Challenging Territory: The Writing of Margaret Laurence

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.

Challenging Territory claims to address the “full range” of Margaret
Laurence’s writing, stressing her diverse gifts as “essayist,
translator, journalist, memoir writer, and fiction writer.” This aim
sounds promising in theory; in practice, however, it results in a dreary
levelling-out, an emphasis on the social and ideological rather than on
the imaginative and creative. Many of the contributors (there are 12 in
all) seem naively unaware of the extent to which they are parroting the
stock responses of their age rather than providing anything new or
(despite the title) challenging.

There are, to be sure, several useful essays here. The editor provides
a thoughtful discussion of A Bird in the House in relation to the
recurrent subject of mourning for the dead; Nora Foster Stovel makes
some pertinent comments on the connections between A Jest of God and The
Fire-Dwellers; Dick Harrison juxtaposes The Diviners with an American
western novel, Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose (though the
comparison is not, I think, to Laurence’s advantage); and Donna Xiques
makes a solid contribution to scholarship by unearthing Laurence’s
early Winnipeg journalism (though I wish space had been found for a
bibliographical listing, at least of the articles pertaining to cultural
subjects).

The rest are both depressing and forecastable. Many of them take up
either a postcolonial or a feminist stance, doling out brownie-points to
Laurence for her ideological acceptability. In the process she is nailed
down to a procrustean bed of political correctness. The novels are
quarried not for their artistic qualities (such an approach is, indeed,
condemned as “formal” and lacking in proper commitment), but for the
message that can be extracted from them. This blunt insensitivity to
artistry is reflected in the monotony of the rhetorical style, replete
with all its contemporary clichés and buzzwords (“patriarchal,”
“imperialist,” “racist,” marginalized,” and the like).

This collection may well be regarded as a representative specimen of
literary criticism in the late 1990s, but that is not, alas, a
compliment.