Paulette Jiles's Transnational Railway Ride: Generic Change and Economic Exchange inSitting in the Club Car Drinking Rum and Karma-Kola

Abstract

Paulette Jiles's Sitting in the Club Car Drinking Rum and Karma-Kola: A Manual of Etiquette for Ladies Crossing Canada by Train deserves serious attention for its interrogation of Canadian-U.S. borders. The book's playful, transgressive stance has drawn attention away from the ways in which it speaks to a very specific moment in Canadian cultural debate. Yet, as Linda Hutcheon argued in 1988, shortly after this text was published, feminism and postcolonialism are terms that frequently align themselves in Canadian writing through parodic textual interventions such as this, which both create distance from and acknowledge complicity with dominant literary forms and cultural influences (1988, 6). This essay seeks to read Jiles's text historically and politically by situating its generic play, its parody, and its inscriptions of both gender and nation at a specific point in Canadian history. Read as a feminist and postcolonial engagement with the debates over Canadian cultural and economic autonomy, the book can be understood as a noteworthy intervention in the controversy over the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA) that was in full swing when the book was published. Jiles's text takes its protagonist, a woman referred to only as on that quintessentially Canadian railway ride across the country from Vancouver, through the Rockies, across the prairies, through the Canadian shield, to Montreal. Our Heroine, however, is a U.S. citizen who boarded at Seattle, a perpetrator of credit card fraud worth fifty thousand dollars who has jumped the border in an attempt to escape. Her train is joined early on at China Bar by a Canadian skip-tracer who seeks, in the course of the journey across the country, to determine whether is the woman he seeks. The book is lyrical, elliptical, and allusive, taking the reader on a complex textual journey in the course of which the text draws on myriad pre-texts including the game of Clue and Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1968). Sitting in the Club Car's preoccupation with categories of gender and nation is evident in the book's first paragraph. Here, in the Opening Scene, generic play engineers a sustained invocation and deconstruction of binary pairs of values that will persist through the entire text: She is entraining for the east somewhere, as Myrna Loy and Jean Arthur and Carole Lombard used to entrain on The Twentieth Century Limited, walking down the concrete beside the large cars-- minor characters exiting stage left and arriving stage right--with matching luggage and a hat with feathers and a porter reaching for her bags. You've seen it a million times in black and white: steam whistling out from between the teeth of the wheels, very swank and pre-bomb. She's finding it easier to depart and effect closure, to become impermeable, like a trench coat, to not care about leaving somebody, to not care even if it was her fault (and of course it was her fault); finding it easier to cease something than to start another new thing, to leave America than to escape to Canada. (Jiles 1987, 5) Numerous paired values are brought into play in this paragraph with a poetic allusiveness and efficiency. Gender and status in characterization are evoked by the categories of female and male--in turn inflected by the contrast between gendered costume of apron and the trench--major and minor. The shift from the third person narration to direct address of the reader invokes the distinction between object and subject, she and you. The invocation of swank, and pre-bomb film conventions in a novel invokes, even as it blurs by the picture it is conjuring in written language, a distinction between different cultural media, as well as suggesting the historical specificity of such conventions and the nostalgia produced in an apparently belated era of post rather than pre. …