Elle

by Douglas Glover

  Behind and beneath the absurdities of the plot and the pyrotechnics of the prose, Glover explores serious moral and spiritual issues, focusing on questions of authenticity: “Is it possible that with the help of God’s light we can know the true substance of things, or is everything just a sign of something else? Or is neither proposition true?”

  Addressing such questions at their most basic level, Elle deals with the interaction between Europeans and the New World, but, as Elle herself observes, “The wilderness is inside as much as it is outside.” As an educated (mostly self-educated) woman, she is also acutely aware of her marginalization, with respect to matters of intellect and spirit, within her own culture: “Plato himself, after all, so little values the female receptacle for the soul that in the Timaeus he considers being born female a punishment for a previous failed life. I try to think: What did I do wrong last time to deserve this?”

  The narrative, then, becomes “the unofficial account of an anti-quest,” a counter statement to triumphalist accounts of European appropriation of the New World, the contents of which are invariably self-servingly arbitrary in any case:

  On his first voyage past Newfoundland, M. Cartier met a fishing ship from La Rochelle sailing in the opposite direction. He reported, not that these sailors had discovered the New World before him, but that they were lost. Thus he became the official discoverer of Canada, behind the crowds of secretive, greedy, unofficial Breton cod fishermen, unofficial, oil-covered Basque whalers, unofficial Hibernian monks, and who knows who else. (Not to mention the inhabitants.)

  But Elle is more interested in the collision of world views that results from the European intrusion. Referring to the aboriginals, she says, “It seems to me that their world is as much a disproof of ours as ours is of theirs.” As someone who lives out this contradiction in her own experience, she becomes, despite herself, an exemplar of a new way of understanding one’s identity and place in the world: “infected with otherness,” she recognizes that the mindset of the Old World, based on “a dream of order,” is made to seem ridiculous from the perspective of the New.

  Glover (mercifully!) does not fall into the trap of having Elle idealize aboriginality as a touchstone of the changelessly authentic. Instead he has her think clear-sightedly about the impact of her own presence in the world of her “bear-woman” companion: “I am the herald of the new, a new world for the inhabitants of this New World, as disturbing for them as they are for us…. She would no longer fit into the world without an explanation, everything would have to be translated.”

  If there is wisdom to be extracted from Elle’s experience, it might be found in such passages as this: “If I have learned anything, it is that the universe gives no clear word as to its state, that our lives are bracketed by fog. And yet there is no holding back. We change ourselves by plunging into the thick of things (a wife, a lover, a New World). We change ourselves or die.”

  F./Rabelais provides the literary expression of such a view; he has, Elle reports, written “a new kind of book; he makes fun of everything. But then he doesn’t. I know what he means.” And the reader of Elle will know what F. means, too. Glover makes fun of everything, including his protagonist, with her amusing propensity for “plunging into the thick of things.” But her own comic self-awareness, radiating from nearly every paragraph, somehow results in a paradoxical sense that she is, after all, much more than a target for her author’s ridicule, that her odd combination of humility, wit, and insight makes her more fully and sympathetically human than many a central character in standard realist fiction.

  Though Elle vigorously denies that her “narrative” is “an allegory,” it is clear that her own gloss on “the thick of things” encourages the reader to move in that direction. Every individual’s journey is “unofficial,” an “anti-quest.” And perhaps it is not possible for the (inevitably marginalized) anti-quester to return home as “a conquering hero.” “Instead… you become a clown or fuel for the pyre or the subject of folk tales,” fates that might imply a life of greater depth, intensity, and vision than those enjoyed by the leaders of expeditions and the governors of states.

  ***

  And, on the subject of allegory, it’s possible to see Elle’s story as a reflection of Douglas Glover’s literary career. The Maclean’s reviewer of Elle called him “probably the most eminent unknown Canadian writer alive.” Certainly one of the best writers of his generation, he is the author of some of the most brilliantly imaginative short fiction in the history of CanLit (see his collections A Guide to Animal Behaviour and 16 Categories of Desire). Though well-known to a discerning readership for those books and for his novels The South Will Rise at Noon and The Life and Times of Captain N., he seemed, before the publication of Elle, to have been marooned on the literary equivalent of a desert island.

  With Elle’s success, Glover’s isolation appears to have changed definitively; like Elle, he has been transported to a place where good writing may be recognized and celebrated. Elle won the 2003 Governor General’s Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In 2006, the Writers’ Trust honoured Glover with the Timothy Findley Award for a male writer in mid-career.

