PUBLICATIONS IN CANADIAN LITERATURE
1.
From In Quest of Meaning, Essays on Literature
and Language, Prosveta, Beograd, 2002:
MYTH OF CREATION AND FRYE’S CYCLES OF LITERATURE1
Northrop Frye has designated modern literature as
ironic. It begins in realism and dispassionate observation,
but moves steadily towards myth. The five literary modes
that he outlined in Anatomy of Criticism,2 evidently go
around in a circle. The five fictional modes are myth,
romance, high mimetic – epic and tragedy, low mimetic –
comedy and realistic fiction, and ironic. The classification
is based on the literary hero’s power of action, which may
be greater than ours, less, or roughly the same. What the
hero can do or could have done, depends not only on the
author’s postulates, but also ultimately on the expectations
of the audience or the current convention that unites the
author, the hero and the audience. Frye’s theory is founded
on two opposing principles, the cyclical and the dialectic.
The same principles are inferred from the Christian myth of
creation.
The Book of Genesis3 describes how God created the
heaven and the earth out of chaos and darkness. Then he
created man in his own image, and made a woman out of a rib
taken from Adam. They lived in the Garden of Eden unspoiled
and virtuous, until the serpent tempted the woman, who then
tempted the man to eat from the forbidden tree of the
knowledge of good and evil. Their eyes were opened, they
were cursed with self-consciousness and knowledge and hard
labour. They simultaneously became rivals to God, and
parents of all living. The serpent was equally cursed above
all animals. As men became more knowledgeable they also
became sinful unbelievers. God had to send all sorts of
disasters to warn them.
The Gospels of the New Testament recount how God had to
send his only begotten son, Jesus Christ, to the earth to
save the people from their sins by suffering for them all on
the cross. The Gospels already announce that there will be
the Second Coming of the Son of God, “in the clouds of
First delivered as a paper at the Xth Symposium of the YugoslavCanadian Society, Novi Sad, 23-26 May, 1996; first published in The
Proceedings of the Symposium, 2000.
2 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, Penguin Books, printed in
England, 1990.
3 Holy Bible, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
1
heaven with power and great glory.”4 Then in the Book of the
Revelation or Apocalypse, a kind of the conclusion to the
Bible, there is the vision of the second coming, when the
door of heaven will be opened to show the throne of God,
accompanied by thunder and lightening and earthquake to
punish the sinful people who would not repent. The beast,
the dragon or Satan would then be confined to a bottomless
pit for a thousand years – to the hell that has so far been
rather neglected throughout the Bible. After the thousand
years he will be loosed out of prison again. The Satan is
also called “that old serpent”5 obviously the same serpent
that originally tempted Adam and Eve to self-knowledge.
The world of the Bible is thus divided into three
levels: the heaven, the earth and the hell, or the
habitations of the God, the man and the devil. Similarly,
human civilization moves from highest ideals, to more
realistic and pragmatic attitude, to total rejection of
faith, nihilism and irony, the result of “too much
knowledge.” Actually, it already bears the seeds of the new
feeling. In the similar way literature moves from
undisciplined myth, through romance and realism, to irony.
The naturalistic view of life, the product of devilish acts,
the desire to know all and to control all, has been used up,
there is no way of going on in that direction. Irony can
only turn into its opposite – the myth.
Literature is a technique of civilization, says Frye.
The communicable literary unit is the archetype, a typical
or recurring image. Archetypes, however, are expressed
through changing conventions or forms. New convention
emerges in response to the existing one. Conventions go
around in a circle. Thus the two principles, the cyclic and
the dialectic (ritual and desire) are closely related.
Ironic convention, including parody, the dominant genre of
our age, is often a sign that certain vogues in handling
conventions are becoming worn out.6 This is what we are
witnessing now. Modernist attempt to break off with
tradition is being counter-balanced by postmodernist playing
with mythical origins of literature. According to Frye, and
not only him, irony signals return of the mythical age in
which the artist, the hero, his art, the audience and the
global order were all united by the same “structure of
feeling”, to borrow Raymond Williams’s phrase. Desire and
ritual merged into one. Divine intervention as the source of
creation, and one divine will governing all life, was taken
for granted.
4
5
6
Ibid., The Gospel according to St.Matthew, 30.
Ibid., Revelation 1.
Frye, Op.cit., p.103.
In Frye's interpretation myth is concerned with gods
and demons. It takes the form of two contrasting worlds of
total metaphorical identification, one desirable and the
other undesirable. These worlds are often identified with
heavens and hells of the religions contemporary with myth or
literature based on it. Romantic myth is suggestive of
apocalyptic imagery. Ironic literature is more suggestive of
the demonic than of the apocalyptic. Sometimes it simply
continues the romantic tradition of stylization.7 When
giving an account of the two worlds, the apocalyptic and the
demonic, Frye draws heavily on the Bible, which he takes as
the main source for undisciplined myth in western tradition.
The only other mythical stage he recognizes, though not in
such detail, is also European, the classical Greek
mythology.
Apocalyptic imagery derives from the biblical book of
Apocalypse or revelation. The apocalyptic world of the Bible
presents a division into divine world = society of gods,
represented by One God; human world – society of men,
represented by One man; animal world = sheepfold,
represented by One Lamb; vegetable world = garden or park,
represented by One Tree (of Life); and mineral world = city,
represented by One Building, Temple, Stone. All this is
united in the conception of “Christ”, the totality.
