Elle Archives | Numéro Cinq

Brand New Douglas Glover Interview in the LA-based Whole Beast Rag

Sep 012013

Adam Segal at Whole Beast Rag in Los Angeles read Savage Love in manuscript (how he got the ms. is a story for another time) and emailed me his admiration (always appreciated) and an invitation to do an interview. It turns out to be one of the best interviews I’ve done in ages. Adam gives great prompts; he’s got a literary spirit; I get to say some things that are new even to me — I like it when the long string of arguments that is my mental life take a new turn.

Here is Adam’s introduction; click the link beneath to read the interview.

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SPECIAL REPORTING: ADAM SEGAL

I was introduced to the work of Douglas Glover earlier this summer when I was given the unique opportunity to read an early manuscript for Douglas Glover’s forthcoming collection of stories, Savage Love. It’s a gorgeously vivid, inventive, and occasionally brutal collection, steeped in blood, familial affection, and North American history. If you’re a fan of short fiction, it’s not one to ignore.

Glover, who holds a Master of Letters in philosophy from the University of Edinburgh and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, has been writing stories, novels, and essays for over thirty years. He is also the founder of the online literary magazine Numéro Cinq. Douglas Glover is, as Maclean’s Magazine suggested in a review of his 2003 novel Elle, “the most eminent unknown Canadian writer alive.” Indeed, Elle won the Governor General’s award for Fiction, Canada’s most prestigious literary award. But let’s not listen to the awards for a moment, and instead listen to the man himself.

I recently spoke with Glover about the flickering quality of ironic language, about the proper ways of approaching historical fiction, about talking corpses and strangled cats, and finally about the massive importance of human self-delusion. Read on, read on:

Read the rest at DOUGLAS GLOVER — WHOLE BEAST RAG ISSUE #6.

Editor’s Note: The magazine is not defunct, but you can read that issue and the interview here.

Girl Wearing Bear, or Elle, the Poem — John Watson

Nov 282011

Okay, one of the best things about Numéro Cinq is the serendipity of the network reaching out (which is its nature, and it is insatiable). DG’s friend Haijo Westra, a just-retired classics professor at the University of Calgary, wrote an essay about dg’s novel Elle which, some years ago, out of the blue, he sent to dg, and they became friends (and later the essay was published in French and then in an English translation on NC). Manifesting his enthusiasm in all ways, Haijo gave a copy of Elle to an Australian poet named John Watson who was in Calgary while his wife worked on her doctorate. Then John Watson wrote a poem in response to Elle and sent it to dg. Now dg and John Watson are becoming friends, and, as winter sets in around dg, John Watson WILL INSIST on sending him emails such as:

We had a foretaste of summer heat last week. We had driven to the Central Coast hoping to spend the night in a little cabin. Towards dusk the beach was listlessly hot, the cabin stifling with no Southerly change expected. So we drove another 3 hours back home so as to sleep…

And this:

We went today (2 hours) south of Sydney to the beach behind the house where DHLawrence lived in Thirroul for 3 months and wrote Kangaroo. The first day after a week of rain. Full sun with a large pale edge of rain run off before the dark blue water.

But dg did admire that poem—delightfully exuberant, digressive, Menippean (if you will) and droll (see poem below).

The poet, upon request, sent dg a bio to go with the poem. It went like this:

John Watson the author of A First Reader (Five Islands Press, 2003), Montale: A Biographical Anthology (Puncher and Wattmann, 2006), Erasure Traces (Puncher and Wattmann, 2008), Views from Mt Brogden & A Dictionary of Minor Poets (Puncher and Wattmann, 2008), River Syllabics, (Picaro Press, 2009) and Four Refrains, (Picaro Press, 2011). He won the Newcastle Poetry Prize (2002) and the Blake Prize for Poetry (2009).

But then John Watson wrote a disclaimer:

The bio too is rather austere. No mention of the influence of voluptuous aunt in early days, nor keen interest in Brigitte Bardot films, pursuit of freakish weather events like waterspouts, St Elmo’s Fire, etc.

This seemed intriguing, so dg asked for another bio, the expanded version. Soon a far more exuberant bio arrived (unfortunately still lacking the “voluptuous aunt” story). Bio and poem together are pleasant and diverting reading.

Since in retrospect actual events seem to fade beside literary ones, a brief biography might be possible in terms of influences. Earliest memory: The Three Bears (the pleasures of uncertainty: “Who’s been sitting in my chair?”) Early adolescence: the stories of H G Wells and particularly the romance of The Door in the Wall. (The notion of idyll, loss and longing “which will persist with Watson for the rest of his life.”) A couple of years later, reading aloud The Windhover, with especial delight in the uncertain function of the word “buckle.” First stirrings of poetry as “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” Then Lampedusa’s story Lighea with its sexual blaze, Nerval’s Sylvie, Daphnis and Chloe, Beroul’s Tristan, Kleist’s Marquise von O. All of these he will subsequently versify i.e. rewrite in iambics. “The impulse to read more closely by means of versification” derives no doubt in part from Borges’ reviews of non-existent authors. Watson’s Dictionary of Minor Poets (read imaginary poets) (2008 but written 20 years earlier) is also part of that impulse.

