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Timothy Findley's Famous Last Words uses formal innovations, such as the framing story of Freyberg and Quinn, to position the reader as an active and critical agent. The framing story turns the reader's tendency to identify with Quinn and Mauberley into an object of critical inquiry; it invites the reader to examine the Mauberley-like tendencies in him/herself. The ambivalence of imagination -- either "our greatest gift" (Findley) or a means to envision perfection, with its accompanying tendency towards fascism -- and the foregrounding of the element of "story" in history forces the reader to "collaborate" in the text, with all of the associated negative and positive connotations of that word. Famous Last Words, like a piece of Brechtian theatre, presents a complex play between confident assertions about the truth of history and a recognition that all analyses of history are limited by their historical and ideological origins.
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An old tale, begun after Confederation and lingering on until the 1950s -- a once-powerful, establishment fairy-tale -- compels our literary attention, especially now that its ideology has largely been disparaged and repudiated: the "old tale" of Canadian Empire and Imperialism. We can clearly see the effects of this ideology on Canadian literature stemming from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, including that by Leacock, Haliburton, Howe, O'Dell, Stansbury, McLachlan, Goldsmith, the Confederation Poets (including Isabella Valancy Crawford and Pauline Johnson, but excluding Bliss Carman), Pratt, MacLennan, and Richler.
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Members of the Socialist Party of Canada (spc) played a prominent role in the labour revolt of 1919, the One Big Union, and the Winnipeg General Strike. The “failure” of all three has led labour historians to focus on the inability of the party to connect with Canadian workers, an inability fuelled by dogmatism, “impossibilism,” and the exclusion of women and workers of colour. This article turns this approach on its head, pointing out that these events have been unequalled in Canadian history, and seeks to explain why this should be so. It challenges the perception of the party as being wed to evolutionary thinking that caused its members to wait around for the revolution to happen. Instead, it reveals the powerful influence of the dialectical method developed by G. W. F. Hegel; its focus on human action was the philosophical underpinning of the spc’s relentless attack on the wage system and the capitalist system’s commodification of labour power. Far from being “metaphysical” or “otherworldly,” the spc’s insistence that workers must gain control of the product of their own labour spoke directly to them, including women and workers of colour. In the creation of the One Big Union, in the solidarity of the Winnipeg General Strike, and in the promise of the labour revolt of 1919, we find the legacy of a party committed to workers rising up.
Keywords: dialectic, labour, commodification, Marxism, impossibilism, class, evolution, revolution, women, race, dialectique, travail, marchandisation, marxisme, impossibilisme, classes sociales, évolution, révolution, femmes, races
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Stephen Leacock's Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, while not a novel "proper," contains a unifying element in the character of Josh Smith. Smith, a self-serving individualist, is portrayed to be in opposition to the town of Mariposa (which is the book's other central unifying factor). Although Leacock's ironic stance precludes any simplistic observations about the ostensibly simplistic little town--so that any "truth" is automatically an equivocation -- there is nevertheless evidence that self-serving business and political attributes are destructive, and that the resilience of community is finally victorious.
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Adele Wiseman's Crackpot sets out to analyze the relationship between the self and society in terms of the language-learning (and, therefore, the morality-learning) process. The character of Hoda, lacking the usual moral or even social guidance, invents her own morality as dictated by her pleasures and by her environment. Yet it is not simple hedonism that occurs, because her beliefs encompass what she perceives as the relative happiness or unhappiness of others. Hoda's moral education or enlightenment comes as a result of her growing ability to use words properly -- thus conflating the apparently disparate notions of language and morality.
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Scott Symons's Place d'Armes uses the journal to create an open-ended novel whose form reflects an immediacy of experience. Symons's fictional character, Hugh Anderson, writes a journal in order to inspire material for his own novel, thus allowing for private notation within the public art of the novel. The various literary forms within this book – notes, journal, letters, novel – further comment on one another through their juxtaposition, illustrating Robert Kroetsch's thesis that Canadian writers are engrossed in "unhiding the hidden." The journal comes to overtake that of the novel, representing a move back to simplicity and directness, maintaining a link with the past which gives strength to the present.
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Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy and Frederick Philip Grove's A Search for America are similar in their focus on the metaphor of America. Juxtaposing the two works gives insight into significant differences in Canadian and American conceptions of personal and national identity and valuations of the margins. Both protagonists, Dreiser's Clyde Griffiths and Grove's Phil Branden, suffer from their position as social outsiders and develop strategies to deal with their marginalization. The Canadian traveller distinguishes himself from his American counterpart through his self-conscious linguistic flexibility. Branden survives, not because he creates a name or well-defined identity for himself, but because he eludes the notion of a fixed identity in his journey towards self-creation. Griffiths's yearning to merge with the society that excludes him means that the only self he has is the one he will become; his language is emptied of meaning until he vanishes like a "nobody." In both novels, metaphors of self-creation are interwoven with metaphors of national identity. Dreiser's ironic tragedy dramatizes the ultimate expulsion of the scapegoat; Grove's ironic comedy-romance ends with the protagonist's overt reconciliation with North American society.
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In the most Lurianic section of A.M. Klein's The Second Scroll, Melech claims to have read Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling in terms of "magical circles" (inspired by the Neo-platonic circle of emanation) which symbolize the process of exile and redemption. Melech argues that there is a logic in his reading of Michelangelo's ceiling which leads from despair to hope; this logic is ultimately replaced by faith.