"I Admit to a Slight Ambiguity": Reflecting upon Canada's Creative and Critical Literary Inquisitors

Abstract

"I Admit to a Slight Ambiguity":Reflecting upon Canada's Creative and Critical Literary Inquisitors Matthew Cormier The Search, Then and Now Acclaimed Canadian writer and scholar E.D. Blodgett wrote in 1985 that "one of the reasons the Canadian literatures are looked upon with a kind of benign diffidence by those unacquainted with them derives from our failure of imagination as critics" (63). Perhaps the "failure" to which Blodgett points lies in a matter of critical perspective: due to Canada's complex layers of colonial, postcolonial, transnational, multinational, and plurilingual cultural memories, to name but a few, its literatures have always been catalysts for questions instead of answers. Namely, the "search" in Blodgett's "In Search of a Canadian Literature" links to an idea of ambiguity (60) and is always the area of critical value for Canada's literatures, an area that should be celebrated rather than condemned. Since the establishment of a "postmodern condition" in the late 1960s (Lyotard) that still resides in Canada's literatures, the self-reflexive nature of Canada's writers of all cultural origins has proliferated and done immense work in posing, precisely, questions that attempt to understand-and, in doing so, construct-what being Canadian means in various respects. Other than Blodgett, the sheer number of well-known Canadian authors who have taken up these questions both creatively and critically speaks to the importance of "ambiguity," as Blodgett claims: Margaret Atwood, Robert Kroetsch, Nicole Brossard, and Thomas King are but a few of numerous authors of Canada's literatures that have written in both genres-critical and creative-to take up the ambiguous literary sites that they occupy. Each of these writers has enjoyed prolific careers that often span decades of work. Alongside their creative productions that are perhaps best known to public readership, these authors have also, throughout the years, contributed significantly to the [End Page 57] development of critical thought on literature in Canada. Blodgett wrote the influential Configuration: Essays in the Canadian Literatures in 1982 and returned to such broader critical strokes in 2003 with Five-Part Invention: A History of Literary History in Canada. Atwood, among other works, wrote the popular Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature back in 1972 before writing Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature over twenty years later in 1995. Kroetsch made an impact in the Canadian literary imaginary with his poetic criticism in 1982 with Labyrinths of Voice: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch and again in 1989 with The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New. Nicole Brossard has been a constant in the areas of postmodernist and feminist articulation in Québec and abroad in works ranging from her collaborative La Théorie, un dimanche in 1988 to Et me voici soudain en train de refaire le monde in 2015. King has been more critically active in the twenty-first century, beginning with the significant compilation of his Massey Lectures in The Truth About Stories in 2003 and more recently even in 2012 with The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America. This essay reflects upon some of the authors mentioned here-Blodgett, Atwood, Kroetsch, Brossard, and King-in a survey that looks back and compares their creative and critical bodies of work to understand the questions they pose, how they pose them, and how they relate to one another and contribute to our understanding of and ongoing search for the literatures of Canada. Blodgett the Historian: An Account of Canada's Literary Ambiguity During the 1980s, postmodernism in English Canada was firmly established as a literary force. Postmodernism's focus on aesthetics such as self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and fragmentation allowed writers in English Canada, from Margaret Laurence to Timothy Findley, to explore, as a particularly popular theme, the ambiguity of history. Linda Hutcheon famously studied this trend in her 1988 watershed critical text, The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction, in which she called it "historiographic metafiction" (122); as a fictional retelling of history, Hutcheon argued that historiographic metafiction "often points to the fact by using the paratextual conventions of historiography...