(Similarly Zeus represented a single divine will). The
frequent apocalyptic metaphors are human society as one
body, sexual intercourse as “one flesh” (two bodies made
into the same body). The animal and vegetable worlds are
identified with each other, and with the divine and human
worlds. The forms of vegetable world, food and drink, the
harvest and the vintage, the bread and the wine, are the
body and blood of the Lamb who is also Man and God, and in
whose body we exist as in a city or temple.8
Demonic imagery, according to Frye, is the dominant
imagery of the current ironic literature. The demonic world
is the world that desire totally rejects, the world of the
nightmare and the scapegoat, the bondage and pain and
confusion. It is the world unrefined by human imagination,
the world of perverted or wasted work, ruins and catacombs,
closely linked with hell. Hence one of the central themes of
demonic imagery is parody, the mocking of artistic
imagination (of “the exuberant play of art”) by juxtaposing
it with “real life”. The demonic erotic relation becomes a
destructive passion that works against loyalty and
frustrates. It is generally symbolized by a harlot, witch,
and siren – a physical object of desire, which is sought as
a possession and therefore can never be possessed. The
7
8
Ibid., pp.139-140.
Ibid., pp. 141-146.
demonic parody of marriage, or the union of two souls in one
flesh, may take the form of hermaphroditism, incest, or
homosexuality. The animal world is portrayed in terms of
monsters or beasts of prey. The vegetable world is a
sinister forest, a wilderness, and a wasteland. The
inorganic world may remain in its unworked form of deserts,
rocks, and waste land. Demonic imagery also portrays
perverted work, engines of torture, weapons of war, images
of a dead mechanism which, because it does not humanize
nature, is unnatural as well as inhuman. Corresponding to
the temple of the apocalypse, we have the prison. The
sinister counterparts of geometrical images are spirals,
wheels, circles, and crosses. The identification of the
circle with the serpent, conventionally a demonic animal,
gives us the ouroboros or serpent with its tail in its
mouth. Corresponding to the apocalyptic way or straight
road, we have the labyrinth or maze, the image of lost
direction, often with the monster at its heart like the
Minotaur. The world of fire is a world of such burning
cities as Sodom. It is in contrast to the purgatorial or
cleansing fire. The world of water is the water of death,
often identified with spilled blood.9
The great precursor of the theorists who advocate
eternal recurrence in history was Giambattista Vico in the
18th century. Language tells us of “the histories of the
institutions signified by words.” 10 Society and art are
closely connected. Divine intervention is implied, but human
action is significant as well. The first men were savage
brutes who used mute language. They gathered together for
self-protection. There followed the “age of gods”, or
fathers, heads of primitive human tribes. Men were becoming
slaves of their protectors, thus began the “heroic age of
oligarchies, of harsh masters using poetic speech. Then
followed rebellion, which brought new rites, earliest forms
of law, and generated prose, which led to argument,
rhetoric, philosophy, skepticism, and democracy. All these
values in time become subverted again to the authority of
primitive societies, to a second barbarism of decay.1 “Human
history for Vico”, as Edward Said cleverly put it, “is human
actuality is human activity is human knowledge.”11 Vico's
theory is not so Christian, but is nevertheless patriarchal.
The father's place is unassailable. His cultural patterns
repeat the pattern of patriarchal family.
Ibid., pp.147-150.
Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current, Oxford University Press, Oxford,
1981, p.102.
1 Ibid., p.100.
11 Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, Vintage. London,
1983, p.112.
9
10
Western literature has gradually moved its centre of
gravity towards irony for the last hundred years, said
Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism (to “new barbarism”,
as Vico would say). Some other current philosophers and
critics predict that the twenty-first century will be the
age of gods. Nietzsche predicted the same hundred years ago.
He sharpened the ironic view of reality and created a vision
of a new kind of future divinity, a man who has perfected
himself to a god-like stature. Nietzsche's ideal was the
archaic Greek society and Dionysian tragedy as the highest
form of its artistic expression. Its ecstasy reminded one of
the oneness of all that lives. The Olympians that the Greeks
invented to interpose between themselves and the terror of
life helped them to endure it. According to Nietzsche, they
enjoyed the tragic fatality of life. The gods justified the
life of man. The existence and the world were eternally
justified only as aesthetic phenomenon.
It would be interesting to try to describe briefly the
present state of civilization and literature and compare it
with Frye's, and to some extent, Vico's account of the
turning point between myth and irony. It is assumed that the
parodic nature of irony signals its ultimate skepticism no
longer able to bear itself, thus degenerating into a new
form of “reflective barbarism”, gradually nurturing within
itself embryos of new myths. “Outlines of sacrificial
rituals and dying gods begin to reappear”12 Two elements are
necessary for the dawning of a new mythological age:
emergence of a new fatalistic divine order with its true
demonic nature hidden behind appearances, and scapegoats, at
this stage more victims than heroes. They are sacrificed to
the order not renew life, but because they do not fit. The
turning point between two cycles, the so-called
postmodernism is inevitably paradoxical in its nature. The
ironic simulated divinity is the mass-media world of
information, advertising and propaganda, and the world
modelled after the language of cybernetics and informatics,
which creates an artificial reality. This artificial reality
is identified with power because it means total control and
manipulation both on a small scale and on a global scale.
The individual is being forced into it. A fabulous new
mythology is developing in America as a focal point, and
gradually spreading world over. Baudrillard describes this
world as completely rotten (with wealth, power,
indifference, poverty, technological futility, and aimless
violence), yet one cannot help but feel “it has about it
something of the dawning of the universe”. It is so obscene
and obvious that it signifies a total collapse of metaphor.
12
Frye, Op.cit., p.42.
