Startle and Illuminate

by Carol Shields

  As it happens, I’m somewhat acquainted with what it feels like to be on the edge. I lived for a long time in Winnipeg, a large city, but certainly not the literary centre of Canada. Though I was born in the centre of the United States, it was clear that Midwesterners were, culturally, at the edge—only remember that famous New Yorker cover map of the United States as viewed from Manhattan. And also at the edge, in a sense, were members of the middle class—and this is a nice irony, the middle being nowhere near the centre.

  This question of edge, though, is problematic, for we have to ask ourselves how the centre is defined—and there are many centres. There is a centre we think of as the core literature or canon of the Western World, of our North American culture, of the women’s tradition, but we see that more and more of that core is subject to rapid meltdown or at the very least revision. Then there is the divide between the dominant culture and the marginal culture. The early settlers and the later settlers. High culture and popular culture. And there are geographic or political entities that, for historical reasons, remained detached, isolated, or else colonized, and where a national literature is slow to flourish or else develops into a sort of sacred amber pellet imprisoned in what is believed to be the national ethos.

  Having lived in Chicago, Toronto, Ottawa, Manchester, and Vancouver, I began to perceive myself as a placeless person, and naturally I wondered if this would affect my impulse to write. It didn’t. I soon realized that writers, even in Manitoba, spend most of their time sitting in little rooms with the doors closed, and that it mattered very little where they were as long as there was a place in their heads that could be tagged as legitimate territory.

  —”As for Me and My House”

  A Hungarian friend told me that, at the time he left Hungary in the late fifties—and I’m sure this has changed today—the national literature was so small, and at the same time so widely disseminated, that anyone who possessed a high school education was, ipso facto, familiar with the entire range of Hungarian prose, drama, and poetry.

  Part of me yearns for that degree of cultural saturation, a whole tradition compacted like a gemstone. Only imagine meeting strangers—on the street corner, in a bus or café, or at a private home—and finding that every cultural moment is secured, and refracted and enlarged, by common references, quotations, allusions, nuances, a body, in fact, of shared belief.

  Another part of me would resent deeply unity of this order. To be defined by a culture as tight and total as this is surely to be confined, and to be handed at the cradle the height, width, and depth of a national literature and all the conduits of connections therein, all the orthodoxies of genre and gender, the petrification of canon, the cross-network of influences—to know it all would be to confess oneself part of a moribund culture. And then, to go one step further—cementing literature belly-to-belly to the national density so that every variation is suspect, is threatening, is minor or anomalous or marginal or subversive or condemned to that variant stream we call, sometimes with reverence, other times with a rolling of the eyeballs—experimental. In other words, to make the centre so unassailable that the edges are hushed into silence.

  I’m more at ease with the rich variables of a randomly evoked, organically spilling, unself-conscious, disorderly, unruly, uncharted and unchartable pouring out of voice. These various surreal juxtapositions of life and literature, of time and place, of reader and writer seem to me to erase or blur national labels while, ironically, sharpening the particularities of the texts: figure against ground, ground illuminating figure, and contribution to my skepticism on the shape and force of a national literature. How fluid is it? Who gets to name it? Who gets to enter?

  And Canadians, these days, are directing serious attention to that very seething, smoking, chaotic multicultural muddle that is, in fact, our reality. This is risky; one almost wants to whisper: un-Canadian.

  Many of these works aren’t in the canon, which must now be redressed or demolished; some aren’t even in print. They are in an almost literal sense reports from the frontier, and the frontier has been shifting in recent years—in terms of geography, demography, gender, and certainly literary form. There are some curious lags: we have been for some time an urbanized society, but our literature has not, until recent years, noticed this fact, perhaps because most writers are one generation from the farm, from the frontier itself. Similarly, immigrant writers—Rohinton Mistry comes to mind—continue to write about their old countries rather than the Canada they immigrated to. It is difficult in today’s Canada to locate the mainstream, the centre. It seems we are almost all at the edge, and that edge embraces aboriginal writing, gay writing, immigrant writing, and women’s writing.

  It may be the noisy and varied writing coming out of Canada today that makes it difficult to compare that literature with that of the United States, but I don’t think such a comparison has ever been easy. It has been suggested that Canadian writing, reflecting the immigration patterns of the country, is more community centred while American writing focuses on the individual, the Canadian who are we rather than the American who am I, but this is extremely difficult to prove. Canadian writing is more sombre, it’s said, more modest, more self-deprecating, more moderate in its ambitions, but again, novel for novel, this is not easily demonstrated. What we can say with certainty is that Canadian literature is smaller than American literature and younger. There are nineteenth-century Canadian novels, to be sure, but not many and no great novels from that century. We can, speaking roughly and without stepping on too many toes, take the year 1960 as the real beginning of our literature. That was the year—just to peg it for you—when there were five Canadian novels published in English in Canada. Five!

