Presenting the Past: The Tendentious Use of History in Contemporary Canadian Literature

Abstract

Since at least 1970, Canadian writers have been working to represent historical events and Native life in their poetry and prose fictions mainly from a postcolonial perspective and metafictively. They have produced a broadly written fiction that is ideologically postmodern in its deconstruction of realist fiction's presumptions and designs respecting history, while in their interrogation of the ideology in received versions of narrative history they implicitly further their claim to a truer historical truth. Examples of this revisionist literature proliferate in contemporary Canadian literature, in works by every major Canadian writer of the past half-century. Apart from the politics of its implicit claim to historical truth, more often than not such art is lessened by sentimentalism. Two of the most celebrated examples of this continuing revisionist literary history are Joy Kogawa's Obasan (1981), which deals with the mistreatment of Japanese Canadians during and after the Second World War—their forced evacuation from Canada's West Coast, their internment, the confiscation of their property, and for some their deportation—and Rudy Wiebe's representative short story. “Where is the Voice Coming From?” (1982), which works as do his big novels of various indigenous people's histories of victimization.

Keywords:

• Historical Fiction
• Revisionism
• Kogawa
• Wiebe

Notes

1. Granatstein has been debated widely in various media, and engaged most notably by former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada Michael Ignatieff. See their opposing chapters on Canadian history in Rudyard Griffith's Great Questions of Canada.

2. With reference to this poem, Robert Fulford argued that it was King, not Scott, who understood the Canadian character (1984, 283–284).

3. The basis of Scott's dislike of Mackenzie King was the prime minister's alleged leaderless style, rhetorically his knack for avoiding resolution to national problems: “conscription if necessary / But not necessarily conscription” (60).

4. “At least” because in the first novel written in North America, Frances Brooke's The History of Emily Montague (1769), Arabella Fermor complains bitterly of the cold and its soporific effect on the development of culture: “Genius will never mount high where the faculties of the mind are benumbed half the year.” (130).

5. See especially his Foreword to A Red Carpet for the Sun.

6. Along with Richler's novel, there are Laurence's The Diviners (1974), Atwood's book-length poem The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970) and novel Alias Grace (1996), Bowering's George, Vancouver; a Discovery Poem (1970) and his novels Burning Water (1980) and Caprice (1987), Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems (1970) and In the Skin of a Lion (1987), and Vanderhaeghe's so-called Western trilogy: The Englishman's Boy (1996), The Last Crossing (2002), and A Good Man (2011). This sampling could readily be increased tenfold and more.

7. See Franca Iacovetta et al.'s Enemies Within: Italian and Other Internees in Canada and Abroad (2000; see also Iacovetta 1992); for convenience see Wikipedia's well documented article on “Concentration and Internment Camps,” especially its section “Canada”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concentration_and_internment_camps#cite_note-AA-10 (accessed 31 August 2011). Granatstein (1988, 104) quotes from a 1940 report by Hugh Keenleyside of the Department of External Affairs, “who was genuinely sympathetic to the Japanese Canadians,” as follows: “‘The police … are not in a position to ferret out the dangerous Japanese [of British Columbia] as they have done with the Germans and Italians’.”

8. Obasan was published at a time, the 1980s, when memories of ritualistic–that is, Satanic–abuse were being evoked from confused child patients by opportunistic, or misguided, therapists; Obasan repeatedly has recourse to therapeutic tropes and metaphors of recovery and healing; for example, Aunt Emily insists that “‘Health starts somewhere’” (167), and she is figured by the narrator as “one of the world's white blood cells” (35); and recall: the encouraged contagion of so-called repressed memories of widespread alleged sexual abuse led to the whole tragedy of familial suffering known as “false memory syndrome,” as Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham documented (1994).