Thus it resembles primitive societies and provokes the same
mythical excitement.13
The language of advertising is found everywhere: in the
photographs of landscapes, in women portrayed as sexual
objects, violence as fashion, events as television.14
Propaganda and advertising, said Frye, are major arts of the
ironic age. They pretend to address themselves seriously to
simple-minded people, but the more sophisticated audience
recognizes it as irony or an ironic game. The power of the
mass media is omnipresent and it is seductive. In this way
it resembles primitive fatality. Seduction supposes a ritual
(not a natural) order. The work of art also has the status
of a ritual object. Seduction of simulation becomes
political: endless reproduction of a form without content is
an attitude towards life15. The convergence of power and
seduction cancels all dialectics. There is a tendency
towards mixing genres and genders. Neither masculine nor
feminine, a kind of a cultural and emotional androgynousness
becomes an ideal. The postmodern seduction implies a passion
for images that create a form of amnesia.
Art, too, becomes ritualistic in that it also simulates
total manipulations and control, that is, parodies already
simulated reality. Novels, Pynchon's for instance, are
never-ending labyrinthine structures. They seem to have
complicated plots, but this is only a game, a play of
surfaces. Paradigms of postmodern art are architecture and
film. Several authors, Jameson, Birringer and Baudrillard,
mention the Los Angeles Bonaventure Hotel as the most
striking example of postmodern space. Its interior is a
“complete world”, a “miniature city”, “new total space”
which expresses the new dominant cultural logic that lacks
critical distance and pretends to be a new kind of totality,
and thus close to being totalitarian. It is described as a
“labyrinthine mixture of parody and kitsch” which makes one
feel disoriented inside the simulated landscape complete
with lush vegetation, a miniature lake, and bridges.16
In the primitive mythology, pharmakos (scapegoat) was a
hero, usually a king, sacrificed in order to purge his
community of a pestilence or to strengthen the others. In
the demonic parody, says Frye17, he is a randomly chosen
victim whose sacrifice has no deeper sense. Who are the
scapegoats of the ironic age? All those marginalised
individuals and groups, among them the artists who do not
Jean Baudrillard, America, Verso, London, New York, 1989, p.23.
Ibid., p.32.
15 Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, St.Martin’s Press, New York, 1990,
transl. By Brian Singer, p.31.
16 Johannes Birringer, Theatre, Theory,Postmodernism, Indiana University
Press, Bloomington and Indianopolis, 1993, pp.6-7.
17 Frye, Op.cit., p.148.
13
14
conform to the leading ideology and, consequently, their
heroes, but also whole nations that do not fir into the
global order. Baudrillard also sees the woman as a victim
being sacrificed to the commercial civilization. In women
writing of today, heroines usually see themselves as victims
of two thousand years old patriarchal society from which
they are trying to step out, or have already stepped out and
are attempting to forge their real identity.
The most striking example of literary heroes as victims are
the heroes of contemporary drama, from Beckett to the recent
time. This type of hero is the heir to Kafka's Joseph K of
The Process. He does not realize what has befallen him, but
does not protest much, either. One of the most beautiful
dramatic realizations of Kafkaesque feeling is Harold
Pinter’s play The Birthday Party.
According to Frye, god as a hero of the myth, similar
to the hero of any other fictional mode, is what the author
makes him and what the audience expects him to be. Myths are
parts of the entire ethos of their time and place. What Frye
does not stress enough is that, although civilization and
its literature go around in cycles, and although there might
not be a moral or aesthetic progress, the important thing is
that there is a difference, a change. Each stage of
civilization generates its own art. Later forms are neither
better nor worse than earlier, but simply different, and to
be judged by their own particular culture. This is what Vico
stressed long before him. There is no unaltering human
nature, and no absolute criterion of value, thinks Said.
Values alter as the social structure of which they are a
part alters. It is nevertheless possible to understand and
evaluate each historical stage and its art by the special
knowledge, which requires imaginative power and insight.
Thus, although primitive peoples of the so-called “heroic
age” were in some respects savage and cruel brutes, we must
understand that they also were sublime poets by nature.
Homer had a “burning imagination” and his poetic characters
(gods and heroes) were “imaginative universals” to which the
characteristics of a genius were attributed: heroism, pride,
honour, anger, violence, comments Isaiah Berlin.18 What will
be the gods and heroes of the new mythology of a destructive
age is yet to be seen.
ALICE MUNRO, ‘WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?19
Berlin, Op.cit., pp.124-129.
First delivered in Serbian at the Symposium “Jezik i knji`evnost na
kraju XX veka”, Herceg-Novi, 5-7. October 1996; first published in
English in the Collection of Papers, Language and Literature at the End
of XXth Century, Podgorica, 1997, pp.291-299.
18
19
In Alice Munro’s novel of this title the heroine, Rose,
is asked this question a couple of times. Thus the choice of
the title suggests that the theme of the book is '‘he famous
Canadian problem of identity"20, as Frye put it. Besides,
the question being asked by women, mother surrogates, Rose’s
stepmother Flo, and her high school teacher, indicates that
the theme is further narrowed to the question of female
identity in contemporary Canada and the world. A certain
sharpness and malice in the tone of the question suggest
that the older generation regards Rose’s opinion of herself
as unorthodox with regard to the traditional view of the
place of women in society. All these observations hold.
Alice Munro is endowed with a gift of brilliant storyteller
succeeding in artistic rendering of all the burning issues
of Canadian life. The novel, however, achieves more than
that, repudiating Northrop Frye who maintained that the
essential issue of Canadian literature is not “Who I am?”
but “Where is here?”21 In his view, Canadian literature was
primarily preoccupied with social and historical background
and the endeavour to encompass and comprehend the vast empty
space occupied by Canada, where every privacy is lost.
In the novel Who Do You Think You Are?” Alice Munro
apparently develops all the issues of the construction of
Canadian and the female identity, but eventually reaches
beyond this limited preoccupation. The ten chapters of the
novel can be read as stories, but they are arranged
chronologically and follow Rose’s growing up. Each chapter
ends with an epilogue that brings us forth into the future
but does not break the continuity of narration. The epilogue
in the last chapter with the same title as the novel - “Who
Do You Think You Are?” finally clarifies this question posed
at the very beginning.
