Post-National Arguments: The Politics of the Anglophone-Canadian Novel Since 1967

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Post-National Arguments is part of a loose series published by the
University of Toronto Press entitled “Theory/Culture.” It begins
provocatively and well by discussing the published responses of various
Canadian authors (both pro and anti) to the Canada–U.S. free-trade
debate, and goes on to ask questions about political attitudes implicit
in a selection of English-Canadian novels written since 1967. Individual
chapters on these novels become exercises in deconstruction—the
unearthing of meaningful contradictions beneath the surface of the texts
that reveal some sort of (unwitting) hidden agenda.

Such a tactic needs itself to be approached from a deconstructive
perspective: what hidden agendas may be behind Davey’s approach?
Because he writes in an impersonal, would-be “value-free” style, it
is difficult to be sure where he stands, but his constant (monolithic?)
approach to the texts suggests that he assumes (i) that novels ought to
champion the social integration of the marginalized, and (ii) that
Canadian novels ought to present a sense of national rather than
transnational awareness. Both these apparent assumptions seem to me
dubious.

The book can be valuable in raising stimulating questions, but readers
need to be on their guard against authorial nudging. Moreover, they
should themselves ask questions about the book as well as about its
subject. Since Davey is preoccupied with people or interests being
excluded in the novels discussed, how significant are his own selections
and exclusions of texts? Does his insistence on degendering a narrator
to an “it” distort novels where, for example, a female perspective
seems central? Is his concern for Canadian political emphasis more than
a sentimental localism? How significant is his title—i.e., are novels
primarily places for “arguments”? Though he claims to be
nonevaluative, is this so? (I think not: he argues that The Diviners
ends “weakly”—presumably because he doesn’t approve of its
resolution.) Is it appropriate to approach all these novels in the same
way? Is it damaging to discuss Fifth Business and Cat’s Eye without
“foregrounding” their comic-satiric genre and tone?

To be read with caution.