Canadian Literary Power

Lawrence Mathews is an associate professor of English at the Memorial
University of Newfoundland.

Canadian Literary Power comprises nine essays dealing with the literary
dimension of what Frank Davey calls “anglophone-Canadian political
contestation.” The essays examine such diverse topics as the nature of
Canadian literary canons, the function of academic critical journals,
the way in which the term “postmodernism” has been used in Canadian
literary discourse, and individual texts of Sinclair Ross, Margaret
Atwood, and Daphne Marlatt. But Davey’s professed overriding concern
is to promote and defend a “national English-Canadian literary
community,” defined as “a polylogue of strong, locally produced,
institutions, discourses, and practices.” He associates himself with
“the emerging discourse of postmodernism, with its program of
valorizing the ‘open’ in order to delegitimate hierarchies and
centralisms and establish alternate values based on regional, ethnic,
gender and class specificities.”

But we never find out what these “values” are. Davey’s project is
essentially negative: delegitimating the discourse of “high
modernism” and “opposing hegemony,” especially in the form of
“the approach of an apparently inevitable trans-national city [whose]
promises of gender, race, and class liberation [are] most likely
false.” Thus, Sinclair Ross is rebuked for endorsing “a putative
universal global over the local” in As for Me and My House, and
Margaret Atwood is contrasted unfavorably with unnamed “blacks, native
peoples, gays and lesbians” whose texts have a “moral authority”
that one of her poems lacks.

Gestures of self-abnegation abound. After convincingly attacking Daphne
Marlatt’s How Hug a Stone for its naively essentialist feminism, Davey
adds almost apologetically that “men’s stake here offers no ground
whatsoever for intervention.” Some “polylogue”! Similarly, after
documenting how feminist critics have misconstrued virtually all
commentary on Phyllis Webb’s work written by men, he concludes that
this is not a striking example of intellectual dishonesty but rather
“an understandable and reasonable political strategy.”

At such moments one wonders what Davey can mean by the phrase
“national community,” for what he appears to be advocating, finally,
is not the genuine “polylogue” discussed in his preface. Instead,
his “community” is merely a blank space in which monologists
representing various hitherto oppressed interest groups (“regional,
ethnic, gender and class”) can compete peacefully to advance their
agendas. Apparently, he thinks that this is enough.