Michael J Sidnell
Producing Marginality consists of six essays and a preface. The earliest (by far) of these is on theatre in Toronto in the 1970s; the next, chronologically, is about theatre in Ontario during four years in the 1980s; the third compares theatre in Quebec and English Canada; the fourth looks at the reception of plays from Quebec in Toronto over a two-year period; the title essay is a critique of newspaper reviewing, public taste, and arts councils' policies; and the sixth and last-written essay is the Introduction, in which Wallace lays out some of his theoretical instruments and discloses his attitudes to such matters as: the social marginalization of gays; the marginalization of theatre in Canada outside - but not inside - Quebec; and the cultural disequilibriurn of a chauvinistic Quebec that knows and cares practically nothing about theatre or any other artistic manifestation in Canada outside its borders, linked with a Canada that acknowledges Quebec's sometimes brilliant productions with interest and respect.
Each of these constituent essays is marked as to place and time of writing - significantly, for though the essays are not arranged chronologically the book is a narrative of quest. The subject of this quest is self-constituted in Toronto, in the mid-1970s, at the moment of his 'coming out to my family, friends and colleagues' (27) as a gay, and the quest is pursued as far as July 1989, in Montreal, where Wallace is then staying with his lover, who is named, praised and thanked. The critical discourse on theatre, with which the quest is confluent, extends backwards and forwards somewhat further, as indicated, and the interweaving of the two strands produces a considerable narrative and thematic momentum.
Wallace's emphasis on the fact of his gayness is in context with a general attention to positionality; so it is pertinent also that the book was produced, as he tells us, with various kinds of support: a B grant from the Canada Council in 1987; a Research Fellowship from Glendon College of York University in 1986-87; a research leave from his tenured position in 1987-88; and a Maclean-Hunter Fellowship in arts journalism in June 1989. Wallace aptly says, with the candour that so delightfully pervades his work, 'I usually feel simultaneously marginalized and privileged' (8). Being privileged and feeling marginalized might be said the most favourable position, at the moment, for productive social engagement.
Wallace's candour is accompanied by sharp critical insights into theatre, but the book is more profound in tapping a true voice of feeling than in its address to the theatrical questions it raises, or in its Cultural politics. Though Wallace makes a serious effort to expose his own 'ideology,' as well as those he criticizes, his analyses of them are slight: there he is staring on a culture with dismay, inspired by a peak in Althusser; as, for instance, in his discovery that anonymous judging by funding agencies doesn't promote excellence. Surely he must have had some earlier inkling that the essential purpose of anonymous judging (like anonymous book-reviewing in olden times) is to preserve the status quo and enforce mediocrity without the nuisance of explanations! A detailed analysis of the particular mechanisms by which this objective is achieved in the theatrical situations that Wallace is familiar with would have been of no little interest.
Another pair of problems that he raises but has not thought through may be worth remark. The first of these is wearisomely familiar. Wallace calls it 'the academic marginalization of drama' (132) - a phenomenon that explains, for him, the obsession of reviewers (and others) with scripts rather than performances. This marginalization arises from a supposed pedagogical fallacy by which Canadian teachers at all levels are said to be teaching playtexts as literature. But the assertion is surely groundless, for teachers and students everywhere are ceaselessly and self-righteously chanting a doxy in which the printed text actually before them is by the mysteries of inscription and intentionality to be apprehended in terms of theatre.
This theatre-on-the-page stuff thoroughly muddles the radical distinction between theatre and writing. Theatre is not, of course, something inscribed but something materially present, and playtexts, more than any other kind of literature, reveal theatre's absence. Theatre, it needs to be stressed, performs all kinds of literature - letters, poems, novels, as well as plays written for it, or for reading. And for good reason, contemporary theatre is often most itself when the literature it appropriates is other than plays.
The connected problem, which is concentrated in the essay 'Understanding Difference' and is a gall to Wallace's spirits, is involved in his conclusion that:
The differences between Québécois and English-Canadian theatre that have become so visible to me in the last few years are also the differences between two cultures; one attempts to ensure its survival through the construction of its own institutions; the other relies on the received structures of outside cultures to pursue its sense of self. (207)
Now, for Wallace, those 'outside cultures'
make themselves felt largely through (dramatic) literature, which he supposes
Quebec theatre to be less reliant on. But the observation appears to be
inadequate insofar as (with the glaring exception of plays written elsewhere
in Canada) theatre in Quebec has been notably receptive of such
literature (much of it from the classical European repertoire, including
Shakespeare), and has been energetically engaged in translating it linguistically,
culturally and theatrically.
A major source of the theatrical 'difference' that Wallace is searching for may be - I think it is - located in his term 'English-Canadian' and in the corresponding ideology which underlies his chapter - the earliest, most historical and scholarly one - on 'Toronto theatre in the 1970s.' This chapter is imbued with the (bi-)nationalism that was more or less pervasive at the time, and which was largely the project of some privileged bureaucrats, academics and artists, who promoted a cosy, shallow and self-serving (but not insincere) idea of (bi-)nationhood that would be realized by the 'institutions' Wallace refers to, and, of course, by (more) public funding. An important element in this ideology was an obligatory 'post-colonialism' that insisted on de-anglicization and linguistic deracination. One of the merits of Producing Marginality is that Wallace allows himself to be pushed from that ideological position to a more open and exploratory one.
As to marginality, Bob Wallace conveys the sense that since only the marginal would be fit to occupy the centre, that dominant position must be kept as dynamically empty as the city centre of Barthes' 'Japan.' Perhaps this theme and Wallace's quest will soon be taken up again, for it appears that one of the benefits of this really engaging book has been to poise its author for the next.