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I Am a Landscape of Desire: Gender, Genre and the Deconstruction of the Textuality of Empire in Douglas Glover’s Elle — Pedro M. Carmona Rodríguez

Mar 042011

Spain has a surprisingly extensive network of Canadian studies departments, a fact that astonished me when I stumbled upon a conference program reference to this essay about my novel Elle. I tracked down the author, wrote him an email, and asked to see a copy of the paper. This was years ago. Pedro and I became email friends. He arranged for me to be invited to a conference at the University of La Laguna in the Canary Islands where I met a crowd of fascinating scholars and lived in an old hotel on a beautiful windswept square in the centre of the city (which is a UNESCO heritage site). The volcanic mountain at the centre of the island was shrouded in mist the whole time I was there. I was introduced to drinks the names of which (as well as the contents) are unfortunately lost to memory. (DG is a notoriously bad traveler.) I love this paper about Elle. I love the magical message loops–someone in Spain was decoding Elle as, simultaneously, I was decoding Don Quixote and writing The Enamoured Knight. I have no idea why there is this connection with Spain. It’s mysterious. Pedro Carmona-Rodríguez is an affable, acute, and sapient scholar, a terrific reader of my work. He teaches English, Theoretical Discourses, and Anglo-American Literatures at Universidad de La Laguna /UNED in the Canary Islands. His area of research is contemporary Canadian literature with an emphasis on gender and postcolonialism, the two entwined. An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the Annual meeting of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies (AEDEAN) at the University of Huelva (Spain) in December, 2006.^[1]

Douglas Glover’s novel, Elle, engages issues of control and its refusal, which are part and parcel of any document that intertextually appropriates and interrogates the imperial text. Through its historical research, the novel shows how the dynamics to expose the functioning of empire is increasingly concerned with examining the extent to which contemporary views are inflected by colonialism. As Tiffin and Lawson argue, “[i]mperial textuality appropriates, distorts, erases, but it also contains” (1994: 6), being this containment a more or less covert tendency to silence any contesting narrative. Glover’s Elle reflects how a female wayward gender construction turns into a counter narrative of the imperialist zeal of settlement and reproduction of the same in the seemingly empty land of the other. Woman and land are here interrelated entities, since biological reproduction and the reproduction of the incoming civilisation are, therefore, parallel acts of colonialist impregnation.

Anne McClintock’s suggestion that imperialism and its deconstruction requires a theory of gender power unveils the mechanisms whereby gender and sexuality lead us into a new dimension of colonial mimicry (1995: 6). This paper is concerned with the ways in which a wayward gender configuration parallels the generic instability of the document produced by the novel’s heroine. On the one hand, Elle’s views on space, race, gender, sex or Native myths challenge the mirror of the Eurocentric technologies of representation, and their vehicular means, the travel account, to inhabit on the other side. On the other, an atypical gender inscription manufactures a peripheral location for her subject. In the meantime, the Canadian periphery, in several senses, is hailed as the stance to threat the colonialist centred textuality. Elle’s autobiographical document unwrites the marginalisation that colonialism and patriarchy have firmly elaborated for her and the Canadian space.

When the novel opens its main narrative line, its then anonymous female protagonist, a replica of the 16^th century historical Marguerite de Roberval, the French woman abandoned in the St. Lawrence River’s firth during Jacques Cartier’s third Canadian expedition, is on top of a man whose penis she maintains erected as tied by a rope, while her lover, Richard, is about to throw up out of sea sickness. When the novel is about to end, in turn, the same protagonist has just murdered Monsieur de Roberval, the agent of her dereliction, in the guise of a Canadian she-bear.^[2] While it seems evident that passivity and activity struggle for preponderance in Elle’s story, her act of writing back from Canada gains for her an upper hand in her fight with the vectors of imperialism and patriarchy: on the one hand, she overtly defies the humanist subject in underlining her gender, and, on the other, that same gender diminishes the relevance of the European colonialist patriarchy.

Being a literal defiance for the systems upholding the enterprise of settlement and reproduction of the French in Canada, Elle is left behind the expedition to which she belongs. Her rendition of that abandonment is transformed into a vitriolic critique of the colonialist mentality (see Hernáez Lerena, 2007; 2009). The creation of subjectivity produced by her memoir interweaves race, gender and sexuality, three elements that turn colonialism upside down. However, Elle promptly claims that “I must be the first French woman to set foot in this world, the first of the General expedition to land, the first colonist in Canada” (Glover, 2003: 37). From the opening of her text, she reveals herself as being between the colonialist and the colonised. Whereas her European origin includes her within the former group, her position as writer and story-teller endows her with the authority of the historian, and illustrates that of so many white women in the New World, who “[…] were not the hapless onlookers of empire, but were ambiguously complicit both as colonisers and colonised, privileged and restricted, acted upon and acting” (McClintock, 1995: 6). As part of that appropriated agency, Elle launches demolishing critiques, and, once, they have targeted their aim, recedes to deny her own relevance as writer and subject. Pragmatically speaking, however, the objective has already being achieved, namely, that of undermining the basis of dominance and establishing firmly a counter-narrative. Thus, she frequently makes speeches like,

I am a headstrong girl, shallow and frivolous, born to a little land in the provinces but never meant to take part in the so-called great events of my time even if I have wanted to. Instead, I wanted to read books and make love, which only made me an object of lust or ridicule and bound me to the periphery, the social outlands, to Canada. Aguyase. […] I have founded an unofficial colony in an unofficial Canada. […] Unfortunately, no one knows this, which is the nature of unofficial non-histories (and anti-quests). (Glover, 2003: 149)

That rejection of positionality starts from quite early in Elle’s memoir. The writing subject lacks a name, since ‘Elle’ is not a proper noun, but a common third person, singular female pronoun. In lacking a name, issues of position, addressing and the authority of writing are immediately affected. In other words, the author of this memoir adopts a quasi-anonymous persona that travels back and forth in time; she rejects the linear teleology and moves from 1542 to 2003, when a contemporary Elle makes love to her boyfriend by the sandy estuary of the St. Lawrence, where it all begun five centuries ago. In this form, the unity and the single voice resonant of any account of colonialism and pseudo-ethnography are broken into pieces; Elle moves in and out of her own writing and her movement, literal and metaphorical, deconstructs the fixity of the ideology and categories underneath. Her dwelling between positions of superiority and inferiority is also a rejection to inhabit a single site to be in turn in several, all-partial enclaves of writing and vision where the spectacle of travelling is mostly refused (see Siegel & Wulff, 2002: 109-122).

