On December 31, 1970, Paul McCartney brought suit to end his partnership with the other three Beatles, making official what had already in fact happened. The four lovable moptops turned countercultural icons had ceased to function as a cohesive unit by the time of The Beatles (the White Album, 1968), with Abbey Road (1969) pulling them together only as one last defiant act against the dissolution embodied in Let It Be. And so “John, Paul, George, and Ringo,” for the first time in their adult lives, faced a future as something other than Beatles. These four young men, four Beatles alone but inextricably bound to one another, would spend the next months and years alternately shunning and embracing their storied past. Three ex-Beatles – all but Lennon, who was murdered on December 8, 1980, at the age of forty years – would continue to grapple with their pasts as they entered middle age and beyond. This chapter provides a broad overview of the post-Beatle lives and careers of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr, and considers their evolution as individual artists.

As it had been at the time of the Beatles' arrival on US shores in 1964, success in America was the “golden ring” of the entertainment industry in 1970, and was the biggest guarantor of success elsewhere. Hence, though occasionally referring to the British context and sources, the focus here is on the artistic evolution of the four ex-Beatles within the context of their reception by American critics and audiences. This chapter, alone in this book, is not about the Beatles. My purpose here is to answer the same question faced by Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr, not only in 1970, but for the rest of their lives, namely: what does it mean to not be a Beatle? This question reverberated in the lives of the solo Beatles. They were stars of the first order, and they – and their audience(s) – had to contend with the band’s highly developed image, one bound up in the imaginations of a significant portion of baby-boomers.

The record-collector magazine Goldmine has a department now called “All Things Elvis” but formerly called “Elvis News.” I once mentioned to a friend, much more a Presley enthusiast than I, that I did not see how there could be such a magazine column or much “news” about Elvis, who had already been dead many years. My friend looked at me as if I were crazy – how could I be so unaware of the perpetual flow of reissues, newly discovered recordings, books written by Presley's acquaintances, accomplishments by or tabloid stories about daughter Lisa Marie Presley, and developments involving Graceland or Elvis's estate?

Viewed this way, most of the actual, journalistic “news” (loosely defined) is about Elvis's aftermath – either his survivors or the latest product line extensions growing from his 1950–70s career. Another type of “news” is the abundant research (again, loosely defined) that continues to be produced by writers ranging from scholars to amateur memoirists to fanzine publishers.

There is, obviously and justifiably, substantial and ongoing interest in Elvis. The “news” about him is actually the discursive and commercial afterlife of celebrity. Elvis is no longer here, but “news” about him still arises, often in the form of pseudo-events and public relations.

George Martin, in many ways, birthed the Beatles as we know them. We know them through their records, not their performances. They arrived on his step as a nightclub-hardened beat group with virtually no studio experience and, under his tutelage, they became the musical group that personified the studio as an instrument. The Beatles’ first three long-playing records, Please Please Me, With the Beatles, and A Hard Day's Night, were a short ramp leading up to a colossal cultural shift. Astonishingly, they were all recorded and released in a twenty-two-month period. To examine those cornerstone recordings, we must first see how they arrived there.

The first experience any of the Beatles had with recording was in 1958, when the Quarrymen, with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Colin Hanton, and Duff Lowe, cut a shellac disc of two songs at a home studio in Liverpool. One was Buddy Holly and the Crickets' “That'll Be the Day,” a highly appropriate choice considering Holly's pervasive influence on the band. The other was “In Spite of All the Danger,” a McCartney- Harrison composition characterized by McCartney as “very influenced by Elvis.” To the participants, the event had a magical feel, as they now could return to their homes and play an actual performance of their own. Still, a professional studio seemed an unattainable dream, and they were barely beyond being just a scruffy little skiffle group.