Alice Munro’s novel takes place in Canada’s historical
time, the changes in Rose’s microworld are connected to
those changes Canada had gone through in the last couple of
decades. Munro gives many indications of the historical
moments in her story. Rose’s childhood takes place during
the pre-war depression and the “legendary poverty”, as Munro
says. People who had lived in it subsequently frequently
remembered the time and recounted its events, sometimes
adding and embellishing. Rose did the same, having no other
childhood memories to boast of.
While the poverty lasted, there was nothing romantic
about it. Workers fell sick of foundry disease and slowly
and silently died (as did Rose’s father). Their children
rarely went to high school, climbed the social ladder, or
managed to cross over to the other side of the bridge that
20
21
Northrop Frye, The Bush Garden, Anansi, Toronto, 1971, p. i
Ibid., p.220.
divided the poverty-ridden West Hanratty, Ontario, from
somewhat richer Hanratty. People were cruel to each other,
scenes of abuse and mental illness were frequent and
painful.
To the historian Morton22, Canada of the time looked
like Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, devastated by draught,
poverty, unemployment. Afterwards, Canada was gradually
becoming a welfare state, American capital penetrated the
country, accompanied by commercialization and its negative
effects. The worst of them, pernicious for the development
of individuality and general culture, was, says Morton,
promotion of social acceptability instead of personal
accomplishment, and thus support of an anti-intellectual and
amoral attitude to life. This central moment of contemporary
Canadian history is symbolically, though not
chronologically, the central moment of Rose’s life covered
by this book – the moment when she marries the son of a rich
merchant, after having succumbed to the charms of a welfare
state. Further history of Canada (and the world) heads
towards ever greater technologization, explosion of media
and teatralization of everyday life. Rose, too, is caught in
the spirit of the time – she becomes a TV actress.
On the second level of the story Rose’s life is
observed in the light of the woman liberation movement, not
completely different from the process of Canada’s
emancipation. On the contrary, many Canadian theorists, the
influential Linda Hutcheon in the first place, have noticed
the analogy between the position of women writers anywhere
in the wold, and the position of English Canadian writers.
“Female voice”, says Hutcheon quoting Lorna Irvine,
“politically and culturally personifies Canada.”23
For postmodernists – almost all the important
contemporary Canadian writers according to Hutcheon – the
concept of nature is but a social construct they make fun of
through their favourite genre, parody. Thus Alice Munro’s
novel can be classified into this category due to its vague
generic determination and its ironic parodying, but my
argument is that it is more than this. There are ironic
elements in this novel: For instance, before her marriage
Rose, who has frequently hesitated in her decision, changed
her mind aware that she does not love Patrick, parodies
Yeats’ verses from the play she writes an essay about, which
deals with a virgin married to a burly peasant against her
will, lured away from her unbearable marriage. “Come away, O
W.L.Morton, The Kingdom of Canada, A General History From Earliest
Times, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 1968, p.465.
23 Linda Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, A Study of Contemporary
English_Canadian Fiction, Oxford University Press, Toronto, 1998, p.6.
22
human Child,”24 recites Rose, her eyes filling with tears as
if she were the captured virgin. Almost immediately,
however, a cynical thought flashes through her mind, that
Patrick is in fact the virgin, she the unscrupulous peasant.
She laughs at the myth of the White Goddess that Patrick saw
in her. What Rose actually mocks is not the “female nature”,
but her wrong choice and lack of intuition. She renounces
motherhood, leaves her daughter with her ex-husband,
ventures forth into troublesome freedom from the security of
family home.
The false dilemma nature or culture is one of the
central places in the feminist theory. Rose finds herself
confronted with the dilemma at the time of her marriage,
told in the chapter “The Beggar Maid”. This book was
actually published outside Canada under that name, and the
copy I used bears this name, too. I have chosen its original
title because I think the latter emphasizes the book’s
parodic quality, which I deem to be marginal, as I am trying
to prove in this analysis. The Beggar Maid is the title of
an old painting that appealed to Rose’s fiancée,
subsequently husband – Patrick, because it reminded him of
Rose. The painting represents a mighty king and his young
lover at his feet, looking at him “meek and voluptuous”,
with “milky surrender”, “helplessness” and “gratitude”.25
Rose looked up the picture in an art book and studied
it. Yes, she thought, she would like to be like that, if
only she had a king like this one, quite different from
Patrick, sharp even in his trance of passion, a clever
barbarian who could make a puddle of her with his fierce
desire. But there are no such men any longer. Patrick
believes in chivalric notions, in the “fair sex” and
“damsels in distress” forever in need of rescuing and
protection. He himself is, however, thin, pale and shy, and
has a large birthmark on his face that spoils his masculine
looks. He also has a strong will to become a modern knight
and a persuasion that his birthmark will fade in time, as
his self-confidence becomes stronger. Patrick loves Rose not
only because she is beautiful and clever, but also because
she is poor, a student on a scholarship, with no other means
for living and nowhere to go. “You are so delicate a real
“beggar maid” and a “white goddess”, says he.
Rose has no heart to betray him and, anyway, she thinks
him the best after all, for having courage to love, but the
diamond ring is not to be underestimated either, nor the
admiration of her friends and fellow citizens from Hanratty.
However, his hidden motive, as Munro forcefully discloses
Alice Munro, The Beggar Maid, Stories of Flo and Rose, Allen Lane,
London, 1980, p.83.