Her memoir also deconstructs itself, and in the process, undermines one by one the cornerstones of the linear geographical conquest and its narrativisation according to an European calendar. “[…] I find I am the subject of a story I can hardly follow. In the labyrinth of dream, I lose the power of thought”. And then, she continues, “[…] this is the unofficial account of an anti-quest. This is the story of a girl who went to Canada, gave birth to a fish, turned into a bear, and fell in love with a famous author (F). Or did she just go mad” (Glover, 2003: 131).^[3] And, not only is this an anti-quest, since Elle’s descent is not followed by an ascent paralleling a learned moral lesson (see Frye, 1976), but an anti-conquest as well.^[4] Hardly do we hear her comments on racial dominance or the prevalence of her moral codes. Far from that, she questions the hegemonic stance with which Europe constructs its other as well as the conveyance of any message of human progress travelling from Europe to America. “[A]nd which message”, Elle wonders, “will we bring to the New World racing through the waves to meet us at the fringes of the mist (M. Cartier says the savages call it Canada, to our ears a nonsense word something like banana, although I can easily imagine that to their ears the word France calls to mind wholly other and unworthy resonances)” (Glover, 2003: 22).

Whereas it is clear that Elle’s alleged lasciviousness motivates Roverbal’s decision to leave her behind the expedition, her learned status is never dismissed as a relevant cause for her dereliction. And, no less important, the connection between her attitude to knowledge and her challenge of patriarchal morality are never set down as trivial reasons for her exclusion. “Maroon her on a deserted island lest she spread the contagion of discontent to other girls or even men, though men are generally impervious”, Elle remembers, “Keep her away from shops and books and looking glasses and friends and lovers, forget her” (Glover, 2003: 29). Her words notwithstanding, there is no way in which she can be forgotten, inasmuch as the text we read is her own account of the events, and seldom does she let her tracks be textually undetected. She never misses the opportunity to highlight that her viewpoint presides over, and consequently, her text strikes backs the systems that attempt to stifle her liberty in every sense, and physically constrain her to an open-air prison. “I like fucking and food and reading books […]” (Glover, 2003: 37), she states to define herself in opposition to the patriarchal imperial system that restricts her freedom of thinking and movement likewise. Bearing in mind the outstanding parallelism between woman and geography, it is no coincidence that there is a shared intention to contain both of them. Whereas the contagion that Elle may bring for the men in the expedition is ended by confining her on an island, the colonialist contention of a threatening geography is carried out by means of a representation whereby cartography is the direct vehicle to overpower the unknown. Thus, when she is about to be exiled, it is Roberval’s finger that points on the map and decides the place where Elle will stay. She, in turn, points out that “maps never look like the territory. Their relation to geography, […], has always been abstract if not outright deceptive” (Glover, 2003: 28). And if the relation between subject and space is always problematic in the colonial context, it is especially so in Canada, where a great deal of attention has been paid to the description of North American nature (see Osborne, 1988). In this sense, whereas the colonial writer makes an effort of containment, Elle shows the opposite tendency, since she distrusts the power of language and representation to contain, and very especially the power of cartography (see Huggan, 1994; van Herk, 1996):

the most up-to-date geographers, cosmographers, map-makers, astrologers, admirals, kings, court jesters and merchant adventurers of Europe contend that Canada is: a) a thin strip of land running north-south and dividing the Atlantic Ocean from the Pacific Ocean; b) an archipelago of large and small islands encompassing a labyrinth of channels leading more or less directly from the Atlantic to the Pacific; and c) a continent enclosing a vast inland sea […]. (Glover, 2003: 46).

Yet that distrust also taints Elle’s capacity to see and report, and, consequently, her memoir turns into what Graham Huggan calls “counter-travel writing” since it “interrogates the privileges that accrue historically to the genre” (2000: 40). And that position of writing from the questioning of genre enables her to provide the reader with a counter-vision of the traditional account. “[…] I have entered a place where the old definitions, words themselves, no longer apply, a world strange beyond anything I could have imagined […]. We have a name for such a place as this – wilderness. It is a name for the thing without a name, for everything that is not us, not me” (Glover, 2003: 38).

Her position as the non-European, paradoxically, enables her to go against the grain and interrogate more fiercely issues of foundation as well as the authority of the national fathers, and the very ontology of Canada. Thus, “[…] The mere existence of Canada constitutes a refutation of the first principle of Christian cosmology, expressed by St. Isidore in the seventh century, ‘that beyond the Ocean there is no land’” (Glover, 2003: 58; see Turner, 1994: 1-18). This creation of what could be termed a strategic marginality endows her with more authority to question issues of foundation:

And I wonder about a country founded by such disparate heroes as Richard and the Sieur de Roberval, who, if combined, still might not amount to a real man. Poor Canada, destined always to be on the edge of things, inimical to books and writing, plagued by insects in the summer and ice in the winter, populated by the sons and daughters of ambitious, narrow, pious, impecunious Protestants and inarticulate but lusty Catholic tennis players, not to mention the rest of the expedition […], every kind of rogue except heretics, traitors and counterfeiters who were deemed unsuitable to the dignity of our pious expedition. (Glover, 2003: 43)

