The Canadian Novel: A Critical Anthology: Volume IV, Present Tense

Elizabeth Stieg taught English in Toronto.

Present Tense is the fourth in a series of critical anthologies that explore the nature and development of the Canadian novel. Each volume is intended to treat a discrete stage in that development and “to offer the best possible examples of criticism in the widest range of approaches, so that each book [will] contribute not only to a better understanding of fiction, but also a better understanding of the art of essay writing and literary criticism in Canada” (p.7). In both of these aims, this volume seems to me to succeed admirably.

Present Tense is devoted to the work of a group of novelists whom editor John Moss describes as contemporary and postmodern, observing that while, historically, all belong to the postmodern period, “critically... the term ‘postmodern’ carries with it certain criteria to which not all of these writers subscribe or conform” (p. 10). Postmodernism, he suggests, “allows opposing realities to be simultaneously present and equally true. It embodies the purposeful breakdown of those conventions of time, place and causality which we have previously thought to be the common links between actual and narrative worlds” (p.13).

Moss’s definition receives amplification and extended illustration in his essay (the last in the volume), which compares George Bowering’s Burning Water and Robert Kroetsch’s Badlands and finds that both authors are “postmodern” in their demand that “we wrestle free of print, the false and narrow dictates of narrative reality.” “Both Kroetsch and Bowering are determined... to break us free of linear time and our obsession with the present moment as the culmination of an historical sequence, as if... reality were the text” (p.258).

Both Smaro Kamaboureli (on Bowering) and Karen Germundson (on Kroetsch) are also concerned with locating these authors in a post-modernist tradition. Kamaboureli’s is a rather dense essay that utilizes the terminology of structuralism, while Germundson offers a broad view of the problems postmodernism addresses and its resources for doing so as a context in which to better understand Kroetsch’s work. “Realism,” she points out, “has proven to be particularly inappropriate, and what we see instead in postmodern fiction are magic realism, high realism, and other interesting offshoots which are evidence of a very different kind of perception” (p.236).

Postmodernism also figures in Ina Ferris’s discussion of Michael Ondaatje. Ferris observes that the hybrid nature of Ondaatje’s narratives makes him difficult to classify. Yet it is precisely because of this difficulty that he “presents so illuminating a case of the postmodern writer who characteristically searches for but distrusts narrative structures, who seeks to connect words and world but remains unsure of either term or of whether they are in fact two terms at all” (p. 74).

While neither Frank Davey nor Ronald Hatch specifically invokes postmodernism in their discussions of Hodgins and Gallant, the context provided by Moss in the introduction is illuminating for both essays. Davey focuses on Hodgins’s attempt to “honour the fragmentariness and confusion and subjectivity of one’s records” and his presentation of “myth and archetype as prisons which require life to be lived reflexively, compulsively, within closed dramatic patterns” (p.43), while Hatch sees Gallant’s work as an expression of “the individual’s need to create new forms of consciousness” (p.46).

Taken together, these essays (including those I have not mentioned) offer an exciting exploration of recent novelistic fiction in Canada. Useful as an introduction, the volume also has much to offer more experienced and sophisticated readers.