The origins of the French-Canadian novel and the construction of a national identity (1837–94)

If the first novels published in Canada were adventure stories with romantic overtones, the influence of the Catholic Church soon prevailed in reanchoring novelists’ inspiration in patriotism and landownership, ideologies rather more conducive to the production of historical novels and rural tableaux de mœurs. The principal concern of the clerical authorities was to encourage literary works that were completely distinct from the French novel of the era, perceived to be decadent and therefore threatening to the Christian faith of its French Canadian readers.

The year 1837 saw the near simultaneous publication of the first two novels published in French Canada, at a time when patriotic rebellions erupted against British colonial power. L’Influence d’un livre, by Philippe Aubert de Gaspé fils, recounts the misadventures of a naive pair who seek the path to fortune in a popular alchemy handbook. News items, legends, and local customs, depicted in the manner of Walter Scott, make up this flamboyant tale, which ironically suggests “l’extrême pauvreté intellectuelle de cette société anachronique.” Probably written under the guidance of the author’s erudite father, the seigneur of Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, the novel was not particularly well received, perhaps due to the confusion resulting from the unrest that marked 1837. The “Canadian chronicles” by Franois-Réal Angers, which were published in the summer of the same year under the title Les Révélations du crime ou Cambray et ses complices, take as their theme a spate of thefts, an act of sacrilege and a murder, all of which were perpetrated in the region of Quebec City.

“That makes it all the worse. If it were fiction I wouldn’t care.”

Fiction and history before Confederation

Although the events of history are always at the mercy of the historian, some moments seem to be worthy of greater investment than others. In the cultural history of Canada, the decades of 1760 and 1830 are clearly seminal. The first marks the end of the French zone of influence in North America as an extension of French rule. This is also the period when, in the course of early settlement, various visions of what came to be called British North America were put forth. While the country was to acquire such a name, the name masked a continual competition between the changing perspectives toward First Nations, on the one hand, and anglophone and francophone Canada, on the other. It was also the decade in which the printing press arrived in the former French colony. 1830 stood for the decade in which the argument, particularly between anglophone and francophone Canada, took on a more violent character and led to a series of decisions and compromises that issued in the Act of Confederation. It marks, then, the second major prise de conscience of the changed colony when, among other things, the efforts toward creating national literatures began to bear serious fruit.

Since the 1980s, life-writing has become a recognized and productive genre, incorporating the traditional forms of autobiography, memoir, journal, and biography as well as adding sub-genres such as advice columns, letters to the editor, obituaries, video tapes, performance, and online lives. As such, life-writing has simultaneously developed into a privileged form of self-expression and into a major field of scholarship. More than representations of self, such texts represent their subjects in relation to their cultures, tracing their interactions over periods of time. In the course of the twentieth century, these subjects and cultures were primarily defined with reference to a nation and its official language. A seemingly homogeneous allegiance to a national code could, however, not be fully realized in classic immigration countries like Australia, Canada, and the United States. Waves of immigration since the end of the nineteenth century have challenged uniform national credos and transformed mainstream societies. The end to colonial rule in Third World countries and the appeal of free economic markets in the First World have created new patterns of global migration in the second half of the twentieth century.

With the transition from a modern to a postmodern age, the processes of acculturation changed from the demands of assimilation to the recognition of cultural differences. The long-held belief in a monocultural model of society gave way to the reality of multicultural nations. Canada is one of the few countries which has officially recognized her cultural heritage of immigrants by adding the Multiculturalism Act to her Constitution in 1988. Forms of life-writing which have appeared since then affirm the spirit of this legislation, though they often relate stories of discrimination of past and present in different cultures.

In the late 1860s and 1870s publishers and writers in the new Dominion were paying close attention to the dramatic changes affecting the conditions of print culture. Many were industrial and had international implications; collectively, they created a new range of opportunities to be tested and exploited. This chapter considers various ways in which, quite apart from the vexing matter of copyright protection, these new conditions affected Canadian writers and publishers. By the 1880s, in fact, the era of the bestseller had dawned and the scramble to profit from new publishing opportunities was evident both in the United States and Canada.

In the wake of the American Civil War, it was clear that, in New York and Boston, newspapers, magazines, and books were being printed faster and in much greater volume than ever before. Technical improvements abounded. Paper was cheaper, automated typesetting was increasingly efficient, woodcuts were being integrated more effectively (the application of photographs was imminent), and large steam presses meant printing forms could operate day and night. Distribution was faster and advertising aggressive both within the printed text and by agents seeking to develop national markets. Newspaper production and book publishing could now occur on an unprecedented scale and at much reduced costs per unit. As well, in the northeastern United States large niche markets were opening up and expanding, although the conservative media of the time deemed much of this new production cheap and merely popular – that is, non-literary and of lesser consequence than traditional publications.