Two of the most eminent post-Confederation Canadian poets, Charles G. D. Roberts (1860–1943) and Duncan Campbell Scott (1862–1947), were also innovative short story writers. Of course, innovation should not be taken as the sole measure of a new country’s literary achievement, especially when its literature already exists within a larger, established tradition. But artistic invention can signal a cultural coming-of-age as well as abundant vitality, as it does for the Canadian short story in this period. Roberts’s Earth’s Enigmas: A Volume of Stories (1896) was the first of his many collections of realistic animal stories, instituting a body of work the importance of which continues to grow. And Scott’s In the Village of Viger, published the same year, was paradigmatic for the Canadian short story cycle, a genre that has continued attractive to Canadian writers. Such late nineteenth-century short stories by these and many other writers – adventurously realistic with respect to nature and adopting the practices of local color fiction – were widely praised for their convincing representations of wilderness and animals, and for their attention to linguistic and other particularities of place as small town and region. The other major short story writer of the post-Confederation period, Stephen Leacock (1869–1944), is perhaps the most internationally popular writer Canada has produced, if for a conventional kind of short story: humorous-satiric fiction.

Indigenous theater in Canada, like its artistic counterparts in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, has become a significant force in the nation’s cultural repertoire over the past twenty-five years, capturing the attention of both local audiences and the international performing arts market, notably at major festivals. Not only has there been a rapid expansion in the number and variety of performance works created by Canada’s First Peoples since the mid-1980s but also a concerted attempt to develop industry structures – publicity networks, production companies, training schools, and research laboratories – that will ensure the continued visibility of Indigenous artists in theater across the nation. This cultural project has been an important part of the broader campaign by Aboriginal Canadians to address the multiple effects of European colonization and thereby reclaim forms of agency. The power of performance to expose and reconfigure social relations has been evident on several fronts, not least of which is the contested terrain of representation itself. As practitioners and scholars have observed, Aboriginal theater-makers necessarily contend – in a very visceral and visual way – with the particular burden of stereotyped Indigeneity that has accumulated over centuries through images of “Indianness” circulated in a wide range of pedagogical and imaginative texts. In this context, one of the key achievements of this theater has been to stage the mechanisms by which Indigeneity is constructed, envisaging, in the process, more flexible and varied representations of Aboriginal cultures and practices.

Introduction

In the terrain that would eventually become the Dominion of Canada, it is not surprising that the literature of exploration was written almost entirely by men. By contrast, canonical narratives of settlement were largely penned by women. From an historical perspective, Central Canada’s settlement literature began with the texts that were written in the first half of the nineteenth century to entice emigrants from the British Isles to the New World. According to Carl F. Klinck, between 1815 and 1840 approximately 100 “travel and emigrant books about Upper Canada” appeared in Britain, of which he distinguishes William Dunlop’s Statistical Sketches of Upper Canada for the use of Emigrants (two editions in 1832 and a third in 1833) as “the most engaging of the lot.” Also popular was John Howison’s much-reprinted Sketches of Upper Canada (1821, 1822, 1825), which integrates advice for prospective emigrants with an account of his own travels and observations. Eyewitness testimonials were considered especially credible, such as T. W. Magrath’s Authentic Letters from Upper Canada (1833), a copy of which was owned by the Moodie family.

The early 1830s saw the appearance of several important works of this nature, including the novels Lawrie Todd; or, The Settlers in the Woods (1830) and Bogle Corbet (1831) by Scottish writer John Galt, which reflect his experience in planning communities under the aegis of the Canada Company in the 1820s, and a tract by William Cattermole, whose recruiting lectures would soon entice John and Susanna Moodie to immigrate to Upper Canada. The generic nature of Cattermole’s Emigration.

The organizers of the 1967 Centennial of Canadian Confederation promoted greater cohesion across social, political, and ethnic tensions in an intrinsically pluralist country. Even after the Centennial Commission had ceased to provide generous funds, many Canadian artists were committed to this project, but it became increasingly difficult to avoid the question whether such cohesion did not come at great cost to too many of the country’s constituents. This was a period when Canada’s collective memory was questioned, cultural icons were dismantled and unified visions of history and the mythology contested. More than ever before, Canadian artists began to view the beginnings of their country critically rather than nostalgically. The “ghost history” that haunts Canadian literature in the post-1960s is the symbolic representation of those elements of the country’s society that were previously barred from consciousness, and it is appropriate that revivals of the ghost story have been a preoccupation in contemporary Canadian criticism.