25 Ibid., p. 80.
24
it, is to heal his hurt vanity and regain the love of the
father who has rejected him as a weakling for choosing
science instead of business. After well-meaning efforts to
preserve it and numerous skirmishes, the marriage eventually
breaks up. Rose had several times lost courage even before
the marriage took place, broke off the engagement, repented.
Afterwards she wandered would not her life have taken a
different course if only she had had the money for a ticket
to Toronto. In the epilogue of this story, Rose accidentally
meets Patrick again at the airport ten years after the
divorce. She is alone, returning from one of her tours,
disheveled and with smeared make-up. He looks masculine and
self-complacent, plumper and, to Rose’s surprise, the
birthmark had really disappeared. Another woman helped
construct the chivalric image he had dreamt of. Just Rose
was about to address him amicably, sure that he would
rejoice as ever, he silently makes a face full of hatred and
disgust. Rose cannot believe someone can hate her that much.
Another issue of female identity, especially a female
artist identity, concerns the relationship with mother or
tradition or the fear of authorship – all three issues
eventually merge into one. The sub-title of the novel is
“Stories of Flo and Rose”. Flo, Rose’s stepmother, has no
imagination, is course although not mean, contemptuous of
all the manifestations of folly, art included. A woman
develops her identity with relation to her mother, says
theory. Rose cannot accept Flo for her mother since she is
so course, while Rose imagines her real mother to have been
a much more subtle. The antagonism between the two women,
the interplay of love and hate, lasts to the end with more
far-reaching consequences for Rose’s formation than her
relations with men. Flo plays down Rose’s efforts to break
away from her environment, and Rose feels constant anxiety
and resistance. The feeling is further reinforced by her
father's attitude fully influenced by his wife’s. “Women's
minds are different”, says he to Rose in one of the rare
moments of confidence, but they have some other advantages,
they can be more energetic, practical, clever and saving,
shrewd. Perhaps he forgot that his daughter was or would be
a woman, thought Rose, surprised at his candour. However,
Rose inherited her father’s mind (at least according to his
concept of a male mind), without the female advantages that
could help her through life. She, therefore, thought of
herself as flawed almost all her life.
Another female person who asked Rose the question “Who
do you think you are?” was her high school teacher who made
her stay after classes to copy a poem three times, because
she did not do it the first time. Rose had memorized the
poem immediately, from the blackboard. It was easy because
she loved poetry. The teacher was not a sadist, thought
Rose, she only defended a principle. According to Morton,
the principle that formed basis of Canadian high-school
education was the philosophy of the American pragmatist John
Dewey. According to the principle, the purpose of schooling
was not mastering skills but adjusting to life, to a
democratic life. In Rose’s case democratic meant one
standard for everyone, no matter how absurd it is. The
practical philosophy contributed to the “increasing
penetration of calculated mediocrity of the mass American
culture”26, says Morton. Do not think you are something
special because you can memorize a poem, says Rose’s
teacher.
Another potential mother for Rose was Dr. Henshawe, her
landlady, one of the first and rare women scholars, a
spinster who was ridiculed by student population. She was,
therefore, unacceptable in a social sense, and Rose, seduced
by her own youth, sexuality and sudden popularity partly
owned to the diamond ring, always acts contrary to Dr.
Henshawe’s mild suggestions. She frowns whenever the old
lady calls her a scholar. When she is recommended to read
Dorothy Livesy, she reads Man and Tolstoy. Rose also decides
to marry partly because she thinks she would anger Dr.
Henshawe who frequently asks her if she loves the young man
she is going to marry.
In a metaphorical sense, says theory (I have relied
here mostly on the brilliant studies by Sandra Gilbert and
Susan Gubar), every creative woman feels lack of an artistic
mother or tradition to continue, and consequently feels
inferior to the father or the male artist she does not feel
as her ancestors, being different from her. She is, thus,
very lonely within the limits of the canon, and having no
ancestors she feels she cannot become a model or an ancestor
to anyone. The fear has been called “the fear of
authorship”, as opposite to “the anxiety of influence” of a
male artist, as Harold Bloom has called it.27
Rose’s road to self-realization is long and swervy, and
does not end with the ending of the book. From early
childhood she wanted to become an actress, but her wishes
were not so conspicuous, as almost every girl wants to
become an actress, or something equally popular. In her
fifties, Rose has become a rather well known actress and TV
person with a small salary, not having a degree. A certain
shame of her profession never leaves her although she loves
it. Her relatives, even dead, seem to admonish her from the
other side of the grave. The moment her shame leaves her is
Mortno, Op.cit., p.505.
Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, The Woman
Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination, New Haven and
London, Yale University Press, p.45-96, (“Infection in the Sentence: The
Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship”)
26
27
the moment of her relative self-realization. If she were to
summarize material facts of her life, it would appear full
of suffering, sad failures and humiliation, especially in
relation to men, with but few moments of joy. This is too
serious a story to be parodic, which does not mean it is not
funny. To come to know herself, Rose has to return into
herself, and this return is facilitated by her coming back
home to Hanratty.
In her hometown she meets again her schoolfriend, Ralph
Gilespie, who had become famous by impersonating other
people, particularly the village idiot, Milton Homer, who
bore names of two great blind poets of deep insight. Ralph
has not ever done any other job except acting for his
friends, fellow citizens and comrades in drink. Rose
remembered Ralph while they sat in the same desk at school,
and for the first time it occurred to her how similar they
were in their peculiarity. Ralph and Rose are now sitting
together in the local club and Rose discovers that there
exists the same conspiracy between them. They silently
exchange glances of understanding. She observes Ralph. He
had always seemed to her shy and ingratiating. Now she
realized that this was his surface. Underneath he was selfsufficient, calm and proud, reconciled to his unorthodox
profession, which liberated him from any unwanted social
control and enabled him to be socially accepted as an
independent being.
