That Art of Difference: (Documentary Collage) and English-Canadian Writing

Alan Thomas is a professor of English at the University of Toronto.

The assertion that documentary is the essential Canadian mode of
expression and representation should be challenged as a quite
unnecessary categorizing and fixing of the national spirit. It is true,
of course, that good film documentaries have been made here and that the
documentary mode has also been exploited by storytellers, poets, and
playwrights. But essentialism of any kind is dangerously reductive.
Manina Jones opens her discussion with the contentious motion on the
table, brings Dorothy Livesay and then Northrop Frye into the debate,
and follows them up with a host of lesser lights. But the approach is
misleading. The general point, however important, is offered only as a
light starter course and is rapidly lost to sight beneath an
accumulating blizzard of weighty critical terms; it emerges again when
Jones argues that “a common formal strategy of a body of contemporary
Canadian works is a ‘collage’ technique that self-consciously
transcribes documents into the literary text.”

Few will quarrel with that proposition, given the figures treated here
as collageists or documentary writers. Colombo, Kroetsch, Ondaatje,
Reaney, Kearns, Kogawa, and Marlatt are among the principals. The author
proceeds to establish the validity of her argument in a painstaking
series of chapter discussions, some of which have appeared earlier as
articles in literary journals. The scholarly earnestness of the
treatment is unremitting—with the exception of faddish insertions in
parentheses to register the wily cunning of an author’s mind in
handling language. So we are treated to a passage such as the following:
“‘Citing Resistance’ pivots on the multiple sonoral play of the
law (cite); of space and place (site); and of vision and the senses
(sight).” This contemporary form of academic wit, which slows the
reading and fusses the page, rarely produces a sustained argument.

The deadly fact emerges that, while all kinds of knowing remarks are
made by Jones about strategic acts and political subversions, we are to
be offered no large context of ideas, no real display of intellectual
reach or perception. There is much reference to political meaning, but
no political excitement. No vision of art rides through and unites the
chapters. As for the writers, we are certainly not going to be
encouraged to see artistic achievement in their use of collage for
documentary—just that they do it, and that the author is aware of the
strategies and affects involved and has diligently recorded their acts.
Why they do it is too large a question for this book.