The revenants include Aboriginal people and immigrants who did not it the two “founding nations,” as well as parts of the country – such as Newfoundland, the last province to join Confederation – whose unfulfilled aspirations illustrate the strains within the Canadian body politic. While as late as 1960 the historian W. L. Morton stipulated that “[t]here is but one narrative line in Canadian history,” literary revisions of history and myth have increasingly served not only to bridge the many divisions, but also to make them even more obvious.

To explain why the Aztec empire crumbled before a small force of conquistadors, Tzvetan Todorov opined that the most important cause of its defeat was the absence of writing in Mexican culture. The Mexicans’ drawings and pictographs recorded experience, not language, and so they lacked the mental structures fostered by phonetic, grammatically organized writing. Aztec leaders lacked the ability to perceive and respond to new situations which writing presumably creates.

It is tempting to smile and dismiss such an evolutionist, Eurocentric, politically incorrect view of a non-European culture. But Todorov’s bias, whether writing is understood as a transcription of language or a pervasive system of difference, is close to the heart (so to speak) of other literary scholarship. The business of literary criticism has always been the analysis of written texts. Since the mid-twentieth century the structuralist and poststructuralist leveling of all representative forms to language, understood in terms of grammar and writing, has determined the focus and premises of other disciplines such as history and anthropology. The classic distinction between savagery and civilization is presented as a technical difference between orality and writing, and some leading anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz claim to “read” culture like a document. Nothing has really changed, however: the wolf is now the wolf in sheep’s clothing; concepts of primitivism and savagery are still at the core of anthropological and ethnohistorical practice. Todorov’s study of the Aztecs is an example of the risk that an oral / literate opposition entails: by its logic, he is led to assert that Aztec leaders were culturally, even mentally inferior to the Spanish invaders who destroyed their world. “Know what [the writer] thinks a savage is,” Geertz remarks, “and you have the key to his work.”

In the decades following Confederation, Canada was a nation struggling to define itself at a time of economic upheaval, ethnic division, and political and religious uncertainty; it was both a forbidding and fruitful time to be a writer, and particularly to be a woman writer, ostensibly barred by her sex from political debate and self-display. Yet when Lily Lewis wrote for The Week in 1888 that “The time has come for this Canada of ours to be revealed by other tongues, other pens, and in other languages than that of the railway magnate or emigration agent,” she obviously counted herself and fellow women among those who would reveal the new nation; and her confidence was not misplaced. Women played an increasingly public role in post-Confederation Canada, contributing with confidence and authority to an emerging print culture centered in the newspaper and magazine industries and the fledgling domestic book trade. Amidst heated debates about the health of the race, the decline of Christianity, women’s rights, class warfare, and the Indian problem, the voices of women were not only tolerated but increasingly sought after for their social awareness, moral influence, and personal touch. Working creatively in genres ranging from the newspaper sketch, campaign speech, and advice column to the personal memoir, patriotic poem, and social problem novel, Canadian women crafted compelling personae who spoke powerfully and persuasively to a large audience, both at home and internationally.

In 1967, Canada celebrated the 100th anniversary of Confederation and to mark the occasion, Montreal staged an international exhibition on two islands in the St. Lawrence, the Île St.-Hélène and the Île Notre-Dame. Expo 67 was to become the most successful of its kind in the twentieth century, praised for a “sophisticated standard of excellence [that] almost defies description.” Described as “a multi-sensory total-environment poem,” Expo brought millions of Canadians and international visitors to a city said to possess such “verve and panache” that citizens from the more remote regions were carefully coached in the media on how to measure up to the place. A microcosm of global competition, most notably between the United States and the Soviet Union and their satellites, an encyclopedia of the latest technological developments, and a compendium of 1960s popular culture, ranging from the campy exhibits of the United States to a “color-splashed display of Carnaby Street’s mad-mod styles” in the British pavilion, Expo 67 was also a unique opportunity to see important collections of art both traditional and modern, for which participating nations had all but ransacked their museums. The effect on Canadian visitors and artists was profound.

