Introduction: Mapping the Ground

Linda Warley, John Clement Ball, Robert Viau

This volume of Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne addresses once again -- but from new directions -- questions and issues that have concerned Canadian writers and critics since the literature's beginnings. As the editors of The Post-Colonial Studies Reader point out, the preoccupation with place -- which they define as "a complex interaction of language, history, and environment" (391) -- is a characteristic element of postcolonial writing. This preoccupation is certainly evident in the writing produced in invader-settler colonies, such as Canada, where the colonial encounter is experienced both as a contest over territory and resources and as a contest over language, especially English, French, and aboriginal languages. If literature is one arena in which cultural identity is constructed, then Canadian literature has been an integral part of a network of discourses that have produced identities informed by images associated with the land. One only has to think of some of the foundational studies of Canadian literature -- Northrop Frye's The Bush Garden, John Moss's Patterns of Isolation in English Canadian Fiction, Laurence Ricou's Vertical Man/Horizontal World, Dick Harrison's Unnamed Country, and Margaret Atwood's Survival -- to understand that in the Canadian literary context space and place have always mattered.

The title of this special issue, "Writing Canadian Space," indicates that the editors have preferred the term "space" to "place." The terms are related but they are not equivalent, nor is there consensus about what each term means, as Doreen Massey explores at some length in the final chapter of her book Space, Place and Gender. The choice of "space" as one key term in the title, however, does indicate that the critics included here are thinking about space as a theoretical concept. While critics have long argued that Canadian writing constructs a "sense of place," those discussions have often circulated around overarching mythic and symbolic images that cannot always adequately account for the huge variety of spaces themselves, the multiple ways in which they are represented, or the diversity of the people who are situated within them. As the thematic studies cited above attest, at a crucial moment in Canadian literary history, the critical project was to assert that there was something unique and fundamental about the national literature that marked its difference from American, British and French literatures. That essential character was often explained in terms of the human relationship to a distinctly Canadian natural environment, and a form of geographical determinism underpinned many critical discussions. There is no doubt that land and the natural environment continue to be important symbolic concepts around which formulations of identity accumulate; however, critics have begun to ask why particular images of the land and the natural environment are so often repeated, whose situations within and relationships to particular spaces are deemed most noteworthy, and why, when the majority of Canadians live in large and small urban centers, cities and city life are so often absent in our critical conversations.

Recent developments in cultural theory, cultural geography, and postcolonial and gender studies have encouraged new ways of articulating the intersections of language, space, time, and identity. Although the trajectory of theoretical development and influence is difficult to trace, Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre are key figures in what might be thought of as a turn in cultural theory towards an investigation of spatial practices and spatial meanings. Michel Foucault argued that the "great obsession of the nineteenth century was . . . history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men, and the menacing glaciation of the world" (22) and that the twentieth century would be "the epoch of space" (22). Lefebvre, whose seminal book The Production of Space became available in English translation in 1991, showed that space is not a neutral background nor an empty container against or within which human activity occurs. Space is never just there but is produced through signs -- visual, gestural, architectural, literary, and so on. Lefebvre's and Foucault's insights prompted critics such as Edward W. Soja in Postmodern Geographies to argue for a rigorous attention to space as a theoretical concept. Critics in a number of disciplines have increasingly been engaged in analyzing the embodiedness and locatedness of subjectivity and its epistemological outcomes. That is, they argue that knowledges, including self-knowledges, are partly a function of our positions in and our relationships to particular spatial environments, including the space of the gendered, sexed, racialized, class-demarcated and medicalized body. In such analyses, place, space and other geographic concepts are used to contextualize and position social identities and social relations. Crucial here is the foundational premise that what is social has a spatial component; likewise, spaces are socially constituted through language and other symbolic signs. Furthermore, spaces and their meanings change over time. Foucault points out that spaces themselves have histories and that "it is not possible to disregard the fatal intersection of time with space" (22). Only by investigating both time and space can we fully articulate what it means to be situated human beings.

In literary studies generally, the critical lexicon is replete with spatial terminology: areas of study are described as fields; critical interpretation is often imagined as a kind of mapping, or texts themselves become maps to be read; innovative critical approaches are said to break new ground or open up new territories; and textualized subjectivities are articulated in relation to sites, zones, borders, centers, margins, and so on. In Canadian literary studies, particular concepts that are specific to Canadian representations of spaces and spatialized identities tend to recur: wilderness, garrison, north, region. Interestingly, at this point in the late twentieth century, when corporate agendas and the distribution of international capital are configuring what Lawrence Grossberg calls a "spatial economy of power which cannot be reduced to simple geographical dichotomies -- First/Third, Center/Margin, Metropolitan/Peripheral, Local/Global -- nor, at least in the first instance to questions of personal identity" (170), one might ask whether such highly localized concepts will continue to be meaningful. Perhaps, as Doreen Massey argues, the trick is to find ways of describing the experiences of human beings who are located in particular spaces that are neither static nor singular but can be imagined as networks of diverse social relations that are constantly in process (154-56). Much of this theoretical work remains to be done.