  Today’s refocusing or defocusing of Canadian literature may be a reaction to our experience in the sixties, the time of our centenary, and the years that followed, a period of explosive patriotism, partly genuine, partly pumped-up boosterism, when we were persuaded to rush our literary impulses into a unified statement of national identity. We had a railway, an airline, a new flag, an anthem—why not a literature too?

  Many Canadians think now with embarrassment of this period, but most believe it was a necessary process. Extravagant claims were made for rather mediocre old texts—and for me the novels of Frederick Philip Grove are out on the marginal edge of the edge—and far too many new novels, volumes of poetry and plays were brought forward and celebrated simply because they contained—and this was and continues to be a catch phrase—Canadian content. Because we needed a critical language to talk about the new Canadian writing, theories were hastily concocted and eagerly taken up. These cobbled together theories became hobbling tyrants. The idea of the garrison mentality, for instance, which poor Northrop Frye mentioned only once and only in passing, became a verity, until it was, finally, demolished when revisionists began to pay attention to what our nineteenth century writers had really said about nature and society.

  None of this is surprising, perhaps, in a post-colonial country where writers had long been persuaded that life, real life, happened elsewhere. Susanna Moodie set her rather lugubrious novels in England, and in an England that had long since vanished. Hugh MacLennan was driven to despair trying to interest American publishers in his Canada-based novels. As recently as the 1930s and ‘40s, Morley Callaghan published some of his novels in double editions: a Toronto setting for those books sold in Canada, a Chicago setting for those sold south of the border. Gabrielle Roy wrote in her autobiography that, as a young Franco-Manitoban writer, she grew conscious of what she calls a worm in the apple, the feeling that she was so doubly at the edge that she belonged nowhere. And what can we say about a country whose bookstores still, today, divide their offerings into Literature and—a very small shelf usually—Canadiana; that’s where our novels appear side by side with manuals about how to master white-water canoeing.

  Nations are fortunate indeed if they possess texts—Huckleberry Finn comes to mind—whose spirit is universally sha
red—well, almost—and understood even by those who have never read them and never will. David Copperfield is, for Britain, a similar cultural key; touch that key and you stir directly into the available culture. We may not yet have in Canada such a universally shared cultural reference, though the name Hagar Shipley from Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel goes a long way in that direction.

  When Margaret Laurence said to Canadian writers if you can nail down one piece of this strange country, then you have an obligation to do it, she almost certainly was signalling that well known irony: that radical regionalism often produces universal response. People are bonded and nourished by a common literature, but only if it has flowered naturally, unprodded by politicians and flag wavers and the prescriptive notions of the Academy.

  In 1957, I crossed the border with my young husband, all our belongings, including an ironing board, packed into our six-cylinder Ford. This was the year of the founding of the Canada Council. It was decided by a number of concerned citizens, and with the blessing of Parliament, and with the help of a substantial and timely private endowment, that Canada, this country on the edge, could afford its own culture.

  We had at that time only a handful of novelists. Our literature, in fact, was probably a good deal smaller than that of Hungary, and there were probably only a few names—Leacock, Callaghan—who were part of the public currency. Pierre Berton had just begun his explorations; Juliette sang from the radio, and the Happy Gang did their gig every day right after the Farm Report.

  After 1957, perhaps because of the thrust of the Canada Council, or perhaps because it was time, regional theatres and symphonies sprang to life across the country. Art galleries mounted Canadian shows. Plays were produced that were written by Canadian playwrights; this had scarcely ever happened before. And librarians from Newfoundland to Vancouver Island began pasting those little red maple leafs on the spines of Canadian books, although I have to say that writers, even today, are uncertain about whether they applaud this distinction or not; certainly I can’t imagine Americans attaching the Stars and Stripes to their books.

  It wasn’t until the middle 1960s that I read my first Canadian novel, which happened to be Marian Engel’s The Honeyman Festival. Of course I’d seen Leonard Cohen and Irving Layton doing their shtick on television, so I knew there was some literary activity going on. The next novel I read was Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel, and one year after that, I found myself registering for a graduate degree in Canadian Literature at the University of Ottawa and beginning preliminary research on the Canadian pioneer Susanna Moodie.

  Both Marian Engel and Margaret Laurence were young mothers when they wrote their wonderful books, and they were assisted in their work by grants from the Canada Council that enabled them to “buy” time. I don’t believe for a minute that we can produce writers by throwing money at them, but the Canada Council has, from the beginning, established a climate of respect for the arts and those who practise them. Writers could be nourished both directly and indirectly, given financial support and awarded social permission to create novels that were wrenched out of the lives of Canadians. It was a gamble and it took time—though a surprisingly short time—and what we have today—our own literature—is as indebted to the Canada Council, as well as provincial arts councils, as it is to Canada’s position “on the edge.”

  In Brief …

  • Canadian writers should contribute to a randomly evoked, organically spilling, unself-conscious, disorderly, unruly, uncharted and unchartable pouring out of voice.