“Generic instability is undeniably a fundamental characteristic of postmodern writing,” as Marta Dvořák argues. Given this instability, one might assume that genre theory no longer functions as a useful tool for interpreting the novel. However, Fredric Jameson argues that traditional genres do not disappear from postmodern fiction, so much as resurface in dissonant states of juxtaposition. Genre analysis takes on a heightened importance in this context because it illuminates the complex ways in which authors break down literary codes and force readers to negotiate overlapping frames of generic and cultural reference. This intersection of formal and cultural concerns can be illustrated by surveying two prominent traditions of crossgenre experimentation in Canada. The first combines lyric with novelistic techniques, while the second, which evolves from a different set of circumstances, yet enters into dialogue with the poet-novelist tradition, adapts dramatic devices to the novel. By compelling these dissimilar genres to intermingle, the authors illustrate how cultures interact in Canada through form as well as declarative statements.

Leonard Cohen

The work of Leonard Cohen exemplifies the poet-novelist phenomenon. A student of the novelist Hugh MacLennan at McGill University, and a Jewish writer in English who revered the poet-novelist A. M. Klein as a surrogate father figure, Cohen produced two landmark novels about crossing cultural solitudes in the 1960s. The Favourite Game (1963) depicts the attempts of Lawrence Breavman to break out of his Jewish Westmount enclave. Breavman courts WASP and Québécois women, immigrates briefly to the United States, and celebrates and satirizes his Jewish heritage.

Canadian modernism, realism, and romance made for comfortable, and at times, not so comfortable bedfellows during the first decades of the twentieth century. “A salutary move has been to circumscribe or define Canadian modernism in a non-canonical way – usually in order to accommodate it, at least partly but paradoxically, to its old enemies, realism and romanticism,” writes Glenn Willmott. Dean Irvine echoes this approach while also emphasizing that Canadian modernism has remained somewhat under-examined in the scholarly literature because of its hybrid attributes.

A review of early twentieth-century prose reveals a rich array of modernist forms, more specifically the exuberant play with self-portraiture and multiple selves found in the life-writing and fiction of numerous Canadian authors who lived during the modernist era. Their works may well constitute the most central and experimental articulation of Canadian modernism in prose, allowing authors to stage cross-cultural, controversial, and even conflicted identities – personal and public, sexual and political, regional and national. In New York, the influx of a group of European artists created an important ferment that stimulated radically modern expressions of art and literature during the First World War era; so too in Canada, the influx of European voices stimulated literary production and energized cross-Canadian literary and cultural dialogue. These authors play with hybrid genres, as well as exploring modernity at the interface of the textual and visual, thereby submitting distinctly Canadian contributions to the global movement of international literary modernism. A well-kept secret, this Canadian modernism deserves more critical attention.

In 1917 Canadian literature made its first appearance in The Cambridge History of English Literature as a modest twenty-page chapter entitled “English-Canadian Literature” by Toronto academic Pelham Edgar, along with a series of other chapters on literatures of the Empire like “Anglo-Irish Literature,” “Anglo-Indian Literature,” “The Literature of Australia and New Zealand,” and “South African Poetry.” Almost exactly ninety years later, this substantial Cambridge History of Canadian Literature, co-edited by two women scholars, with its thirty-one chapters written by a distinguished company of Canadian and international contributors, offers convincing evidence for the establishment of Canadian literature as an important scholarly field and for its current standing. Between then and now there have been numerous literary histories, encyclopedias, and anthologies in English and French, produced in a continual process of inventory-taking on the state of the nation and its literature.

Interestingly, these have been concentrated in particular periods of national crisis or celebration, notably in the post-war 1920s, in the decade of cultural nationalism centered on the Centennial of the Canadian Confederation in 1967, and most recently since the mid-1990s with its radical reassessments of the nation and its literary heritage. This Cambridge History of Canadian Literature is situated in the context of newly defined discourses of nationhood, national culture, and literary production which are both specific to Canada and related to larger theoretical questions which have widened the parameters of nation, history, and literature.

