The Margin Speaks: A Study of Margaret Laurence and Robert Kroetsch from a Post-Colonial Point of View by Gunilla Florby

Abstract

Book Review s The Margin Speaks: A Study of M argaret Laurence and Robert Kroetsch from a Post'Colonial Point of View. By Gunilla Florby. Lund, Sweden: Lund University Press, Lund Studies in English 93, 1997. 252 pages. Price not available. Reviewed by Frances W. Kaye University of Nebraska-Lincoln In this monograph, as the subtitle indicates, Gunilla Florby sets out to demonstrate how two very different prairie writers participate in the postcolonial enterprise of what Florby calls the “Second World,” the Europeandescended majority inhabitants of such former English colonies as Canada and Australia. While this provides useful insights into the writings of both Laurence and Kroetsch, it scants what would seem to me to be crucial to postcolonialism: indigeneity, or, in the cases of the African and Asian diasporas , bondage. Kroetsch and Laurence are both writing back to the center, engaged in a dialogue in which they fully own their blood and intellectual lineages to Europe, no matter how irrelevant those lineages have become to the “here” of the prairies. In this sense, they can be distinguished from someone like Thomas King, who is writing back against the center as some­ thing still dangerous to the cultural and personal survival of indigenous peo­ ple. Usages like Florby’s, in fact, have prompted King to announce that what he is writing is not postcolonial at all. This is not simply a semantic question, however, because Florby’s defi­ nition does not allow her to do justice to Laurence’s principled but difficult refusal to appropriate indigenous culture, or to either recognize how risky or Illustration by Mary Hallock Foote. Reprinted fromScribner’s Magazine 16 (Aug. 1878). 4 2 8 W A L 3 3 ( 4 ) W in t e r 1 9 9 9 gauge how successful Kroetsch’s incorporation of indigenous characters into his narratives and his use of the idea of the Native North American Trickster are. The greatest strength of Florby’s monograph lies in her discussions of individual works and her unraveling of the ways each writer writes back to the myths of Europe. She skillfully synthesizes existing criticism and points out how brilliantly and insistently each author has used and naturalized to the prairies the European metanarratives. Kroetsch writes an Alberta Odyssey in The Studhorse Man or revises the entire picaresque tradition in Badlands. Laurence gently revisits the stories of Abraham and Hagar, Rachel and Jacob, Prospero and Miranda, and even Agamemnon and Clytemnestra from a fem­ inist point of view, showing us that the patriarchy never has worked, “old” world or “new.” These readings, however, though they do deal with naturalizing old tales in a new landscape, are not particularly postcolonial. Given Florby’s relative lack of attention to indigeneity and each author’s treatment of it, I wish either that she had distinguished between the rewriting of the central myths of the colonizing culture and the two writers’ treatment of various events that do distinguish Canada as a colony or had dealt with the current heritage of imperialism in regard to indigenous peoples. Laurence has insis­ tently told and retold two tragedies in her Manawaka books: the story of Dieppe, a pre— D-Day raid on France by Canadian troops, most of whom were killed or captured (an episode that has continued to define for Canadians the sense of being “colonials” and expendable to British or American generals), and the fire that overtakes Piquette Tonerre’s shack, killing her and her two children, people who, because they are of indigenous descent, seem equally expendable to most of the descendants of the colonizers of Manawaka. As for Kroetsch, I wish that Florby’s study of his writing back to the myths of Europe had included some discussion of his section of Seed Catalogue that talks about the “terrible symmetry” of fighting back against one part of the center on behalf of another; there, Kroetsch tells the tale of his cousin, shot down while flying in service of Canada, allied with the British, to drop bombs on the city of Cologne, where his great-grandmother had been bom. Speaking to the difficult relationship between empire, colony, and the rest of Europe, this story deals with...