Mapping Jouissance : Insights from a Case Study in the Schizophrenia of Canadian Drama

Abstract

To read is to compare.--George Steiner, What Is Comparative Literature? In The Map and Garden, John Vernon identifies two forms of schizophrenia that together frame most common features of twentieth-century literature and culture: one alienation of division, compartmentalization, separation (the map); other, absence of distinctions, compulsion to see world as inseparable, natural, erotic, and always whole (the garden). (1) Vernon's contrast of and shows a striking potential to absorb various contrastive analyses of English Canadian and Quebecois literatures, including double-axis hypothesis highlighted by Jean-Charles Falardeau (1959) in which English Canadian literature is seen to operate on a horizontal axis (individuals in relation to each other and society) in contrast to vertical axis (of man in relation to cosmos) of Quebecois writing; (2) Clara Thomas's characterization of English Canadian literature as masculine, linear, and Protestant formed under image of Robinson Crusoe in opposition to cyclical, feminine, and Catholic perspectives of a French Canadian writing dominated by fable of Precious Kingdom (1972); (3) Philip Stratford's stylistic analysis of typical Canadian novel as outward looking and preoccupied with realism and historical perspective in contrast to inward looking, subjective, and deeply coded roman quebecois (1986); (4) and McLuhanesque speculations on English Canadian literate/visual stylistics cast in relief against Quebecois orality (1990). (5) The map/garden axis also seems receptive to Sylvia Soderlind's at-homedness thesis, which contrasts absolute, almost sacred, identity between name and thing, and in Quebecois novel in contrast to English Canadian novel in which language becomes a plastic, though tough and resistant material that is separable from territory it un-names and names. (6) Noticeably, studies of novel have dominated comparative studies of English Canadian and Quebecois literatures. (7) In addition to numerous, most obvious reasons why there has been a paucity of research comparing English Canadian and Quebecois drama--the barrier, dominance of novel and film, lack of awareness of Canadian theater--we can add opposition of postmodern criticism to generalization (as risking totalization or essentialism) and to binary analyses (as rigid, biased, and exclusionary). Vernon's schizophrenias of map and garden resist tendency to exclude difference and alterity or to privilege a centrist or structuralist tradition. Relative to garden, map is a minor form, but Anglo-American societies happen to perceive it as dominant and central. Binary contrasts of English Canada and Quebec seem typically to apply privileged signifiers of traditional Western culture (and map) to English Canada--masculine over feminine, realist over religious, objective over subjective, individualistic over collective--but in Vernon's analysis, garden and map are not opposites, are not mutually exclusive, because garden includes and infuses all, including map. Though Vernon bases The Garden and Map on work of novelist William Burroughs and poet Theodore Roethke, both of whom have been diagnosed as schizophrenic, playwrights whose work I wish to consider--David Fennario and Michel Tremblay--strike me as models of mental health. What I wish to isolate in this comparison are differences of style, at once most pervasive and most inscrutable element of any writer's work. At same time, I take to heart Raymond Williams's claim concerning sociocultural change that the actual alternative to received and produced fixed forms is not silence: not absence, unconscious, which bourgeois culture has mythicized.... What really changes is something quite general, over a wide range, and description that often fits change best is literary term `style'. …