But the act of colonisation is also filtered through the lenses of the body and a related politics of desire. It is in this context where Elle’s assertion of “I am a landscape of desire” (Glover, 2003: 53) gains special strength, since it reduces the act of colonisation to that politics of free-ride desire that has secluded her on a stranded island, and, eventually, reconciles the act of colonisation to her body mastery. In opposition to her fellow explorers, and their ideas on foundation, Elle claims “[f]ounding a colony in the New World is like the act of love” (Glover, 2003: 108). And to go further, their divergence concerning colonisation is made to rely on a gender difference that borders that comic effect with which Glover, and, ultimately, Elle punctuate their writings. “[…] I think, this is the difference between men and women: my uncle has conquered Canada by brandishing a sword over the bodies of his companions; I have conquered Canada on my back. In either case, the long term effect on the inhabitants is the same” (Glover, 2003: 96).

Thus, Elle rapidly approaches the native Itlsk, once her European fiancé dies on the Isle of Demons. The common issues of human degeneration and its coterminous claims of lack of domesticity and progress are wiped out in Elle’s reliance on her own colonial politics. The colonialist assumption of the virgin land is also disclaimed in her writing. First by her acknowledgement of the native presence, but also by using and reversing that already classical parallelism between woman and land. As Lawson and Tiffin state drawing on Peter Hulme (1995: 5), the parallel between these two entities is based on gender / sexual and racial postulates. First, the virgin woman/land is depicted as devoid of desire and sexual activity, but also waiting to be sexually initiated and impregnated, and, indeed, it cannot be overlooked that “sexuality as a trope for other power relations was certainly an abiding aspect of imperial power. The feminising of the virgin land […] operated as a metaphor for relations that were very often not about sexuality at all, or were only indirectly sexual” (McClintock, 1995: 14).

The racial factor is also significant, because the claim of native property is rapidly dismissed on the basis of white European supremacy. Racial inferiority was officially accompanied by a feminisation of the native, once again evincing that “knowledge of the unknown world was mapped as a metaphysics of gender violence […]. In these fantasies, the world is feminised and spatially spread for male exploration, then reassembled and deployed in the interests of massive imperial power” (McClintock, 1995: 23; see Pratt, 1991). Therefore, and taken as a whole, “colonialism conceptually depopulated countries either by acknowledging the native but relegating him to the category of the subhuman, or simply by looking through the native and denying his/her existence” (Tiffin & Lawson, 1994: 5).

Elle’s abandonment can only be understood by looking at a colonialist politics of surveillance on women’s bodies and their borders. Her free ride of her sexual desire jeopardises the enterprise of conquest and settlement. Not in vain, the control of women’s sexuality ensured maternity, and the racial purity of the new empire builders. In the end, it was a question of the “health of the male imperial body” (McClintock, 1995: 47). On the contrary, female “body boundaries were felt to be dangerously permeable and demanding continual purification”. Consequently, “women’s sexuality, was cordoned off as the central transmitter of racial and hence cultural contagion” (McClintock, 1995: 47). As McClintock underlines, for the 16^th century explorer and coloniser, women, of any race, needed to be mastered for being embodiments of nature, and the unconquered, but also for being ambivalent figures, thresholds “by means of which men oriented themselves in space, as agents of power and agents of knowledge” (McClintock, 1995: 24). And, as a matter of fact, Glover’s protagonist perfectly illustrates that position of threshold. On the one hand, she is between the old and the new world, being literally transported from the former to the latter and back, but also for her position as colonised and, though unwilling it may be, coloniser. She is taken care of for her role as reproducer, and when she cannot be mastered, left nowhere. She moves not only between places, but languages; loses her French in favour of muteness, and recovers her language, but now inflected by her travelling and dwelling in the stance of the other: “[d]id I once speak fluent French, read books? Now I am mute, or my words stumble as they come out of my mouth” (Glover, 2003: 147).

And, indeed, in this novel any roles are interchangeable; any position, contingent (see Wyile, 2003). Elle is the peripheral subject writing from the margin back to a centre that her own writing sets to deconstruct. Yet her status as a white coloniser makes of that periphery an unreal centre subject to immediate threats. Her memoir is also a feeble colonialist document, which, from the edge of genre, launches a powerful assault on the textuality of empire and its dissemination of pseudo-ethnographic travel accounts. Elle’s attack on colonialism and empire does not overlook the power of books, since she is prompt in defining herself as a product of her own reading, as in the end we all are. “I have made my mistakes”, she explains in her memoir. “I blame printed books for this, a recent invention which has led us to solitary pleasures: reason, private opinions, moral relativism, Lutheranism and masturbation” (Glover, 2003: 65). For all the assertions made in her writing, the grim truth is that her account vanishes, self-deconstructs and, therefore, goes as it came, leaving the reader valuing the connection between colonialism and gender and assessing the inflection of colonialism and its textuality on our daily lives.

—Pedro Carmona-Rodríguez

References

Appenzell, Anthony. 1976. “The Great Bear”. Canadian Literature 71 (Winter): 105-107.

Brady, Elizabeth. 1987. Marian Engel and Her Work. Toronto: ECW Press.

Engel, Marian. 1990 (1976). Bear. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.

Fee, Margery. 1988. “Articulating the Female Subject: The Example of Marian Engel’s Bear”. Atlantis 14.1 (Spring): 20-26.

Frye, Northrop. 1976. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge: Harvard U.P.