  The academic branch of the CanLit industry is also beginning to take note. The Art of Desire, a collection of critical essays on Glover’s work, edited by Bruce Stone of the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay, was published in 2004 by Oberon Press, which has also published two of Glover’s other books: Notes Home from a Prodigal Son, a collection of Glover’s own idiosyncratically insightful essays, and The Enamoured Knight, a meditation on Don Quixote.

  And what accounts for Glover’s long pre-Elle sojourn in the limbo of the “eminent unknown”? My theory is that his work is too strong, too original, and (often) too comic for what has at least until recently been identifiable as the taste of the Canadian mainstream. He’s a contemporary version of Elle’s F., his writing playful, passionate, and intelligent. Perhaps Canada is now ready to respond positively to such qualities in its nationally recognized authors. Perhaps a wider audience is at last ready to appreciate his work as Elle appreciates F.’s: “What I love about his stories: He writes as if he is never afraid of what he might say next.”

  Reader’s Guide

  About the Author

  Douglas Glover was born in 1948 and grew up on a tobacco farm near the town of Waterford in southwestern Ontario. He studied philosophy at York University and the University of Edinburgh and worked for several years at daily papers in New Brunswick, Ontario, Quebec, and Saskatchewan. He is the author of three story collections, four novels, and two works of non-fiction: Notes Home from a Prodigal Son and The Enamoured Knight, a book about Don Quixote and the novel form. His novels include Precious, The South Will Rise at Noon, the critically acclaimed historical novel The Life and Times of Captain N., and Elle.

  Elle won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and has been published in several languages. It also appeared on the shortlists for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Canada and the Caribbean. The Life and Times of Captain N. was listed by the Chicago Tribune as one of the best books of 1993 and as a Globe and Mail top-ten paperback of 2001. His most recent collection of stories, 16 Categories of Desire, was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Award and a top fiction pick for This Morning (CBC Radio), Hot Type (CBC Television), and the Toronto Star. His 1991 story collection, A Guide to Animal Behaviour, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award.

  Glover’s stories have been frequently anthologized, notably in The Best American Short Stories, Best Canadian Stories, and The New Oxford Book of Canadian Stories. His criticism has appeared in the Globe and Mail, the New York Times Book Review; the Washington Post Book World, the Boston Globe Books, and the Los Angeles Times.

  Since he settled in upstate New York in the early 1990s, Glover has taught at Skidmore College, Colgate University, Davidson College, the S
tate University of New York at Albany, and Vermont College. He has also been writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick, the University of Lethbridge, St. Thomas University, and Utah State University. For two years he produced and hosted The Book Show, a weekly literary interview program which originated at WAMC in Albany and was syndicated on various public radio stations and around the world on Voice of America and the Armed Forces Network. From 1996 to 2007, he edited the annual Best Canadian Stories.

  An Interview

  1. How did you first come across the story of Marguerite de la Rocque, and why were you inspired you to write a novel about her?

  I first read about Marguerite in Francis Parkman’s multivolume history of New France. He has about a page and half on her, and that was my primary source, though I did track her down in several other books as well. There really isn’t much to go on.

  I thought about writing her story because she struck me as one of those indomitable people I always admire, the ones who survive and even thrive on whatever life or history throws at them. Also, it was remarkable that she survived by herself when the large expedition brought to colonize Canada by Sieur de Roberval and Jacques Cartier couldn’t succeed. So that gave me a speculative line of attack. Why did she succeed when her companions died, when Sieur de Roberval’s colony failed? How was she different? And that led me to speculate that her motives were somehow purer, that she was closer in her attitudes to what we might call the forces of life, and this allowed her also to be more open to native culture. This fascinated me.

  2. You say in your Author’s Note that you have tried to “mangle and distort the facts” as best you can, and your novel is rich in anachronisms. What is your vision of the historical novel?

  There are two kinds of historical novels: one tries to tell the reader about a particular moment in history, and the other tries to tell the reader what history is. I write the second kind. My novels (I include in this The Life and Times of Captain N.) are a meditation on the nature of history and how it threads through people’s lives. I am not interested in creating a costume epic or an historical romance or a documentary drama. To me, people are like prisms, and history is like light shining through them. People are much the same everywhere and at any time, it seems to me. But history flows around and through them, affecting social and economic conditions, communal behaviours, and the ideas they reason with. The ideas history presents to any individual at a given time and place are especially interesting to me. Mostly we’re not even aware of how they come from outside ourselves and shape our lives. The old ideas or the newly fashionable ideas — they almost always seem to come from inside our own heads. In my novels, I am trying to remind people of this. The anachronisms are all purposeful. And some aren’t even anachronisms; they are just surprising facts. For example, the popularity of tennis in 16th-century France in Elle and Tom Wopat’s sunglasses in The Life and Times of Captain N. The anachronisms are meant to do two things: 1) startle the reader into a sense of the flow of history, and 2) make the reader aware of the way the past and the present interpenetrate one another (which is really saying the same thing in a different way). Ask yourself how aware you are of when the ideas you think with — that is, your beliefs and habits of reasoning — were invented, by whom, and where? What was it like before those ideas?

