English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

Canadian Avant-Garde

Ed.Christian Bök.  Ground Works: Avant-Garde for Thee.  Introduction by Margaret Atwood.  House of Anansi Press, 2002. 280 pp.  $22.95 (Cdn).

By Christine Kerr

            Margaret Atwood. Leonard Cohen. Michael Ondaatje. All Canadians who have proved that it is possible for a Canadian writer to be widely known and successful outside the borders of Canada. However, as Margaret Atwood points out in her introduction to Ground Works: Avant-Garde for Thee, the term “Canadian Writer” was considered an oxymoron by international critics as recently as the 1960s. This anthology of experimental fiction reveals how Canadian writers have long been struggling to break free from the literary, cultural and geographical wilderness that seemed (still seems?) to set boundaries for them.

This collection is culled from the years 1965 to 1985 and showcases writers who were born in the 30s and 40s. This generation of writers had all been raised on a Modernist diet, but came of age during the zenith of European intellectual movements in the post-war decades that spawned Existentialism and the Theatre of the Absurd. It was a time when logical form, character, dialogue and realistic illusion were being abandoned. Yet who would associate Canada with an avant-garde movement or literary innovation then or at any time period? In fact, as Bök indicates in his Afterword, the lack of support that the writers featured in this collection received for their literary experiments caused most of them to modify their approach often as a response to negative critical reception (230). One of the explanations why Canadian avant-garde fiction has not been embraced is because it frequently challenges the tenuous and fragile values of cultural identity that still prevail in the realist tradition of Canadian literature. The avant-garde might scratch at the scar of the Canadian cultural fringe. Are we really seen as no more than the frozen, northern (inferior) province of the United States? Or the provincial, imitative (inferior) colony of England? Bring back Anne of Green Gables!

The iconoclasm of these avant-garde works can be illustrated by the excerpt, “The Pretty Good Canadian Novel,” from George Bowering’s A Short Sad Book (1977), where Bowering responds stylistically to Gertrude Stein in an allegory about Stan Bevington, the owner of a Canadian publishing house (Coach House Press). Bowering’s selection is one of the longer excerpts and Bök has placed it more or less at the mid-point of Ground Works. The narrator of this excerpt muses:

Ask him [Stan Bevington] why he has a printing press & a beaver on his books while the Nationalists have a foreign spider on their books & an alien owner & post-graduate degrees from across the line.

Forgive this ranting. It is the middle of the novel, where all the axes are ground. It is the ground work. (120)

House of Anansi Press, which published this anthology, was founded in 1967 by writers Dennis Lee and David Godfrey. It advertises itself on its website as a “company [that] specializes in finding and developing Canada's great new writers of literary fiction, poetry, and nonfiction and in maintaining a culturally significant backlist that has accumulated since the house was founded 35 years ago.” So, a Nationalist slant … but Anansi, as Bowering jokes, is a spider from African folklore, by the 1970s the largest shareholder of Anansi was Ann Wall, a citizen of the United States, and founder Dave Godfrey obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. Thus, even the publishers of this very collection are scoffed at for their media image and claims. As Bowering observes, the middle of the novel is a place where private ends are served. In this case, it becomes clear that in a collection of avant-garde works, there can be no sacred cows. Bowering presumably was aware that his axe grinding cliché is of American provenance?

            The other selections are extremely varied in terms of content, style, mood and purpose. Stream-of-consciousness is a technique used by a few of the contributors. Audrey Thomas’ “If One Green Bottle,” taken from Ten Green Bottles (1967), uses only fragmented phrases interspersed with ellipses to enter the mind of a woman giving birth to a stillborn child. Thematically reminiscent of Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” with its contrast between physical mortality and poetic immortality, its fusion of mythology, memory and meta-fiction is lyrically evocative. In complete stylistic contrast, but also dealing with the actual writing process, is Chris Scott’s Bartleby (1971). Bartleby uses the 18^th-century Tristram Shandy as its stylistic inspiration. Although it sets itself up to be a biography of a character named Bartleby, the narrator-as-author traps himself in cycles of parodic meta-fiction. In the selected chapter, the narrator is attempting to respond to suggestions made by a critic on how to improve the work in question. Extremely witty, yet ironically disrespectful of his own wittiness, the narrator battles with his unwritten novel that seems to write itself anyway despite Bartleby’s absence. Fiction having a life of its own reappears as a theme in “Daymare” (1979) by Robert Zend. Two identical men live in California and England. When one man sleeps, the other is awake creating the dreams for the sleeping man. They are aware of their dual existence but are unable to break free from each other because of the sleep/awake problem. Eventually, they communicate and agree to cooperate with each other, causing both men to become wealthy and successful. The two characters decide to write their story but choose an author (Zend) to publish under his name. When Zend finally reads the story, he is delighted at having been chosen to be the author of such a tale. In this way, Zend’s story becomes the end-product of the agents within the fictional world. The author’s role becomes that of mediator between fabula and audience.

            Several of the selections exploit pop culture for their starting point. Dave Godfrey turns to Hollywood for “CP 69” which is a retelling of the ending of John Wayne’s Rooster Cogburn from the perspective of a viewer watching the movie on an airplane. Michael Ondaatje and John Riddell have both been inspired by comic books. Ondaatje’s tale “Billy the Kid and the Princess,” even incorporates the quintessential comic book sound effects: “CRASH!!!: “SOCK!” “SWISSS!” (61). Riddell’s “Pope Leo: El Elope” is a comic strip that recounts the struggle for power between Pope Leo and the evil Pop Elo … or is it the evil Pope Leo versus the revolutionary Pop Elo? It really makes no difference since whichever character takes his place on the Vatican-style balcony above the crowds, the people shout indiscriminately: “Pop Elo Loop Pope Pool Poll” (160). This humorous lipogram that uses only the letters “E,” “L,” “O,” and “P” satirizes the mass response to religion and religious leaders.

Despite the radical flavour of this anthology, the selections expose a chronic gender imbalance: there are 17 works by men and only 3 by women. This discrepancy reflects the male dominance of English Canadian writing during this time frame (as Atwood acknowledges in the Introduction). Apart from gender and time of birth, however, there is no other glue that unites this group of contributors, except perhaps the obscurity of their experimental pieces. It is this obscurity that Atwood sought to redress by her proposal to Anansi Press to reproduce these surprising yet overlooked works.

To help guide the reader through this unchartered territory, each selection starts with a brief but helpful biography of the author, followed by a half page of critical observation that situates the excerpt. However, it is this editorial commentary that can be somewhat daunting. Take, for example, the critique offered for Daphne Marlatt’s story “Zócalo,” where Marlatt’s style is described as being “reminiscent of two types of phenomenological writing: both the ‘proprioceptive verse’ of Charles Olsen (who pays heed to the cadence of the breath line), and the écriture féminine of Hélène Cixous (who pays heed to the rhythms of the female body)” (139). The actual selections are nowhere near as problematic as the critical comments might imply. A browsing reader might assume from such comments that the anthology is intended only for academics trained in the practice of critical language and put the volume back down on the bookstore or library shelf.

And this would be a shame.

The selections offer a fascinating entrée into a realm of Canadian writing that is not readily available. If Canadian writers are to be encouraged to build on the ground work carved out by these experimenters, the world of the avant-garde needs to be accessible to the non-academic. If experimental fiction is presented as a domain that needs specialized language to talk about it, then this could be an impediment to its acceptance. Bök asserts in the Afterword: “The work in this anthology, however, reminds us that to explore the limits of language, literature must often put its own most elementary principles at risk” (231). Just so.