  • You can blur national labels while sharpening particularities; radical regionalism often produces a universal response.

  ~ 14 ~

  BE BOLD ALL THE WAY THROUGH

  JOURNALING PAYS. KEEP SEPARATE ONES FOR THINGS YOU SEE, the beginnings of stories, what catches your attention. Use it to learn how to write sentences; practise in a journal.

  Recognize clichés. Don’t use them or clichéd ideas, e.g., “All people in an asylum are sane; we’re the ones who are insane.”

  Set a structure. Sit and write a certain amount of time. Have a place to go and sit.

  Rituals are useful. You need time around the time to write, to get into the fictional world.

  Try to write two pages a day. Do your two pages, then go for a walk. Think about what you’ve written and where it will go organically the next day.

  Read what you wrote the previous day to enter the other reality.

  Read one page of the dictionary to settle your mind.

  Don’t write yourself out; write to the point of exhaustion, not past it. Save something to prime the pump the next day.

  Structure comes out of content, not the reverse.

  For character and plot development, don’t think it out, but let them evolve organically so that their growth is nurtured. Trust the first draft to develop into something thick.

  A story is something moving to someone else. That is all.

  There is one line that unwinds a poem. A poem should be a flash of a camera; some part of it goes off.

  The idea of rhyme in poetry comes out of prayer, incantations, ringing bell, hands clapping.

  Poetry hands people an experience they’ve had but haven’t articulated.

  For Gary Geddes, poems are little toys he carries around in his head.

  In poetry, avoid commenting on images you create.

  Use a thesaurus.

  After writing, ask yourself, “Is this what I really mean?”

  Every writer is troubled with getting what’s in the head onto paper.

  How to move an image forward: Ask yourself, what is the worst thing that could happen to this set-up? Have the telephone ring (plays). Have several obstacles, a range of them, to drive new narrative ideas.

  Some narratives move very slowly. Let them move at their pace.

  How to find the essential idea, something to write about: 1. Write down ideas, brilliant ones do slip away. 2. Who am I—self-discovery. 3. We always see narrative scraps around us to be filled out.

  Have faith in your own material, what passionately interests you. Felt passion makes it interesting.

  I have no idea what will happen in this book. It is a mere abstraction at the moment, something that’s popped out of the ground like the rounded snout of a crocus on a cold lawn. I’ve stumbled against this idea in my clumsy manner, and now the urge to write it won’t go away. This will be a book about lost children, about goodness, and going home and being happy and trying to keep the poison of the printed page in perspective. I’m desperate to know how the story will turn out.

  —Unless

  Alice Munro takes a simple narrative structure and gives it fullness. Learn from her. Reading her is as good as taking a creative writing course.

  Language is the most interesting, generating vocabulary, letting it flow. Let language flow out.

  Let yourself be as crazy as possible.

  Use what you know. Alice Munro hires a researcher.

  Everyone says the first sentence is the most important, but the truth is the second one is.

  Going from one place to another is hard. Don’t use “meanwhile.”

  Get rid of “just,” “very,” “somehow,” and “would” (which is dead wood) and “there” at the beginning of a sentence. Replace “all of a sudden” and “suddenly” with nothing or with “then” or “but then.”

  You don’t have to write every step the characters take. “An hour later” is sufficient.

  Leave an opening in writing; don’t paint yourself into a corner.

  Write long sentences branched at both ends and balance them with short ones. When you’ve finished a paragraph, look at the beginning of the sentences to see that they don’t all start the same way.

  Don’t worry about writing autobiographically out of fear of injuring others. First write everything about the person accurately, and mask it later. One can alter components of a piece after writing it. Robertson Davies, when asked why he was writing so we
ll into his sixties said: “People died.”

  How to give structure to so many lives? The answer is that everything, life, keeps going.

  The discovery that privately held experiences are real, this is what literature is about. We’re not alone.

  Alice Munro often transposes into past and present tense, back and forth, an effective way to get the best of both worlds. Use the present tense for a sense of immediacy. In Margaret Laurence’s Diviners the chapters change tense in a pattern.

  On appropriation of voice: You should be able to write about anything you chose. We need to go outside our own skins. The problems come when experience is falsely conveyed without accuracy and respect.

  Don’t put undue faith in the idea of conflict in story. That shape, like an upside-down V, is not real anymore. The new audience wants a love of text, character. Alice Munro is interested in the impulse of murder rather than who did it. You should be aware of the lives of characters, what they do, outside the story.

  E. M. Forster acknowledged that in any narrative there will be characters to be rounded and others who are flat; this is a convention we accept.

  Endings can simply go off spiralling.

  Although most good writing is done alone (and don’t for this reason take too many courses) consider collaborative writing, writing in a community instead of in isolation. A play in particular lends itself to collaboration. Work with someone who has the same idea of schedule and workload, but is different from you.