Mad Translation in Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers and Douglas Glover’s Elle

Abstract

This essay discusses Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers and Douglas Glover’s Elle, two postmodern Canadian novels whose subversions and parodies of conventional realism, still the dominant mode of historical fiction in Canada and elsewhere, are intimately connected with their exploration of the foundations and limits of modern historical conscious ness. More specifically, my argument arises out of what I perceive to be some crucial similarities between the two texts. Both address the early stages of the European colonization of North America and the concomitant mutual exposure to the other of radically alien cosmologies: one oral, polytheistic, and tribal; the other literate, monotheistic, and nationalist. Both feature protagonists whose attempts to understand this otherness in its own terms—or to inhabit the reality of the other—leads to a radical destabilization of personal and cultural identity, resulting in a state akin to