The history of francophone theater reflects the complexity of French Canada’s political and social evolution over the past four centuries. During the period of French colonial rule, most theatrical activity can be described as amateur performances of French plays staged in salons, military barracks, or collèges classiques. In response to Lord Durham’s Report following the Patriots’ Rebellion of 1837–8, native-born French Canadians began building a national theatrical repertoire by writing patriotic historical dramas. With urbanization in the late nineteenth century came the construction of permanent playhouses in Montreal and Quebec City and the founding of professional theater companies. This institutionalization led to the growth of popular entertainment that took the form of burlesque variety shows in Quebec French during the 1920–40 period.

Reacting to calls for change beginning with the 1948 Refus global manifesto and continuing through the Quiet Revolution, Quebec drama became part of the collective project of social and cultural transformation. The nationalist or identitary drama of the 1960s and 1970s, which has been labeled le nouveau théâtre québécois, is characterized by the use of vernacular language, experimental techniques, and political subject matter. The growing consensus on the need for a distinctly Québécois culture provoked an identity crisis in Canada’s other francophone communities, leading to the creation of multiple provincial repertoires of francophone drama. In the aftermath of the defeat of the 1980 referendum on sovereignty-association, Quebec theater turned from dramatizing collective political aspirations to issues more personal and aesthetic.

Between 2001 and 2004, the Bank of Canada issued its updated series of bills, each denomination depicting on its verso a collage of thematically linked cultural images, microscopically captioned with a brief excerpt from a literary text. The series, under the title “Canadian Journey,” aims both to reflect the diversity of Canadian cultural experience and to produce a sense of common tradition and shared values from within that diversity, so the texts chosen for the bills consist of poems – John McRae’s “In Flanders Fields” for the ten-dollar bill – or stories – Roch Carrier’s “The Hockey Sweater” for the five – that Canadians of any ethnic or linguistic background will likely have encountered either in school or in the media.

The two lines (like other texts, presented in both official languages) on the back of the 100 dollar bill are not so widely known, perhaps because they question how we can be said to share any such history: “Do we ever remember that somewhere above the sky in some child’s dream perhaps / Jacques Cartier is still sailing, always on his way always about to discover a new Canada?” This couplet is reshaped from the last six lines of Miriam Waddington’s poem “Jacques Cartier in Toronto,” from her 1992 collection The Last Landscape. Its inclusion on Canadian currency is significant not only because it honors Waddington’s significant contributions to Canadian literary culture, but also because it poses directly the question of how poetry and national history entwine.

Looking back to the late 1930s, the novelist Hugh MacLennan described Canada as “an uncharacterized country,” unrealized and unappreciated by Canadians themselves, while the rest of the world “had never thought about Canada at all, and knew nothing whatever about us.” By contrast, in the late 1950s he was speaking confidently about a national transformation: “There are many evidences that the Canadian scene at the moment can provide themes as significant to old countries in Europe, and to the United States, as can be found anywhere. If this is true, there is no need any longer to ask whether there can be a Canadian literature. There is one now.” This magisterial overview by the major literary spokesman for Canadian nationalism in the 1940s and 50s provides a framework for this chapter. These twenty years form a border zone between old and new, when the patterns of colonial Canada were radically disrupted by the Second World War, followed by the optimistic years of post-war reconstruction and attempts to forge a new national consciousness for an independent North American nation. Canadian Confederation seemed complete when Newfoundland joined in 1949, but the province’s discontent lingers into present-day politics and literature. Inevitably this was a period of conflicting political and cultural interests: nationalism versus regionalism, biculturalism and bilingualism; literary modernism versus traditionalism; voices of British-centered cultural authority versus the “other” voices of regional writers, ethnic writers, women, and French Canadians. Altogether these unresolved tensions produced a far more contentious and livelier literary culture than many historians have been willing to acknowledge.