Glage, Lyselotte. 2000. “Introduction”. Being/s in Transit: Travelling, Migration, Displacement. Ed. Lyselotte Glage. Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V. Editions. ix-xiv.

Glover, Douglas. 2003. Elle: A Novel. Fredericton (NB): Goose Lane Editions.

Holland, Patrick and Graham Huggan. 2003 (1998). Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing. Ann Harbor: The U. of Michigan P.

Hernáez Lerena, María Jesús. 2007. “Surviving the Methaphorical Condition in Elle: Douglas Glover’s Impersonation of the First French Female in Canada”. Canon Disorders: Gendered Perspectives on Literature and Film in Canada and the UninitedStates. Eds. Eva Darias Beautell and María Jesús Hernáez Lerena. Logroño: Universidad de La Rioja / Universidad de La Laguna. 71-91.

Hernáez Lerena, María Jesús. 2009. “Visited Graves in Colonial Cemeteries: The Resurrections of Marguerite de Roverbal”. Canada Exposed /Le Canada à découvert. Eds. PierreAnctil André Loiselle and Christopher Rolfe. Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang. 343-356.

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

Huggan, Graham. 2000. “Counter-Travel Writing and Postcoloniality”. Being/s in Transit: Travelling, Migration, Displacement. Ed. Lyselotte Glage. Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V. Editions. 37-59.

Hutchinson, Ann M. 1987. “Onward, Naked Puritans: The Progress of the Heroines of Bear and The Glassy Sea”. Canadian Women Studies 8: 63-68.

McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Imperial Contest. New York: Routledge.

Osborne, Brian S. 1988. “The Iconography of Nationhood in Canadian Art”. The Iconography of Landscape in Canadian Art. Eds. Dennis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P. 162-178.

Philip, Marlene Nourbese. 1991. Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence. Toronto: Mercury.

Pratt, Mary Louise. 1991. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge.

Ryan, Simon. 1994. “Inscribing the Emptiness: Cartography, Exploration and the Construction of Australia”. De-Scribing Empire: Post-colonialism and Textuality. Eds./Intro. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson. London: Routledge. 115-130.

Siegel, Christi and Toni B. Wulff. 2002. “Travel as Spectacle: The Illusion of Knowledge and Sight”. Issues in Travel Writing: Empire, Spectacle and Displacement. Ed. Christi Siegel. New York: Peter Lang. 109-122.

Siegel, Christi. 2002. “Introduction”. Issues in Travel Writing: Empire, Spectacle and Displacement. Ed. Christi Siegel. New York: Peter Lang. 1-9.

Tiffin, Chris and Alan Lawson. 1994. “Introduction: The Textuality of Empire”. De-Scribing Empire: Post-colonialism and Textuality. Eds. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson. London: Routledge. 1-11.

Turner, Margaret E. 1994. Imagining Culture: New World Narrative and the Writing of Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP.

Van Herk, Aritha. 1996. “The Map’s Temptation or the Search for a Secret Book”. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 31.1: 128-136.

Verduyn, Christl. 2008. “A Canadian Bear, A Woman’s Heart: Douglas Glover’s Elle and Marian Engel’s Bear,” TransCanadiana: Polish Journal of Canadian Studies, Vol. 1: 74-85.

Wyile, Herb. 2003. “Lost in Transit: A Rev. of Douglas Glover’s Elle”. Canadian Literature 182: http://www.canlit.ca/reviews/unassigned/6270_Wyile.html.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the Annual meeting of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies (AEDEAN) at the University of Huelva (Spain) in December 2006 and published in Proceedings of the 29th AEDEAN Conference: Universidad de Jaén 15 al 20 diciembre 2005. CD-ROM. Ed. Alejandro Alcaraz Sintes et al. Jaén: AEDEAN / Servicio de Publicaciones U de Jaén, 2006. 539-45.↵
Marian Engel’s novel Bear (1976) and its many echoes all the way through a thirty-year-old tradition of Canadian writing are decidedly present in Elle. Here, as much as in Engel’s text, the bear is not only the savage symbol of Canada that needs to be tamed to ensure the human mastery of the landscape. In both novels, the bear is the other, near but not quite; distant but at hand to assert by opposition issues of national and personal subjectivity. In Elle, like in Bear, a too close contact with the animal brings an imminent danger for the human. Additionally, it is women that in the two novels flirt in different ways with the wild icon of Canadianness, and it is them that in distinct forms go back to a civilisation whose appearance has been remodelled by the contact with the savage lands of Canada (see Appenzel, 1976; Brady, 1987; Hutchinson, 1987; Fee, 1988; Verduyn, 2008).↵
And indeed, it is quite late in the course of the novel when we find Elle saying “I tell you now that I am very old and writing this memoir in secret, knowing that it may be used to light fires when I am gone” (Glover, 2003: 113). Her document goes through a process of demystification similar to the one undergone by other European texts. Thus, in the early stages of her period on the Isle of Demons, she acknowledges “we have eaten the books, using the bits we found inedible to kindle the fire in desperate circumstances […]. I keep only the English Bible, much chewed by rodents, for its strangeness and the vulgar force of its language (Glover, 2003: 49). From pseudo-ethnography to European religion, all goes through an immediate act of mockery that diminishes their cultural relevance, while recognising their presence in the postcolonial imaginary.↵
Holland and Huggan have appreciated a certain similarity between travel narratives and what they term “displaced romances”, but preserving the distinction between “the picaresque mode of comic misadventure and the pastoral mode of contemplation and elegiac reverie” (2003: 10). In its blurring of defining categories, nevertheless, Elle fluctuates between one and the other, and, whereas it is true that the comic predominates, it hardly avoids being grotesque and sad.↵