When thinking about this in retrospect, Rose stopped
feeling the shame of her profession, carried by a wave of
kindness, sympathy and forgiveness that included herself.
Acceptance of her own vocation, of acting other people’s
lives and tetralization of experience in order to survive
was enriched by a new quality of insight into people and
events. By accepting her love, which is her vocation, which
is her life, she accepted sadness of her failures, physical
and mental squalor as a part of life, became liberated from
debilitating social convention. “Home is where the hurt
is”28, is Rose’s final insight. Home is me, is my identity,
identity is pain. She felt Ralph Gilespie closer than any
other human being ever. She also felt this was not simply
sexual warmth, curiosity, but something deeper, beyond
words.
Some critics writing about Who Do You Think You Are?
objected to Munro’s introduction of so many, according to
them, unnecessarily crude details describing child
molesting, brutal fights, undignified deaths and humiliating
sexual experiences. All this was necessary as it was the
material Rose’s life was built of, all she had to accept and
Michale Billington, Stoppard, The Playwright, London and New York,
1987.
28
overcome in order to be able to accept herself and go on.
Rose becomes an Everywoman. Alice Munro, former housewife
who, admittedly, wrote secretly, shut in her room under the
pretence of sewing a curtain29, managed to overcome the fear
of authorship. Instead of creating the “madwoman in the
attic”, a heroine who, like Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, is a
projection of author’s hidden nature, repressed desire and
rage to be destroyed together with the mad heroine, Munro
has created her own vision out of everyday bits and odds. In
this way Alice Munro escapes Frye’s classification of
Canadian literature as a product of a garrison mentality
afraid of individuality and the breakthrough of the limits
of the visible world, and the postmodernist mannerism of
laughing at the spirit of seriousness.
EXTERNAL SPACES, INTERNAL SILENCES
Field Notes, Ship Journals and the Spoken Silence30
In his writings about Canadian imagination, Northrop
Frye introduced the concept of a “garrison mentality” as a
feature of early Canadian literature. “A garrison”, says
Frye, “is a closely knit and beleaguered society, and its
moral and social values are unquestionable”.31 In such a
society the real terror does not primarily come from an
Catherine Sheldrick, Alice Munro, A Double Life, ECW Press, 1992,
p.55.
30 First deliveredat the 1st International Conference of Central European
Canadianists, Brno, Czech republic, 13-15 November 1998; first published
in the Proceedings of the Conference, 2001, pp.167-173.
31 Northrop Frye, “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada”, in The
Bush Garden, Essays on the Canadian Imagination, Anansi, 1971, p.226
29
external threat but from a feeling of becoming an individual
and pulling away from the group, becoming aware of a
conflict within you. The early Canadians frequently felt a
sense of detachment from their literary tradition, not being
able to establish any real continuity with the Indian
mythology as a part of their own culture. The fear of
becoming an individual was identical with the terror in
regard to nature, resulting in a desire to conquer and
control it. The subject and the object were completely
separated. Consequently, Frye recognized birth of genuine
Canadian art in the paintings of Group of Seven and some
recent poetry and fiction, capable of direct imaginative
confrontation with the North American landscape, the way
native people have always done.
Further elaborating Frye’s views, his obvious disciple
D.G.Jones identified estrangement from the land, fear of the
wilderness and of the “savage” as the examples of the
garrison mentality. It relies on the faith of law not love,
and is terrified of the female. 1 The way out is to come to
terms with the savage, accepting it within oneself - a
Jungian integration of the personality, of the Apollonian
and Dionysian elements of nature, in some measure
affirmation of the darkness as well as the glory. It implies
transcendence of the false dichotomy between the male and
the female space. The crucial point is that individual
integration only can produce a society of diversity, in
which unity does not mean uniformity.
Robert Kroetsch’s and Audrey Thomas’s works are but two
examples of the numerous achievements in recent Canadian
literature of the ideals set up by Frye and his followers.
Robert Kroetsch once designated external space as male,
internal as female, and declared that it is the latter that
men fear, because women “contain the space” and “speak the
silence”.2 How the two can be integrated is dramatized both
in Kroetsch’s novel Badlands and in Audrey Thomas’s
Intertidal Life. In these two novels Canada is potentially
Frye’s “no-man’s-land, “with huge rivers, lakes and islands
that very few Canadians had ever seen.” Or Peter Brook’s
“the empty space”, the potential scene of creation.3
D.G.Jones, “Butterfly on the Rock”, Images of Canadian Literature,
University of Toronto Press, 1970., p.60
2
Robert Kroetsch, “The fear of women in prarie fiction: an erotics of
space”, Open Letter 5.4., 1983, p.49. Kroetsch’s leading idea expressed
in the essay is discussed by Linda Hutcheon who also gives an extensive
analysis of Intertidal Life in The Canadian Postmodern, A Study of
Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction, Chapter 6 - Shape Shifters:
Canadian Women Writers and the Tradition, Oxford University Press,
Toronto, New York, Oxford, 1988.
3
Frye, Op.Cit, p.220.
1
In Badlands, the hero spends his life exploring the
vast countryside to find fossil remains, leaving the field
notes to his daughter to shape them into a story fifty-six
years later. But her story is not the description of her
father’s adventures. The true story is contained in her
spoken silence, her written thoughts and feelings. Audrey
Thomas’s novel is about self-assertion of a heroine through
the process of becoming a writer. Alice (in her own special
Wonderland) undertakes an exploration into her soul. The
resulting diary is her peculiar “spoken silence”.
Simultaneously, she is reading a book called A Spanish
Voyage to Vancouver, describing an exploration of the
Canadian coast in the early colonial days. She contemplates
how male explorations usually turn to be imperialistic,
while a female exploration must be something different.