At the close of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, which gave England almost total control of the continent of North America until the American Revolution, only a handful of English administered a newly conquered population of 60,000 French Canadians. It has been asserted that this period witnessed “a literature of information rather than a literature of imagination.” It is indeed for its documentary qualities that certain critics appreciate The History of Emily Montague (1769), published in England but nonetheless the earliest novel to emanate from the North American continent. The quality of its descriptions of the Kamouraska region has effectively incited critics to treat it as travel literature. Yet the writer Frances Brooke (1724–89) undeniably reconfigured the topography, institutions, and social interactions of the French and English elites in the newly acquired colony of what is today Quebec, struggling notably, as Susanna Moodie would, with the gap between Old World diction and decorum, and New World landscape – the embodiment of Burkean sublimity.

The History of Emily Montague

Moving in the literary circles of Samuel Richardson, Samuel Johnson, and Fanny Burney, Mrs. Brooke was an established editor, translator, playwright, and novelist (The History of Lady Julia Mandeville, 1763) before leaving England to reside in Quebec City in 1763. As well as a travel book intended for an English readership in search of exotic settings and mores, Emily Montague has been labelled a romance (although almost totally devoid of the conventional melodramatic trappings the genre had adopted), a novel of sentiment, or a novel of manners, and the book has often been reduced to an uneventful love story.

The Super Heroes Stamp Pack issued by Canada Post on October 2, 1995 sported the likeness of Superman, the quintessential American superhero. It may have seemed a prank to many Canadians but it was actually a quirk of fate: Superman’s co-creator Joseph Shuster (1914–92) was born in Toronto and moved with his family to Cleveland at age ten. Much later, in the 1960s, Mordecai Richler interpreted the “Man from Krypton” as a metaphor of the “Canadian psyche,” that is, a convenient self-image for individuals with great abilities yet content to live under the disguise of a self-effacing alter ego.

However debatable Richler’s tongue-in-cheek contention may be, it at least implies that comics are no different from any other narrative species: they simultaneously tell stories and impart collective representations. Today’s Canadians are often unaware of their country’s comic art heritage – they know at best that Lynn Johnston, the author of the long-running soap-opera-cum-sitcom newspaper comic-strip “For Better or For Worse” (since 1979) is one of them. And yet, from the political commentaries of editorial cartoons to the escapism of twentieth-century comic strips to the mature creativity of present-day graphic novels, English-language comics and French-language bande dessinée have been vivid elements in the landscape of Canadian news and entertainment media since the mid-nineteenth century.

The problem

The early globalization of New France, its evangelization and exploration, after a few years in Acadia, began in earnest in the 1630s, the same decade in which the Jesuit-trained René Descartes’s Discours de la méthode appeared, a text that formed the foundation of modern, rationalist philosophy. Just as our world is post-Cartesian, the formation of Canada was earnestly its opposite, and their ideological differences form the basis of a debate begun in Quebec in the nineteenth century between the liberal, secular historian Franois-Xavier Garneau and the more conservative, ecclesiastical historian Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Ferland. Inasmuch as the liberal side has prevailed, the missionary work of the Jesuits and its written legacy, not to speak of their influence on Marie de l’Incarnation, tends to be put aside, as, for example, a recent history in English has done. To neglect these texts, especially the Jesuit Relations, simply because they inscribe an ideology that does not it the contemporary doxa would be to distort the sense of Canada’s arrival into history. It is to forget that, before the “empire writes back,” it writes; and by merely writing, it claims an ideological and discursive territory that extends well beyond its initial frontiers. That they have not been entirely neglected is apparent from novels, poems and plays such as Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, Laure Conan’s À l’œuvre et à l’épreuve, Brian Moore’s Black Robe, Archibald Lampman’s “At the Long Sault,” Delaware playwright Daniel David Moses’s Brébeuf’s Ghost, and E. J. Pratt’s Brébeuf and his Brethren.

In 1965, recognizing that publishers had released relatively few short story collections during the previous decade, the Literary History of Canada predicted that the genre was dying. Instead, short fiction thrived, copious and flexible. By the first decade of the twenty-first century approximately fifty collections were appearing every year, the increase in numbers coinciding with social growth, changes in the means of production, and extended critical attention. While markets for the genre remained fragile, short fiction nevertheless became more visible and more varied, with publishers seeking further ways to attract commercial attention and new writers keen to address readers in a different manner and voice. New stories ranged widely in subject and form: from Alice Munro’s Altmanesque collections, where western Ontario radiates into story-making, to Rohinton Mistry’s layered sequence set in Toronto and Bombay; from Alistair MacLeod’s memorializing Cape Breton cadences to the serious comedy of Austin Clarke and Thomas King; from Mavis Gallant’s and Guy Vanderhaeghe’s dances with temporality to the rhetorical adventures of Audrey Thomas, Tamas Dobozy, Mark Anthony Jarman, Douglas Glover, Thomas Wharton, and Lisa Moore. Numerous writers, such as Nancy Lee, Rachel Wyatt, Jack Hodgins, and Bill Gaston, dramatized the particularity of gender, place, and social politics. Some, such as Olive Senior, Adam Lewis Schroeder, and Joseph Boyden, focused on issues relating to ethnic and colonial history. Still others – among them Elizabeth Brewster, Kristjana Gunnars, Timothy Findley, Barry Dempster, Ken Mitchell, Mark Frutkin, and David Watmough – established their primary reputation with their poems, plays, or novels, but also published noteworthy collections of stories. The history of the genre during these decades thus demonstrates a series of differing designs, due in part to radical changes in technology, strategic developments in the publishing industry, and the emergence of succeeding generations of writers, all coping with the demands of the medium and the institutions of communication, and eager to express their understanding of their own time in the world.