  When I wrote “mangle and distort,” I was being ironic. Elle is a novel; it’s not meant to be true. And the “true” historical accounts of Marguerite’s adventure aren’t very dependable, to say the least. So there isn’t much real fact to measure my book against.

  3. Your novel has frequently been described by reviewers as “Rabelaisian,” and the famous French satirist even makes a cameo appearance as Elle’s lover F. What interested you about Rabelais, and how is he important to this novel?

  Well, one of the things I like to think about is how the history of an epoch influences the lives of the people living in it. So I was very interested in what was going on in Elle’s mind as she set off for Canada. All sorts of fascinating things were happening in France and Europe at the time: the popularity of tennis, the kind of puerile medieval machismo of the ruling classes, the invention of Protestantism and the Catholic reaction to it, the invention of books, the transition out of Renaissance humanism into something more modern (including the invention of the novel, the form I was writing in). Then I noticed that Rabelais was a popular writer at the time and that, in fact, he disappeared off the radar (in terms of his biographers) about the time Marguerite de la Rocque’s adventures were taking place. Several biographers noticed the parallel between Cartier’s voyages and the trip west that Panurge and his friends took and suggested that there might even have been some connection between the two men. No one knows. This is highly speculative. So I was free to invent inside the gap.

  Rabelais’s famous “book” (La Vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel) came out in five volumes, and the fifth volume (Le Cinquieme Livre) was published after his death. Most critics agree that he didn’t write all of it. Someone patched together his notes and fragments and filled in the spaces. That’s where I got the idea that Elle could help him finish the book, thus, rather cheekily, giving Canada a direct role in the invention of the great modern literary form, the novel.

  And, of course, some people call my writing Rabelaisian, which I take to mean a kind of writing that takes a certain joyful interest in matters relating to the body and juxtaposing this interest with higher things to create a comic tension. This is quite true of the way I work.

  Books of Interest Selected by Douglas Glover

  The Voyages of Jacques Cartier translated and edited by Henry Percival Biggar (with an introduction by Ramsay Cook). University of Toronto Press, 1993.

  This book contains translations of Cartier’s trip journals for all three voyages plus some supplementary documents dealing with Roberval. The narrative is remarkably easy to read: it’s a snapshot of the first encounter between Europeans and Canadians.

  Pioneers of France in the New World by Francis Parkman. Little, Brown and Co., 1865.

  This book is part of Parkman’s multi-volume history of New France. Energetic, dramatic, romantic, and Victorian. A great read. This is where I first came upon the story of the Isle of Demons and the marooned young woman.

  The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought, and Art in France and the Netherlands in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries by J. Huizinga. Penguin, 1965.

  Introduction to Modern France, 1500-1640: An Essay on Historical Psychology by Robert Mandrou. Holmes & Meier, 1976.

  These two books were especially helpful in giving me a feel for 16th-century France — an alien, violent, childish, religious world. Fascinating reading.

  Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais, translated by Burton Raffel. WW Norton, 1990.

  Also, of course, everyone should look at Rabelais himself. Here is a good contemporary translation.

  The Conflict of European and Eastern Algonkian Cultures 1504-1700: A Study in Canadian Civilization by Alfred Goldsworthy Bailey. University of Toronto Press, 1969.

  Alfred Goldsworthy Bailey (whom I once met in the library at the University of New Brunswick years and years ago) wrote this wonderful book. It’s a brilliant and suggestive account of the history and economics, and tries to give a sense of how the native Canadians reacted to contact with Europeans. Well written and fun to read.

  Naskapi: The Savage Hunters of the Labrador Peninsula by Frank G. Speck. University of Oklahoma Press, 1935.

  This has great old photos including pictures of bear skulls suspended from trees — the sort of thing that made the world of the Canadians Elle encounters come to life for me.

  And a book I loved:

  Labrador Winter: The Ethnographic Journals of William Duncan Strong, 1927-1928, edited by Eleanor B. Leacock and Nan A. Rothschild. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994.

  Strong simply went up to Labrador on his own and lived with a couple of hunting bands, lived
as they lived. His journals are full of strikingly human material, mysterious, poignant, and real.