Thomas’s novel tries to determine and to gulf this
difference, but also leaves certain questions open.
As in many other Canadian novels of today, the hero's
or heroine's experience consists of a variety of cultural
ingredients that have recently become a significant part of
Canadian life. Native Indian sensibility is essential in
Badlands, while Intertidal Life creates a unique new world
in which the heroine lives, against the background of
current sub-cultures. More than this - the historical
dimension based on the observation of contemporary life both authors have proved capable of telling a good story. In
both novels the true victory of the self is not to conquer
nature, but to make yourself open to it, and to let it in.
Both novels, thus, have a form of a quest. Linda Hutcheon
sees them as post-modern parodies, subversions of
traditional literary forms and philosophies, but this I
regard to be their minor merits. Both are serious
considerations of the central myth of mankind, based on the
exploration of imagination and myth, as well as history.
They both belong to those imaginative Canadian explorers of
new visions of life. In Kroetsch’s novel the quest is
directed outward, a sort of a descent to hell, only to end
in the inner self of the heroine, inheritress of the hero,
her father. The quest in Thomas’s novel starts as an inward
journey, to be finished as a self-assertion shared with
heroine’s family and friends.
Kroetsch’s leading idea was expressed in the essay “The
fear of women in prairie fiction: an erotics of space”. He
argues that the prairie novel’s obsession with travel is an
evasion of the sexual, a substitute. The hero who should be
artist is overwhelmed by the fear of how to possess a
formidable woman.1 “ How do you make love in a new country,
1
Kroetsch,
“The fear…”, p. 49
asks Kroetsch. Travel is the true intercourse in prairie
novels, is his reply: “a frenetic going back and forth, up
and down, in and out.”2 Travel acts out an evasion.
Contemplating the new Canadian literature - the literature
of a new country, Kroetsch says, “Here on the plains we
confront the hopeless and necessary hope of originality:
constantly we experience the need to begin…We contrive
authentic origins. From the denied Indians. From the false
fronts of the little towns. From the diaries and
reminiscences and the travel accounts. From our displaced
ancestors.” 3
Badlands is the story of a paleontologist, William
Dawe, who spent more than twenty years tracing dinosaur
bones in the Alberta Badlands and elsewhere. He died there,
leaving the field notes to his daughter Anna. Her mother
died, too, lonely and resentful, neglected by her husband
who had “occasionally imposed himself” upon her, as the
daughter puts it. When the mother read the field-notes, she
could read her own boredom and loneliness. The daughter
wonders: “Why it was left to me to mediate the story I don’t
know: women are not supposed to have stories. We are
supposed to sit at home. Penelopes to their wars and their
sexes.”4 She is to find the answer by going back to the
Badlands following her father’s route backwards (she starts
where his first expedition ended). There she meets an old
Indian woman, Anna Yellowbird, who gave her name to Anna
Dawe, having saved her father’s life once. The old woman
teaches the younger one the simple wisdom of love, endurance
and the joy of living.
The two women decide to go to the source of the river
where the expedition started. Eventually, they reach the
source of the things they have not understood before. The
Indian woman, Anna Yellowbird, who has never questioned
men’s affairs, is standing by the side of the younger woman
silently watching the stars. She no longer mentioned
“dinosaurs or men or their discipline or their courage or
their goddamned honour or their goddamned fucking fame or
their goddamned fucking death-fucking death.” Men’s
activities once observed with a sort of reverence now appear
“Like pissing in the ocean.”1 Anna Dawe reads the last
pompous words written on the last page of her father’s last
field book: “I have come to the end of words” 11 Everything
that matters lies outside the range of the words her father
Ibid., p. 53-3
Ibid., p.55
4
Robert Kroetsch, Badlands, Paper Jacks, Don Mills Co. Limited, Ontario,
1975, p. 3.
2
3
1
Ibid., p.270.
knew: life itself. She throws the emblem of a futile effort
into the lake, and walks out, hand in hand with Anna
Yellowbird, without looking back. The book is a recreation
of her own and her father’s past life. It marks the end of
her initiation and the beginning of a new stage of life.
All Audrey Thomas’s novels are semi-autobiographical,
with one narrator, a woman mostly, an artist who persists in
her self-realization even at the cost of losing the man she
loves.2 Her earlier story Prospero on the Island (1970)
bears an obvious reference to Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The
island is the empty space where everything is possible. But
the creator is this time Miranda, an artist who writes a
novel. Intertidal Life, too, takes place on an island. The
heroine is Alice lost in a Wonderland, at first, a female
Prospero in the end, reaching the point where her created
world and the world that is really there become the same
thing. At first, Alice feels mutilated by her husband’s
desertion, like the small sea creatures that are losing
their limbs. This feeling is paralleled by the anxiety about
the operation she will have to undergo, in which she will
have to be “stitched up” like a cripple.1 Gradually, as she
watches the tiny intertidal creatures, she notices that they
can grow new replacement legs when they have lost the
original ones. And she stops feeling lonely. 2She is writing
a diary of the breakdown of her marriage and of the process
of writing her first novel. She is also reading A Spanish
Voyage to Vancouver. While reading this ship-journal she
contemplates the nature of her obsession with her husband
and of man-woman relationship in general. Similar to
Kroetsch’s description of the imperialistic quality of the
sexual attitude of some men toward women in the quoted
essay, she sees that “women have let men define them, taken
their names even, with marriage, just like a conquered or
newly settled region.” 3She realizes her husband is not
Peter the Rock but Peter Pan, a carefree boy who wants to
avoid responsibility, and that she has to go on her quest
alone. She predicts, proceeding with her “maritime theme” as
she calls it, that new maps are needed, new instruments.