Massey has written that "'Space' is very much on the agenda these days" (249) in the social sciences and humanities, and recent publications show that critics of Canadian literature are finding new and exciting ways of analyzing spatial matters.. A partial list of such studies would include special issues of Semiotext(e) and The London Journal of Canadian Studies titled "Canadas" and "Geography, Gender and Identity in Canadian Literature" respectively, the proceedings of a conference held at the University of Northern British Columbia titled Diverse Landscapes: Re-Reading Place Across Cultures in Contemporary Canadian Writing, and two books, Graham Huggan's comparative study Territorial Disputes: Maps and Mapping Strategies in Contemporary Canadian and Australian Fiction and W.H. New's Land Sliding: Imagining Space, Presence and Power in Canadian Writing. In such critical work, attention shifts away from defining a singular Canadian identity in the natural environment or in metaphors derived from it and focuses, instead, on articulating the complexities of Canadian representations of spaces and our different relations to them. Such studies raise urgent questions about how spaces are made meaningful through language and how literature participates in a larger cultural and critical project of understanding the spatial components of social existence. The authors collected in this volume participate in and extend these debates.

Fifteen articles have been selected from numerous submissions, and the resulting assortment reflects not only the methodological variety of research on Canadian literary space, but also the spatial variety of Canada itself. From Hearne's Arctic Fort to Lowry's Dollarton to Roberts's Tantramar Marshes, we move from coast to coast to coast, as the saying goes; moreover, with stops along the way in such locales as Grove's snowbound prairie, Callaghan's Toronto, and Scott's post-Massacre Montreal, this collection engages with a mixture of wilderness, rural, and urban spaces, and covers a broad temporal range. Most importantly, perhaps, these articles attend not only to physical spaces -- natural and built -- but also to the symbolic spaces, imaginary spaces, and spaces of desire that may reveal the most about what Canadian writers make of their world.

Wilderness journeys are the focus of the first three English-language articles. Kathleen Venema draws on postcolonial theories among others in her nuanced rhetorical analysis of spatial signs in Samuel Hearne's journal. Hearne's increasingly conflicted negotiations of cultural codes with the "Northern Indians" are shown to be a function of his distance from the Hudson's Bay Company fort, which acts as "the symbolic (if absent) centre of his text." Venema reveals the ways Hearne's bureaucratic position (as a representative body) is altered by changes in the physical position of his material body. The imperialist discourses informing Hearne's Arctic presence as an explorer also, in different ways, affect the later recreational Arctic travels of C.C. Vyvyan. In her reading of Arctic Adventure, Heather Smyth shows Vyvyan crossing gender boundaries of the 1920s by inscribing her travelling self both within and against traditional masculinist and imperialist images. The heroic male adventurer model is more conventionally used, though in some idiosyncratic ways, by F.P. Grove in "Snow." As W.H. New explains in his close reading of discursive codes and tropes, the slippery language of "Snow" enables it to be read as both a true account and a fictitious tall tale that maps prairie space in a self-aggrandizing manner.

The destination of Grove's flamboyant excursion is home -- as it so often is in literary journeys, and as it is in Daphne's Marlatt's Ghost Works. Michèle Gunderson's reading of Marlatt's text draws out a familiar theme -- the construction of "self" through a search for "home" -- but addresses the complexities of Marlatt's relations to multiple homes and lived spaces, and her desire that "home" be a place at once familiar and strange. Reading the new-world strange through the old-world familiar was a persistent habit of early Canadian writers; as D.M.R. Bentley shows in his wide-ranging discussion of the literary site poem, one fascinating measure of Canadian literature's development is the way particular spaces and places were seen to have been made special by their inclusion in a poem. While this was particularly true if the site had been a touchstone for a British writer, especially a Romantic, Bentley shows that increasingly places could become hallowed as the "literary property" of a Canadian writer -- the way the Tantramar area did for Roberts, for instance.

Les deux prochains articles portent sur la littérature canadienne-fançaise. Pierre Rajotte s'intéresse aux récits de voyage de la second moitié du XIXe siècle qui présentent une image du référent qui tient plus de l'imaginaire et des archétypes culturels que de la réalité. Casgrain, Routhier, Garneru décrivaient les sites qui s'étendaient sous leurs yeux en appliquant au réel des grilles d'interprétation tirées de leurs lectures. Paradoxalement, il semblerait que <<nous vivions trop dans les livres et pas assez dans la nature >> pour reprendre le mot d'Anatole France. La mer, d'après Alessandra Ferraro, ne fait pas partie de l'imaginaire canadien-français du XIXe siècle et quand elle apparaît dans les oeuvres poétiques c'est toujours à titre de symbole négatif, reproduisant le climat d'incertitude et d'angoisse dans lequel était plongé un peuple dont le territoire n'était pas assuré. Ce n'est pas qu'au siècle suivant, comme l'explique Ferraro, que l'eau deviendra une valuer positive, symbole d'ouverture au monde.