Douglas Glover’s Elle: A Menippean Satire — Haijo Westra & Adam Westra

Feb 032011

Haijo Westra sailing on the Strait of Juan de Fuca

Adam Westra

Here is an amazingly perceptive essay about dg’s novel Elle, written by a University of Calgary classics professor, Haijo Westra, and his son, Adam, who is currently living in Berlin while pursuing a doctorate in philosophy at the Université de Montreal (NC readers will remember Adam’s earlier contribution to the magazine here). Haijo sent dg an earlier version of this essay cold three or four years ago, just to try it out on the author. Subsequently it was published in French (“Elle de Douglas Glover: Une satire ménippéene,” by Haijo Westra and Adam Westra, Littoral, Numéro 5, autumne 2010). What is really impressive, if not to say brilliant, about this essay is the intuition that Elle follows the ancient model of the Menippean satire, which, in fact, it does—hard to credit, yes, in this day and age, but dg was thinking of Menippean satire, mixed form, and so on when he wrote the novel. No one has ever noticed this before (while dg’s apparent post-modernism is often remarked upon). Actually, these formal ideas lurk behind much of his fiction after the first two novels. It took a classics professor and a Kant philosopher to notice this (thus the currents of literary criticism can always do with a bit of refreshment from the ancient past). It’s a great pleasure to give the English version of this essay a home at Numéro Cinq.

Haijo Westra teaches Latin and Greek at the University of Calgary. Adam Westra is now working on his Ph.D. in Philosophy in Montreal and Berlin on the role of analogy in philosophical thinking, with a particular emphasis on Kant. (Coincidentally, or not, dg wrote a chapter on Kant’s use of analogy in his thesis at the University of Edinburgh.)

The tradition

The report of a French woman, identified as Marguerite de la Roque, abandoned on an uninhabited island of the Harrington Harbour Archipelago in 1542, has only the slightest basis in fact.^[1] Yet the story of how she was caught in flagrante delicto with her lover and how she was subsequently marooned by her Calvinist uncle, Sieur de Roberval, the leader of the first expedition to bring permanent settlers to Canada, and how she (barely) survived for three summers and two winters, spoke to the European imagination from the sixteenth century on. It is a story of passion, involving transgression of social boundaries, punishment, expulsion, and exile. It is a story of colonization, turning into a trial of survival and a threatening loss of identity through colonization in reverse by a dystopia of screeching birds and polar bears. It is also a story of gender about a young woman both victim and hero, and of gender role inversion, as she outlives her lover and takes over the traditional role of the (male) hunter. In Douglas Glover’s prize-winning novel Elle, translated under the title Le pas de l’ourse, the situation of the protagonist in between Europe and Canada becomes the locus for the exploration of the contemporary crisis of identity.

Arthur Stabler has surveyed the various literary treatments of the legend of Marguerite in literature from the sixteenth to the twentiethcenturies.^[2] Since Glover has woven many of the motifs of earlier versions into his novel and uses the tradition to link his nameless main character Elle intertextually with Marguerite as well as to redefine her in opposition to her legend, I will review them briefly with an eye to the role of the female protagonist in other genres, before analysing the novel Elle as a Menippean satire and positing the suitability of this Centaur-like genre of inversion for Glover’s novel and the appropriateness of the North Shore as a site for examining the contemporary crisis of identity.

The first version of the story is by Queen Marguerite de Navarre in her Heptameron (1558), a woman’s answer to Boccaccio’s Decameron.^[3] In Stabler’s summary, the Queen of Navarre, a Protestant sympathizer and an early feminist, has the abandoned woman survive through God’s mercy as well as her greater ability to survive the rigors of an uncouth diet. She even takes over and uses her dead husband’s gun (arquebus) to defend his grave against the wild animals, so his body will not become carrion meat. At the same time, in spirit, she lives an angelic life of prayer and meditation while reading the New Testament, all of which makes a great impression on her rescuers and on the ladies of La Rochelle, who send their daughters to her upon her return to France to teach them to read and write, in which honourable profession Marguerite spends the rest of her life. The Queen of Navarre turns the story into an exemplary tale of fidelity, Protestant devotion, and hardiness, as well as a triumph of a literate identity over the dispiriting nature of the wilds, turning the main character into a self-employed professional woman who was clearly strengthened by her experiences and acquired an identity and fame along with a profession. (In Elle she conducts a letter-writing business for illiterate merchants: 196). This first elaboration is an exemplary tale in which Marguerite is not a wanton delivering herself to sexual passion, but instead a faithful married wife, who saves her craftsman-husband’s life by a plea to have his death sentence commuted to being marooned, voluntarily joining him in his exile. This treatment of the story inscribes itself in the narrative tradition of examples of virtuous women, the ancient, medieval, and early modern answer to the denigration of womanhood.^[4] As such, it is quite different qua genre and social milieu and outcome from subsequent elaborations of the story. Glover actually has Elle comment on this version in a self-conscious protest against her own legend: “I became the parable of the pious wife … who shoots bears with an arquebus”.^[5]