Imperialism is over, for nations, for men. 4
We can observe in Intertidal Life the Jungian archetype
of Mandala, a circular image with a center that represents
2
THE OXFORD COMPANION TO CANADIAN LITERATURE, 1983, p.786.
Joan Coldwell, “Natural Herstory and Intertidal Life”, Room of One’s
Own, (The Audrey Thomas Issue), 10, Nos. 3-4, March 1986, p.141
2
Ibid., p.142.
3
Audrey Thomas, Intertidal Life, New Press, Canadian Classics, Toronto,
1984, p.171.
4
Ibid.
1
the wholeness of personality and the center of the whole. It
is the archetype of inner order. Whenever Alice feels
emotionally chaotic and desperate, she starts drawing
circles, until in the end she regains her former balance,
dares to confront the dark forest she has feared before and
the coming mysterious operation that has underlined her
whole story.5 On the other hand, in the final cleanup of her
house, she discarded two mandalas imposed from outside: one
done by her husband, another by his lover. On her way
forward, she has confronted the life-style of the hippie
community of the sixties, with its Asian Indian philosophy meditations, gurus, grass smoking, without being overwhelmed
by it. She has gradually created her own, unique and
forceful philosophy of life. She has called it “intertidal
life” - the life between two tides or changes of the moon,
the female life. At one point of the story, Alice and her
friends discuss the nature of a female life. The moment of
conception is the woman’s tidal time. All the rest is
intertidal life, occupying the greater part of her life.1 It
is also the life between two men, full of different small
but significant things. Although some of her closest friends
belonged to the sub-culture of the 60’s, and although she
herself for a time took part in it, she realizes that it was
essentially a way to avoid responsibility, pain and death,
which must be a constituent part of life. Those people were
consequently not calm and silent as they had first appeared
to her. They are choking with impotent rage and anger.
Although the ending of the novel is ambiguous - Alice is to
undergo an operation with an uncertain outcome, Alice is
implicitly ultimately victorious: she has gained “a certain
embarrassed respect” of her young daughter whom she advises
that “There are so many legitimate things to be afraid of.
Cruelty and indifference and wars. You shouldn’t use up your
fear on the dark.”2 (They are going through the woods to the
Indian reserve).
Both novels are basically a critique of the
predominance of scientific attitude to life, which is shown
to be somewhat dry and futile, and a reassertion of the
humanistic view, the art of writing in the first place. In
Badlands, William Dawe and his companions setting off on
their expedition, are described as the “vanishing form of
life”1 by a photographer who wishes to capture the image of
these weird men. Later on in the novel, when her father’s
Brian Nix, “The Significance of the Mandala Archetype in Audrey Thomas’
Intertidal Life, Canadian Writers On-Line, 1998.
5
Coldwell, Op.cit., p. 143.
Thomas, Op.cit., p. 252.
1
Badlands, p.117.
1
2
greatest triumph is described - his emerging out of the
Badlands with fossil skeletons - his daughter comments on
the change in the tone of his field notes: they became more
impersonal. They became mere descriptions of the size of
bones etc. When his scientific success began, “he ceased to
dare to love”2 . In the conclusion of her own diary, Anna
Dawe makes her final condemnation of her father, the famous
scientist: “While he laboured and hid in the museum, when he
might have been remembering, or regretting, or explaining,
or planning, or dreaming, or hating, or even loving I
suppose, he was busy putting down each days tedium and
trivia. Shutting out instead of letting in. Concealing.” 3
In Intertidal Life Alice is obsessed with the shipjournal A Spanish Voyage to Vancouver which she has stolen
from the library. Not because of its meticulous description
of the explorations that involved the island she now lives
on, but because she is contemplating the shape her own
exploration must take. When she says that new maps and new
instruments are needed, she does not have in mind an
imperialistic, scientific exploration, but that the
relationship between man and woman is changing. It is then
that she finally stops saying how the hero of their three
daughters, her husband, has abandoned her in his boyish
search for new excitements, and suggests that perhaps she
should say that he has set her free. She remembers how
difficult it has been for her to start writing after giving
birth to three children, alone and lonely, and having to
keep a home for the family (because “someone had to be the
parent’), how she wrote on a kitchen table at first etc. The
passage from the ship journal taken as the epigraph of the
novel describes how and why the crew kept their records in
an almost scientific way: “Part of the following day was
employed in arranging and setting in order our records of
observations, charts and calculations, and the notes made on
all matters which having been jotted down on board ship in
the midst of the toil and labour required to be
systematically expanded in order that they might be in good
order and not convey a confused idea of the information
gained.”1 Unlike this systematic ordering of facts to avoid
any possible ambiguity, an artistic rendering of human
experience that Alice endeavours, cannot avoid the affluence
of life, with both its misery and glory. “There are no
rules. Each time it will be different.”2 Thus, although she
has reached a remarkable level of self-awareness and
2
3
1
2
Ibid., p. 139.
Ibid., p.269.
Thomas, Op.cit., epigraph to Section I.
Ibid., p. 276.
courage, Alice is not ashamed to declare simply and briefly
in the face of the coming operation: “I am afraid”.
Both books are, thus, “spoken silences.” In the “Fear
of women…” Kroetsch says that “External space is the silence
that needs to speak, or that needs to be spoken. It is male.
The having spoken is the book. It is female. It is closed.”3
Similarly, Audrey Thomas’ Alice asserts at the end of her
journey that “People are so afraid of silence. I guess
because they might have to listen to themselves”.3 The
strategies of both writers are to listen to the inner self,
to obliterate the boundary between the internal and the
external world. For, as Frye said, “no social imagination
can develop except through those who have followed their own
vision beyond its inevitable loneliness to its final resting
place in the tradition of art.”4
3
Ibid., p. 276.
4
Fye, Op.cit., p. 212.