramatic
re-enactment of a Civil War skirmish, the Battle of Gomez Gap.
Tully, a failed painter, a bankrupt, a liar, a drunk, and a
flagrantly deadbeat dad, is also a modern-day knight errant who
tries to win back his loved ones in the midst of the supposedly
imitation battle.
 The phrase "a modern-day knight
errant" is an obvious reference to Cevantes’ hero,
the mild lunatic of Don Quixote. Cerventes' life (1547-1615)
overlapped briefly with the life of Rabelais (1494-1553).
The former was Spanish, the latter French; however, their work has come
down to us through the centuries mixed in spirit. If Elle is
Glover's Rabelais novel, The South Will Rise At Noon is his
Cerventes novel. Though if these broad generalizations mean anything at
all, they only suggest that Glover draws inspiration from the broad
tradition of the Renaissance
humanists. Both Elle and The South Will Rise At Noon question how
"story" (history) is constructed -- as does Glover's other
novel, The Life And Times of Captain N., which takes place at the
time of the American Revolution and incorporates the perspectives of the
Loyalists, the Revolutionaries, and the First Nations in a swirling tour
de force.
If Goose Lane is right -- that The
South Will Rise At Noon is "the first full-length embodiment of
Douglas Glover’s famous historical imagination" -- then we
can expect to find across Glover's oeuvre patterns that were initially
laid down in that 1988 novel. As I noted above, yes, those patterns are
there.
To dig deeper, though, we must ask
ourselves what that phrase means: What is Glover's "historical
imagination"? What is he up to in these three novels?
The Enamoured Knight
by Douglas Glover
Oberon Press, 2004
"If you want to read the book, you have to read the
book."
-- Douglas Glover
 The
above quotation comes from Douglas Glover’s book-length essay, The
Enamoured Knight (Oberon Press, 2004), on Cervantes’ great novel, Don
Quixote. In his essay, Glover assails simple-minded critics who read
the novel as an extended allegory that recommends reality over illusion,
fact over fiction, the quotidian over flights of fancy. While Glover does
say that Cervantes’ work is that strange thing, a book against books, he
is clear that it is not another thing, a work of the imagination against
the imagination.
In The Enamoured Knight, Glover returns again and again to
critics who look into Don Quixote and see a world of either/or and
argues theirs is a view too simple to be credible. To some, Quixote, the
mad knight, represents the danger of the dream world, while his trusty
friend Sancho represents the sane simplicity of the solid (real) everyday
world of facts and mortgages. Glover shows the irony of that position:
"If you want to read the book, you have to read the book." The
words (facts) between the first page and last page of Don Quixote
reveal a far more complicated world than the sentimental critics would
have us believe.
Two recent reviews will help with the illustration.
First, the January 2005 issue of Quill & Quire included a
review by Sarah Ellis of Tales of Don Quixote by Miguel de
Cervantes, retold by Barbara Nichol. (That’s right, retold by Barbara
Nichol.) Ms. Ellis wrote in her review that she
kept Nichol in abeyance for a week or so while [she] immersed
[herself] in the original, a first-time read for [her]. As [she] meandered
along with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, [she] asked [herself] what was
potentially appealing to children about this narrative.
Ellis finds two items potentially appealing to children:
- "the Winnie-the-Pooh factor. Don Quixote is a knight of very
little brain and in this story the reader is always smarter than the
hero"; and
- "humour. Like a comedy smorgasbord, this story has slapstick,
satire, puns, farce, guys dressed up as damsels, scatological jokes,
and a particular form of post-modern Monty Pythonesque
absurdity."
Mitigating against Don Quixote’s appeal to children Ellis
counts "its length, confusing digressions, and the fact that many of
the incidents don’t make any logical or emotional sense. [Her] most
common reaction while reading was ‘Huh?’"
Well, well. Too bad so sad for Ms. Ellis that Glover’s The
Enamoured Knight came too late. Though to be fair to Ellis, she
does end her review advising readers "to consult the big fat original
and have as good time as [she] did." Ellis also manages to identify
in the big fat original "post-modern Monty Pythonesque
absurdity" (a redundancy, surely). What she doesn’t get is that the
"confusing digressions" are part of the scheme. As Glover points
out, Cervantes has the narrator in Part II, which was published a decade
after Part I, comment on the fact that readers complained about the
digressions in the first published volume. (In other words, the
digressions are ultimately part of the joke, but you need to read the
novel as a whole before you can be in on it.)
