The Comic, The Centripetal Text, and the Canadian Novel

Abstract

T H E C O M I C , T H E C E N T R IP E T A L T E X T , A N D T H E C A N A D IA N N O V E L * LOUIS K . MAC KENDRICK University of Windsor X propose a modest realignment, not a redefinition, of the vexed term “comic,” from the perspective of postmodern fictional practice and with reference to some English-Canadian novels. The argument will be tentative and general in substance, both in theory and in abbreviated demonstration from selected narratives. There are few pieces of critical writing that deal with what I will represent as the measure of comic fictions, and a limited supportive commentary — which I make no attempt to include — from those writers considered to be comic novelists. Nevertheless, each character­ istically manifests that awareness of technique which is central to my re­ alignment. For Canadian literature as a whole the distinctions between what are called “comedy,” “humour,” and “comic” are unclear, and they are not enforced in popular appreciations and reviews, nor in academic criticism. In the latter, the nature of comedy as a mode is often defined only to confirm the prototypes of character and plot, themselves principally dramatic, sum­ marized by Northrop Frye most conveniently in Anatomy of Criticism. While the kinds and degrees of comedy have been argued in terms of aesthetics, psychology, linguistics, and literature, it is ultimately these models which preoccupy literary criticism. Critical attention to comedy invariably settles on content, not on technique, on plot, not on distinctions of rhetoric. Such attention often shows an at best uneasy understanding, or acknowledgement, of any relationship between a story and its style, a tale and its telling. In his article “Surviving the Paraphrase,” Frank Davey noted that “in its brief lifetime, Canadian criticism has acquired a history of being reluctant to focus on the literary work — to deal with matters of form, language, style, structure and consciousness as these arise from the work as a unique con­ struct.”1 Again, John Moss has recently complained of an insular Canadian criticism, of “schematic generalization” that assumes a particular orthodoxy and avoids “aesthetic evaluation.”2 While there are other instances of such * Originally delivered as a paper at the 1982 ACUTE annua,! conference at the University of Ottawa. English Studies in C anada, x, 3, September 1984 disaffection, or proposals for alternate critical directions,3 my approach necessarily acknowledges Frye in The Secular Scripture when, discussing the conventions of literary structure, he writes: “There is still a strong tendency to avoid problems of technique and design and structure in fiction, and to concentrate on what the book talks about rather than on what it actually presents.”4 My emphasis on Canadian comic novels is technical and stylistic; I wish to preserve the autonomy of fiction and not assume, or pretend, that it is otherwise an imitation of actuality. “Humour” has a longtime association with Canadian writing: witness such relatively recent and representative anthologies as A Book of Canadian Humour (1951), The Treasury of Great Canadian Humour (1974), Cana­ dian Humour and Satire (1976), and The Leacock Medal Treasury (1976), not to mention a host of individual collections. A sampling of criticism whose subject is the nature of Canadian humour reveals several persistent themes. J. D. Logan sees Canadians as unable to change their basically Calvinist or Puritan moral outlook, and as unable to regard life and conduct other than fragmentarily: “The result is that to them the part is greater than the whole,” and Canadian humour is “either hard and dry, like the crackling of thorns under a pot, or ephemeral and idiotic.”5 While these observations are important to our awareness of structural niceties in Cana­ dian fictional comedy, it is their notion of polarity in performance that is immediately significant. Lionel Stevenson suggests, more kindly, that Cana­ dian humour, with its emphasis on action rather than on character, and its undeveloped qualities of subtlety and insight, pursues a middle course be­ tween American exaggeration and British restraint. It is a hearty sense of fun, arising from genuine joy of life, including an eye for the absurd...