Two theoretically based discussions of regional space are offered by Lisa Chalykoff and Ian Adam. In a provocative position paper, Chalykoff argues against what she sees as the "two solitudes" that dominate articulations of the Canadian literary region. Taking issue with both physical-geographical and mental-psychological epistemological bases for constructing regions, she advocates a new conception of the region that would acknowledge recent thinking about the social dimensions of space. Ian Adam draws on the philosopher Charles Peirce in a discussion of icons and iconicity in prairie literature, using a story by Sharon Butala as a case study. Concluding that prairie writing is more inclined to rural than urban icons, he argues for greater recognition of the prairies as a region of cities as well as of plains and farms.

Dans un article sur l'invention romanesque de noms réels et la métaphore toponymique dans Kamouraska d'Anne Hébert, Luc Bonenfant démontre en quoi les toponymes de ce roman sont le lieu d'un investissement sémantique et syntaxique complexe qui dépasse la notion de cadre géographique et comment ils contribuent grandement à la poétique générale du texte. À cet article sur des toponymes québécois succède un article de Jean Morency sur l'espace nationale et l'espace littéraire dans l'oeuvre de Victor-Lévy Beaulieu. Dans ses oeuvres, Beaulieu pose la question de l'espace du Québec contamporain: comment décrire un espace enraciné dans la réalité québécoise, et uniquement québécoise, en marge de tout pittoresque et de tour exotism, dans lequel les lieux s'imposent comme d'eux-mêmes?

The rural bias Adam finds in prairie iconicity has had a long tradition in Canada as a whole; if asked to name a characteristically Canadian environment, we tend to think first of all that "open" space. Our last four English-language articles discuss literary engagements with Canada's three biggest cities and all, in very different ways, show how the palimpsestic layers of city-space exhibit its historical and contemporary multiplicity -- the competing visions and discourses that formed it, as well as the many modes of habitation and use that still jostle within its porous boundaries. Justin Edwards's essay on Morley Callaghan's Strange Fugitive examines a Toronto in transition; poised between contradictory images of provincial dullness and American-style urban decadence, Callaghan's 1920s Toronto is a place of paradoxes. Through close attention to representations of such spaces as parks, streets and homes, Edwards shows how the crossing of spatial boundaries functions in the city as a figure for social transgression.

In his study of Dollarton, the squatter's place near Vancouver where Malcolm Lowry lived and wrote, Norman Ravvin connects the incompleteness of landscape with Lowry's habitually endless rewriting. With something like an archaeologist's attentiveness, he traces changes over time in the Dollarton landscape and the meaning imputed to it by Lowry and his successors, including those who have recently memorialized him with "The Malcolm Lowry Walk." Douglas Ivison performs a similar task for the Montreal of Hugh Hood's Around the Mountain, drawing on Lefebvre, Foucault, Guy Debord and other theorists to demonstrate how Hood's attention to disruptive and marginalized elements of the palimpsestic city combats the homogenizing and obliterating spatial practices of capitalism and helps make urban space knowable. Being the product of so many forces, urban space can be hard to know at the best of times, as David Harvey (1-2) and others have argued; at the worst of times even the most familiar urban space can seem alien and threatening, and need to be radically revisioned. Gail Scott's Main Brides is set at just such a time -- Montreal after the 1989 killing of 14 women -- and Ellen Servinis sees that novel as using the aftermath of the Massacre to address the ways urban space is seen variously to enable and prevent a sense of belonging in women. And while Ravvin and Ivison find diversity in the palimpsest's historicity, Servinis finds diversity in a figure of simultaneity focused on "the Main," the street that both divides and gathers Montreal's differences.

To end this beginning with an (admittedly predictable) spatial metaphor, we hope the studies gathered here will help to widen the field of Canadian studies, and contribute in some way to the placement of space on the agendas of more critics and students of Canadian literature.

Works Cited

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 1995.

Atwood, Margaret. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Anansi, 1972.

Beeler, Karin and Dee Horne. Diverse Landscapes: Re-Reading Place Across Cultures in Contemporary Canadian Writing. Prince George: UNBC P, 1996.

Foucault, Michel. "Of Other Spaces." Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22-27.

Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: Anansi, 1972.

Grossberg, Lawrence. "The Space of Culture, The Power of Space." The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons. Ed. Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti. London: Routledge, 1996. 169-88.

Harvey, David. The Urban Experience. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1989.

Harrison, Dick. Unnamed Country: The Struggle for a Canadian Prairie Fiction. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 1977.

Huggan, Graham. Territorial Disputes: Maps and Mapping Strategies in Contemporary Canadian and Australian Fiction. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1994.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.

The London Journal of Canadian Studies. Special Issue: Geography, Gender and Identity in Canadian Literature 12 (1996).

Massey, Doreen. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.

Moss, John. Patterns of Isolation in English Canadian Fiction. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974.

New, W.H. Land Sliding: Imagining Space, Presence and Power in Canadian Writing. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997.

Ricou, Laurence. Vertical Man/Horizontal World: Man and Landscape in Canadian Prairie Fiction. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1973.

Semiotext(e): Canadas 5.2 (1994).