In 1570/72, a second version appeared, written by Nicholas de Belleforest in the form of an histoire tragique^[6], an extremely popular genre at the time, with its own requirements for character and action. Marguerite is cast as a beautiful, spirited, and passionate young noblewoman, curious to see foreign lands, who falls in love during the journey with a young gentleman, lusty and hale, who wins her affection by writing verses and playing the lute (Elle observes that Canada is a place inimical to literature and books: 42-43). After appropriate resistance and agonized reflection the young lady finally consents to an informal wedding ceremony and is persuaded by her lover that they are man and wife in the eyes of God. De Roberval finds out and tricks both of them by marooning them on the “Isle of Spirits” off the East Coast, thickly wooded and inhabited only by wild beasts. Marguerite’s tears and laments fail to sway her cruel relative’s heart and she is left lamenting her loss not unlike Ariadne abandoned by Theseus on Naxos, the model of the woman abandoned by her lover in classical literature, most famously in the Roman poet Catullus, poem 64. Glover actually uses a different story from classical antiquity, namely that of Iphigenia (32-33) sacrificed by her father, Agamemnon, for the greater ‘good’ of the expedition to retrieve Helen from Troy, to point to the epic theme of revenge: De Roberval, like Agamemnon, “must have known that this would come back to haunt him” (33; 198-201). In Belleforest’s version, the lovers’ initial stay on the island is idyllic but the child that is born, as well as her lover, die within a year. She is reduced to inhuman appearance and worries about being eaten by wild animals when she expires, a recurring motif of atavistic horror in the tradition. Finally rescued after two years, she is told by her rescuers that her cruel relative has perished.

The differences with the Queen of Navarre’s version set the tone for subsequent treatments. From this point on, Marguerite is a noblewoman, a requirement of the genre of the histoire tragique, as is the courtship, seduction, and transgressive sexuality, and the generally operatic character of the tale. Yet Marguerite is not a mere victim. She is characterized by Belleforest as unusually brave, begging her relative to take her on the expedition. Her passionate nature makes her yield to her lover’s seduction, yet in the end she is more vigorous than him. (It is Elle who pursues her tennis-playing lover Richard in France: 20). After his death, hunting is her only pleasure; hunting, then, is related to aristocratic leisure as well as survival. The motif of Marguerite killing bears with a large gun in this version became very influential. The image of the armed female hunter inscribes itself in the traditional topos of the upside-down world, combining an exotic setting with a temporary inversion of European norms, rules, and gender roles. Canada has this effect on European culture and cosmology (58, 67).

The third version, by André Thevet, dates from 1575, expanded in 1586.^[7] Thevet was a cosmographer and reports the story as fact, explicitly naming Marguerite for the first time and claiming as his sources both Marguerite and her uncle, the Sieur de Roberval. In Thevet the love interest takes on an even more trangressive character with the introduction of a Norman maid, Damienne, a cunning bawd who holds watch while the lovers disport themselves onboard ship, turning Belleforest’s genteel operatic tale into a fabliau or a bawdy farce. She is clearly the model of Glover’s Bastienne (39), a name that also occurs in the legend.^[8] There is a woodcut in Thevet’s Cosmographie depicting Marguerite as holding an arquebus over two dead bears.^[9] She is said to have killed three of them in the Cosmographie, four in the Grand Insulaire after the death of her husband, child, and maid. She is rescued after two years and five months by Breton fishermen, but at this point she is seized by a desire not to leave the place where her dear ones had died; back in France, she wishes she were still in Canada.^[10] Glover explicitly borrows this detail (115) suggestive of a first, problematic Canadian identity expressed as nostalgia for the place of exile and loss, a recurring motif (157, 164, 176, 190) used to define a strange and equivocal attraction to Canada as the “Land of the Dead”(167), or as “a place that teaches us yearning and grief” (164), or as a version of the myth of the “Fortunate Isles” where St. Brendan’s companion asks to be left behind alone (157), or as an incomprehensible attraction to a savage place, or as a form of melancholy affecting old Canada hands (176). Glover also invokes the explorer Jacques Cartier’s characterization of the North Shore of the St Lawrence as the accursed, infertile land of exile God gave to Cain (159), east of Eden (Gen. 4.1-16).^[11] As a character in the novel, Cartier is unable to textualize his memoirs of Canada on account of a similar melancholy.^[12]

Subsequent literary treatments come in a variety of genres: as an exemplary tale by the seventeenth-century Dutch Calvinist Jacob Cats who presents Marguerite’s plight as the just rewards of premarital sex;^[13] as an eighteenth-century French novella by Feutry; and as part of a nineteenth-century collection of tales about shipwreck and adaptation under the title Les vrais Robinsons, adding the detail that Marguerite returned mad to France.^[14] Feutry writes about a young woman with a charming face, a sensitive soul, and a firm spirit by the name of Elise who is adaptable and hardy and who learns to hunt and whose daughter is raised in Rousseau-esque fashion. Together mother and daughter develop a “superior philosophy of life” due to their unconventional experience outside the artificial constraints of society.^[15]

The first Canadian version is in the form of a dramatic monologue delivered by Marguerite who has retired to a convent, written by an Irishman, George Martin (1887).^[16] Initially, the lovers are depicted sentimentally as living in an earthly paradise, where the wild beasts do not attack them, “…as if they felt/Love’s universal breathing melt / Their savage instincts”.^[17] Out of necessity, Marguerite learns to hunt; the theme of gender inversion is intensified through her disguise as a male naval officer designed by her uncle -unsuccessfully- to keep her out of trouble, as she was “volatile and gay”. The association of the female with a weapon almost seems to call for transvestism to reify the gender inversion.^[18]

The first dramatic treatment in Canadian literature by John Hunter-Duvar (1888)^[19] has Marguerite rescued by a Native woman, the first time a Native person enters the story, clearly as a cultural intermediary and saviour, since she also averts a massacre of Sieur de Roberval’s men because of her love for the unlovable Roberval, a construction suggestive of Elle’s rescue by Itslk, the Inuit hunter. However, the native man’s encounter with Elle and their cohabitation is presented by Glover as a manifestation of the destructiveness of European contact for native culture.

