New World Myth: Postmodernism and Postcolonialism in Canadian Fiction

Peter Babiak teaches English at the University of British Columbia.

Marie Vautier plots the characteristics of New World Myth—stories that
challenge European versions of Canadian history—as they appear in six
novels. Her emphasis on typology suggests an affinity with Northrop
Frye’s myth-based criticism, but she is decisively postmodern in
claiming that these novels “destabilize the traditional functions of
myth in their reexamination of historical events.”

Vautier’s theoretical assumptions—history is not objective,
identity is provisional, language is indeterminate—are too
predictable, but the strength of her work lies in its engagement with
detail. These meticulous readings are supplemented in chapters that
elaborate comparisons of narrative technique in English-Canadian and
Québécois novels. Thus Jacques Godbout’s Les Tétes а Papineau (an
allegory set at the time of the first referendum and told by bicephalic
twins) and Rudy Wiebe’s The Scorched-Wood People (a reconsideration of
Louis Riel as a Christlike martyr) are read with an eye to understanding
how first-person narrators confirm that history is the product of
perspective.

The argument underlying this study is that historical novels that lay
bare their fictional devices are symptomatic of the need to actively
reclaim the past. For example, in her reading of Obasan (Joy Kogawa’s
acclaimed novel on the mistreatment of Japanese Canadians), the emphasis
falls on how storytelling gives Naomi, the Japanese-Canadian narrator,
“some control over the hold the past has had on her.” Similarly,
Vautier sees the narrator’s reworking of biblical myth in Comme une
enfant de la terre (a wonderfully eccentric novel by Jovette
Marchessault) as a way of arming women against gendered conceptions of
history. That both narrators are female means that both novels offer
alternatives to “male-dominated rational and linear study of the
past.”

Whether Vautier’s study overstates the political significance of
literature is a question best left to critics intent on proving that
postmodern novels that relentlessly problematize history, identity, and
language can offer something to a world that requires measures of
stability. Her concluding imperative—“the need to acknowledge the
coexistence of the narratorial desire to mythologize and the desire to
expose the mythologization process”—is inauspicious, but her New
World Myth category will help us better understand literature’s role
in the production of social history.