Don Quixote is a book that comments on the fact that it is a
book – and the fact that it is actually two books in one (Parts I &
II). But the narrator also comments that the story has been recovered from
other texts. The story is a story about telling stories. Of course, the
most basic reduction of the plot line is that Quixote believes he is a
knight acting out the plot line of a Romance novel. He is deluded into
believing he is the hero of a book. But he is the hero of a book! Just not
the book he thinks he’s the hero in! From this point forward, Glover
points out, things become more complicated – and any attempt to reduce
the novel to a simple plot can only be less than satisfactory.
Reader beware: "If you want to read the book, you have to read the
book."
The
Enamoured Knight includes, among other things, one of the
best summaries of the history of the novel you'll read anywhere. An
excerpt has been included on The Danforth Review.
Another
excerpt is on The Globe and Mail website.
The second review I want to highlight here is The Globe and
Mail’s review of The
Enamoured Knight by Darryl Whetter
(January 15, 2005). Whetter lauds Glover’s book-length essay, but ends
his review with what he considers the essay’s paradox:
If, as Glover and company suggest, Don Quixote is indeed the
progenitor of the novel, and if, as Glover assiduously points out, it is
a novel more concerned with writing self-consciously about a fictional
world than directly portraying that world, why has the vast majority of
subsequent thinking about the novel preferred the latter to the former?
If the novel didn’t begin with a "realistic" rendering of
the world, why is it expected to do so now?
In actual fact – one is tempted to say "as Whetter would have
seen if he had read the book" – Glover explicitly points out:
the novel followed several historical trajectories at once. While one
kind of novel followed the path of conventional realism, what we might
call an alternative tradition of self-consciousness, complexity,
experiment, elaboration and playfulness has flourished simultaneously,
though perhaps with leaner commercial success (88).
In my reading of The
Enamoured Knight, I found Glover
careful not to claim Don Quixote as the "first novel." I
don’t believe this is the question that interests Glover. In an
interview I did with him in 2001, I said I thought he was like Milan
Kundera, in that he was "interested in the history of ideas." It
was my attempt to ask him about "traditional" versus
"experimental" novels. In response, he said:
My argument is mostly against anyone who takes one or the other as
being definitive--how sick I am of all those turgid, log-rolling
arguments about whether novels should have ethical messages or whether
they should be purely aesthetic confections. Most writers strike a
balance that somehow suits their particular temperament. Why some feel
called upon to climb on soap boxes and campaign for the primacy of their
particular brand of novel-writing is beyond me.
I believe The
Enamoured Knight is consistent with the above
quotation, and that Whetter has mis-read Glover’s book-essay on
Cervantes’ novel. It’s not a matter of preferring one over the other.
It’s about recognizing the novel-writing universe for the complexities
that exist within it. If you want to understand the solar system, you
gotta get out there and take photographs up close of Saturn’s moons.
"If you want to read the book, you have to read the book."
In Notes Home from a Prodigal Son, Glover has an essay
("Masks of I") that outlines two opposing theories of the novel:
one championed by Percy Lubbock in The Craft of Fiction (1921) and
one outlined by E.M. Forster in Aspect of the Novel (1927). Glover
shows the opposites do not need to negate each other. Novels are about
making up things. In the make-believe world, we can co-exist quite
unremarkably. As John
Lennon said, "All you need is love."
As for Whetter's second question: "If the novel didn’t begin
with a 'realistic' rendering of the world, why is it expected to do so
now?" The answer to this is quite simple. The question is a red
herring. The novel is expected to do many different kinds of things by
many different kinds of readers. See quotations from Sarah Ellis's review
above. Some readers are interested in how novels chart the history of
ideas; others are more interested in the "Winnie-the-Pooh
factor." This is also unremarkable.
Another quotation, this one from John Barth: Traditionalist
excellence is no doubt preferable to innovative mediocrity (but there's
not much to be said for conservative mediocrity; and there's a great deal
to be said for inspired innovation).
Finally on this quotation: "If you want to read the book, you have to read the
book." What I think Glover is getting at is, read the book for
what it is; don't try to impose one sets of expectations on a book that
the book itself cannot sustain. Put another way: Dear Reader: Respect
the author. Let the author take you on a journey. Surrender. Listen.
Read with both calm and fury. . . .
And consider this! Consider the challenge I have set for myself: To
answer the question, "What is Glover up to in these
novels?"
I have read the novels, but have I read the novels?
Dear Reader: This is for you to decide.
[Stay tuned for Part III]
Michael Bryson is the
editor of The Danforth Review.
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