There is a lot of aggression in the fencing-theme title and jacket photo of Ripostes, Philip Marchand's first collection of literary essays. In the photo, a sword rests against a fencer's mask in a clean vertical line. Because it looks like a salute before battle, the pose reinforces too neatly the cliché that when an honest critic is armed and ready, there will soon be blood on the floor. Certainly Marchand, who has been book columnist for the nation's largest newspaper, The Toronto Star, since 1989, has delivered on a promise of a thorough re-examination of the canon of Canadian literature. In an essay last year in Saturday Night, reproduced as "Confessions" in Ripostes, he shocked a lot of people with his antipathy to the work of most of Canada's top fiction writers, particularly Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Timothy Findley, and Margaret Laurence. In an isolated essay, this has the look of a shotgun blast, but in Ripostes, Marchand devotes a separate, withering essay to the work of each of these writers to lay out, in detailed formal terms, what it is he especially dislikes.
This is decidedly nervy. Canadian literati after all are culturally still so insecure that they become rather giddy about any kind of international success, however superficial, that our writers achieve. Who failed to smile, after all, at the image of Michael Ondaatje in a tux on Oscar night in Hollywood, radioactive with joy over the success of The English Patient? When Atwood's face appeared in the States on a plastic shopping bag in Barnes & Noble mega-stores, with Charles Dickens on the obverse, who could fail to see this as a true blessing?
Marchand is not shy in laying down a rigorously dissenting view. At the root of the situation is the ticklish problem of determining literary value. Not even the greatest critic has been able to figure out any reliable formula. Northrop Frye said that critics-at least in academia-should strictly avoid ranking writers. It's a futile game and only history can really decide. While Marchand agrees with this up to a point, he seems to recognize that as a popular critic, he must inevitably get his hands dirty by anticipating such judgements on the basis of what his own taste tells him right now. What gives him assurance is the fact that the history of literature is littered with writers like Tennyson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, James Hilton, Pearl Buck, and Mazo de la Roche (to name just a few) who were able to perfectly exploit the mentality of their middle-class readers at one very particular time. They become successful, sometimes fabulously, only to sink out of sight, usually permanently. Their success becomes more a question of sociology than literature. Not surprisingly, Marchand stamps the name Tennyson all over the great mound of Atwood's oeuvre.
"It is unlikely," he claims, "that the Atwood persona will fascinate future generations, and her literary reputation will have to undergo the scrutiny of readers who no longer find her thoughts on social issues bracing and revelatory." In his analysis of Atwood's fiction, Marchand shows in deliberately numbing chart form how she keeps repeating the same kinds of characters in novel after novel. Against an Atwood surrogate protagonist is a bland husband or boyfriend with a goofy, utterly trivial, artistic career. Men have never done too well in Atwood's world. To show how she tries to balance out a bleak gender equation, Marchand points to her increasing interest in the merciless Witch figure, as seen in Serena Joy of The Handmaid's Tale and of course the infamous Zenia of The Robber Bride. To see an aspect of Atwood's universe laid out in a simple chart is both funny and disconcerting. The effect of Marchand's criticism is blunted, though, precisely because Atwood does write gothic romances, which, as he admits, use standard narrative devices and polarized characters.
Marchand similarly shows the simple one-two-three algebra behind the characterization in Timothy Findley's fiction. Against the Bully, there is either the Lost Lady or "the sensitive, doomed gentleman". The Lost Lady is invariably crazy and the doomed gentleman will almost always perish in a terrible sacrificial death. To Marchand, Findley's damaged characters are too closely patterned on his own persona:
"It is difficult for a reader not to suspect that the author himself-who, in his public communications, often comes across as a male version of Blanche DuBois, perpetually menaced by Stanley Kowalski in the form of the Mulroney government, or the philistine world of television, or even bloody-minded feminists-frankly identifies with his sensitive, doomed characters, male and female."
Because of his astute use of formal techniques-simple analysis of imagery, character, and rhetoric-Marchand is effective in laying out his arguments. The problem is that his basic argument for many people is a structure built on sand. He plainly speaks for the satiric and realist tradition; his antipathy towards gothicism, romance, and surrealism, which is perfectly understandable from his point of view, hardly needs such exacting apples-and-oranges elucidation. What is missing in Ripostes is a complementary section of essays that would identify the kind of fiction that Marchand does like. As it is, there are only a few hints of this in Ripostes.
Marchand has been consistently warm about the work of Mordecai Richler who "with his impregnable comic and realist perspective remains wholly immune to the lure of the Gothic." Yet he offers Richler little more than a pat on the shoulder. Likewise, a strong early interest in the fiction of Clark Blaise goes unnoticed throughout Ripostes. In two sketchy review articles, "Writers Just Want to Have Fun" (Parts One and Two), Marchand does explore the work of the post-Atwood generation, which he sees as basically split in two.
First, there are the immigrant writers like Nino Ricci, Rohinton Mistry, and Moyez Vassanji, who still look back to their homelands for the content and perspectives of their stories. A second group, made up of Americanized writers like Daniel Richler, Eliza Clark, and Douglas Coupland, look without embarrassment to the apparently lustrous life and culture below the border. Marchand is particularly heartened by Clark, whose characters just want to find happiness in Florida. Marchand was born and raised in the States, and it's quite possible he is letting his own Inner American out here in a belief that "adventures under sunny skies and palm trees in the United States or on city streets wired to the Global Village" will clear up the Seasonal Affective Disorder of our fiction writers. Neither group, Marchand correctly assures us, could care less what a canoe, a death-dealing wilderness, or the fate of the dreary, doomed John Franklin might really mean. The combined efforts of the two groups, Marchand predicts, "will make our present theories about Canadian literature obsolete, in a very short time." Clearly there is more hope here than close observation.
If anything, there has actually been a revival of gothicism among Canadian writers in the past two years. This is certainly true in two key works, Jane Urquhart's The Underpainter and Ann-Marie MacDonald's Fall On Your Knees. Recent first novels by Gail Anderson-Dargatz, Shani Mootoo, and Ron Wright are also firmly entrenched in the gothic tradition, which of course invariably prefers the dark corners of existence. And while Fugitive Pieces, by Anne Michaels, is not gothic, there too there is a tone of melancholic romanticism, which supports the characters as they reconstruct their lives in a Toronto environment. While this is decidedly not Tampa, the novel hardly suffers from monochromatic shading.
Collections like Ripostes rarely make any difference to the way literature unfolds. Novelists are not, after all, about to abandon their own ideas of what they are doing. While missing the mark in key areas, the essays of Ripostes are nevertheless refreshing because Marchand owes nothing to any school of theory, either of a nationalist or academic kind. It is not surprising that the editor of Ripostes is John Metcalf, whose own 1982 essay collection, Kicking against the Pricks, likewise forced up untouchable issues out of a murky area of national identity. Precisely in the tradition of Metcalf, Marchand is readable, witty, and full of surprises.
John Ayre is the author of Northrop Frye: A Biography.