What is here?

“Science does not always appear, as on the present occasion, in holiday attire,” Mr. William Dawson, the Principal of McGill College, warned the members of the Montreal Society of Natural History and assorted guests on a May evening in 1856. More than 150 ladies and gentlemen, the “elite of the city and neighborhood,” had shown up for the soirée the society had organized in honor of Sir William Logan, the Director of the Geological Survey of Canada. The guests were having fun. After the requisite speeches, they inspected the museum, peered through three powerful microscopes that had been set up for their amusement, and partook of the refreshments in the library. But now it was Mr. Dawson’s turn. Science, he declared, means sacrifice. “It scales every mountain, gropes in every mine, toils through every wilderness, boils its camp kettle by all streams, pores over the minutest objects, anatomises the least agreeable creatures, stifles itself in laboratory fumes, breaks stones like a road maker, and carries loads like a porter.” A true scientist, Mr. Dawson added, is someone people look at and say: “[He] has seen better days.” As if he realized that he wasn’t about to convert anyone in the audience who wasn’t already a scientist, he quickly shifted gears: really, what he meant was that science was, above all, a way of getting people to talk to each other – which was precisely the purpose of a fine natural history society like the present one. Just in time.

In one of his final interviews, Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911–80) reflected on the people who had strongly influenced him. Harold Adams Innis (1894–1952), McLuhan claimed, “is the only man since the beginning of literacy 2,400 years ago who ever studied the effects of technology, and I think that is an amazing thing in view of the numbers of great minds that had this opportunity. He’s the only human being that ever studied the effects of literacy on the people who were literate.”

Harold Innis

A rural southwestern Ontarian by birth and upbringing, Innis graduated from McMaster University in History and Political Economy (BA, 1916), then enlisted and was sent overseas; the war in Europe was, for him, a deeply moral cause. “If I had no faith in Christianity I don’t think I would go, but it is as He said, you must desert everything take up the cross and follow me,” he wrote to his sister. The experience of the horrors of war, however, left him an avowed agnostic, robbing him of his Baptist faith and his plan to become a preacher.

Innis returned to McMaster for his master’s degree in Political Economy (1918), then went to the University of Chicago for his doctorate (1920). Under his supervisor, the economic historian Chester Whitney Wright, he wrote as his thesis, “A History of the Canadian Pacific Railway.” Although employment offers came his way, he declined these “on a chance that a Canadian university will send in an application.”

In the last decades of the twentieth century, English Canadian and Québécois literature became increasingly defined by their relations to a world much larger than Britain, France, and the United States. How those other languages, races, and cultural traditions manifest themselves in Canada is commonly called “multiculturalism.” How English Canada and Quebec locate themselves in relation to other places and cultural traditions is called “globalization.” There is, however, another definition of “globalization,” equally common but with the opposite meaning, which refers to increasing cultural homogenization and subordination to the English language and international capital. Both definitions must be remembered for both express a truth.

Different kinds of difference

This chapter will discuss the authors from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean most responsible for making literature in Canada multicultural, but, in order to establish a context, we must first make some important distinctions. The presence of other languages and races in Canada is nothing new: Canada has always imported cheap labour to do the work English Canadians did not want to do, and immigration is central to the nation’s self-definition as a place that people choose to come to. English Canadian literature has long included writers from ethnic minorities, such as Mordecai Richler and Rudy Wiebe, but their presence did not make that canon multicultural in the way it has so resoundingly become. As long as decolonization and the forging of a national identity were the great projects of literature in both French and English, as they were until the 1970s, the experience of people who spoke other languages, looked different, or did not identify with the national history could be ignored.

Describing her first encounters with contemporary Indigenous literature in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Okanagan writer and educator Jeannette Armstrong remembers listening to Duke Redbird read his poems on CBC radio, or hunting through Indian newspapers to search out poems “scattered like gems” in their pages. To her, these works reflected “[n]ot unrequited love and romance, not longing for motherland, not taming the wilderness nor pastoral beauty … nor placing the immigrant self,” standard themes of Canadian literary criticism at the time, but rather “our own collective colonized heritage of loss, pain, anger and resistance, and of our pride and identity as Native.” Armstrong defines the early stages of a literature in Canada which is not synonymous with Canadian literature, although it has developed side by side with other contemporary Canadian writing.

In saying what Indigenous literature in the 1970s was not, she implies particular relationships to self and community, history and political power, land and story. Her comments also evoke a heady time of protest, of Black and Chicano pride imported from south of the border, and of an intense search for cultural alternatives – taken on by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians – towards a white, Anglo-Saxon, middle-class society that often saw its own assumptions as universal, or, if it acknowledged difference, as superior. Since then, Canadian literature has branched into many literatures, forms and perspectives. Contributing its own richness, Indigenous literature has also flourished, yet it remains inextricably involved with survival. It addresses Canadian readers of all backgrounds, exposing profound and subtle effects of colonialism and offering alternative points of view.

Canadian theater historiography

Theater, like historiography, is a process of analyzing and evaluating a society’s past and present. It articulates particular places and times to address private and public issues that may transcend these particularities, and helps to shape the society it reflects. Theater history can be read as voicing a national narrative or as countering a national narrative, as culturally validating or iconoclastic. In Canada, where a vast and diverse geographical and social landscape challenges imaginative configuration, theater has developed in diverse communities which resist the imposition of a cultural center. A persistent loyalty to local and regional place troubles the imperative to articulate a coherent national identity. Nor should Canadian theater be read in evolutionary terms, as a chronological development through clearly discernible phases. Its origins and forms speak to its collaborative, dynamic, amorphous, and performative nature.

Theatrical ritual and performance have existed in Canada long before colonization in the form of First Nations ceremony and dance. However, these Indigenous performances have been occluded by a long-standing historical assumption that the first performance was a Masque entitled Le Théâtre de Neptune en la Nouvelle France at Port Royal, Acadia (now Nova Scotia), written in 1606 by Parisian lawyer Marc Lescarbot, and enacted in barges and canoes by voyageurs dressed in Native regalia to celebrate the return of a French official from an exploratory sea voyage.

Up to the middle of the nineteenth century, all travel reportage about the lands north and west of the Great Lakes was beholden either to the British Admiralty or to the large fur companies, in particular the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company. Vast distances, severe climate, and sparse population ruled out anything like independent travel or travel for its own sake. The naval expeditions of James Cook and George Vancouver charted the Pacific coast of North America during the later eighteenth century. Then, in the early nineteenth century, the British navy undertook to survey the Arctic coastline, beginning with the land expeditions of Captain John Franklin. The design and reporting of these expeditions reflected what Mary Louise Pratt has referred to as the post-Enlightenment “knowledge-building project of natural history.” Informed by a “planetary” sense of the knowledge-gathering errand, the ship-based scientific expedition “became one of Europe’s proudest and most conspicuous instruments of expansion.” Expeditions such as those of Cook and Vancouver included scientific specialists, and their elegant and prestigious published accounts were imitated by aspiring travelers-turned-writers, as the genre became one of the most popular and profitable of British publishing. Lacking anything like the support of a group of naval vessels, the fur traders who were almost solely responsible for communicating knowledge of the interior of the continent nonetheless aspired to publish “voyages” that shared some of this prestige and glamor. For most of the fur trade travelers, however, writing was initially a response to the record-keeping requirements of the large commercial organizations in which they labored.

In 1955, when she was about sixteen, Margaret Atwood announced to the other girls she lunched with at Leaside High School in Toronto that she intended to be a writer. Five years before that, Mavis Gallant had quit her job at the Montreal Standard and moved to Paris resolved to do the same thing. “I believed that if I was going to call myself a writer, I should live on writing.” The first story she had submitted to The New Yorker came back, she has also recalled in the Preface to her Selected Stories (1996), “with a friendly letter that said, ‘Do you have anything else you could show us?’” She did, and the second story she sent, “Madeline’s Birthday,” was accepted and appeared in that magazine on September 1, 1951 – it proved to be the first of over a hundred stories she would first publish there. By 1955 too, Alice Munro had appeared with half a dozen stories in such Canadian outlets as the Canadian Forum, Mayfair, and Queen’s Quarterly and had four broadcast on CBC radio, but her second daughter was born that year so mostly her time was spent being a mother and wife in West Vancouver. Her initial appearance in The New Yorker, the first of over fifty stories ultimately, would not happen until 1977. In 1955, Carol Warner was still an undergraduate at Hanover College in Indiana; she would not become Carol Shields until 1957, when she married. She began publishing poetry and criticism in the early 1970s, subsequently establishing herself as a writer.