Finally, in 1899, the first, full-length treatment appears in a Canadian historical novel by Thomas G. Marquis.^[20] During the winter, a she-bear and her cub arrive on the island riding on an ice berg. The mother bear is shot by Marguerite and her male companion but the cub is tamed. When madness threatens the lonely Marguerite, she finds comfort in her pet bear, François, who is abandoned and returns to his natural ways instantly by killing a seal when Marguerite is rescued.

Glover, Atwood, Engel: Of bears in novels

As Glover indicates in his Author’s Note (8), these earlier versions brutally summarized here were known to him from Stabler’s book. Taken together, they present the encounter with the New World as a complete inability to come to terms with the natural environment other than through the ultimate imposition of European firearms. Nature is a place to die in and the essential task of the European in this savage land is to survive until rescued and returned to Europe, a quintessentially Canadian motif identified by Margaret Atwood in her guide to the Canadian literary imagination, Survival. Emblematic is the relationship with wild animals, either as mortal threat or as superficially domesticated pet in the story of Marguerite. In the literature of the second half of the twentieth century this opposition of culture versus nature changes, most notably in Atwood’s Surfacing and in Marian Engel’s Bear.^[21] There are several obvious reasons: the return to nature and the prominence of the Great Mother myth in the sixties and seventies; the importance of Jungian ideas in Canadian literature, in particular the role of animus and anima manifesting as animals, as in Robertson Davies’ Deptford trilogy; and the inclusion of Native mythology where the boundary between human and animal, nature and culture, is more fluid, with myths of women disappearing into the forest to have children with a bear or other (totemic) animals.^[22] Atwood’s protagonist, rejecting a failing marriage and the return to city life, is imagined as taking on some of the physical characteristics of a she-bear at the end of the cottage season; Engel’s main character even tries to initiate sexual contact with a captive bear, only to be sharply reminded of species boundaries and her place outside nature. In Elle one finds the most far-reaching identification of the female protagonist with the bear, but with a very different emphasis and outcome, introducing a new, post-colonial phase in the reception of the story. Glover uses the motif of theriomorphism to thematize the problem of identity and loss of the self (165, 167) through an imagined process of colonization in reverse, of a European woman, the anonymous Elle, by Canada.

Initially, Elle is saved from starvation by a starving old she-bear that collapses on top of her (94), like a deus ex natura. In clear opposition to the tradition, she never kills a bear (181), and her lover’s arquebus remains “rusty and useless” (69). From the first encounter Elle identifies with this old mother bear that is skin and bones like herself. She talks to it like a companion, an alter ego. Behind Elle’s identification lie the humanoid appearance and habits of bears, which make them actors in Native mythology, where bears and humans take on each other’s shape. In Glover’s novel this identification is profoundly ambivalent. At its best, the mythical co-existence of human and bear encompasses a spiritual world of wisdom (93) and a vision of the ultimate oneness of humans and nature; eventually it becomes a nightmarish obsession for Elle, a loss of self. Yet, initially the bear is a saviour. Elle even takes shelter from the cold inside the gutted stomach^[23] of the bear and is so reborn as it were to the Native hunter who has been following the bear on a vision quest (93). To him, the white woman has acquired the polar bear’s power. She now dresses in the bear’s skin and dreams of a bear lover (95). By contrast, her uncle, de Roberval, has grown terrified of bears (140). Yet her bear-ness becomes a dangerous obsession of which she has to be ‘cured’ (120, 145) by an old Native shaman, whose own identity switches back and forth from human to she-bear, both self and other, both cure and disease. Elle becomes a changeling herself with physical symptoms of bear-ness: barely recognizable, she is ‘rescued’ by a European ship of fools who relate her appearance to the character dressed as a bear in a charivari, an inversion ritual of medieval Europe (161: hence the Lords of Misrule, 107). She is returned to France and builds a camp outdoors together with a Native Canadian girl, Comes Winter, brought to Brittany by the explorer Jacques Cartier. Elle dreams and pines for Canada while walking the captive bear brought back from Canada as a cub, equated with her lost child (167), on a leash, dog-like. Leon, the dog that went to Canada with her, has shed his domesticity and refused to leave Canada, but the wild bear, brought to France, is pathetic in its domestication, bondage and decay, an image of the colonized self. Elle is said to have returned “infected with savagery” (183); physically and mentally she is in an in-between place, “in a state of being neither one nor the other” (167). Conversely, the Native girl, Comes Winter, has become “infected with Christianity” (183) and is thoroughly alienated from her own culture, a condition reified by the mortal European disease she has contracted. All three of them are exiles, alienated from their homelands, Elle doubly so.^[24] Comparing colonization with lovemaking (119), Glover suggests the intensity of the relationship between Old and New Worlds as well as the inevitability of human isolation and alienation (108). Glover refuses, however, a possible reading of the novel as an allegory of the (failed) ascent of the soul to mystic union (116). The locus for the discovery of this permanent alienation is Canada, the “Land of the Dead”, but also the land that signifies but itself (134), that is pure otherness, since both nature and culture connote. The status of the bear, from salvation to obsession to captivity, marks Elle’s passages as she moves from Canada back to France. The gothic ending of the novel suggests an ultimate redressing of the balance between captive nature and savage culture in a final, violent act of revenge against de Roberval in which Elle becomes indistinguishable from the captive bear.

Genre

The introduction of a thinly disguised Rabelais as Elle’s partner in the second half of the novel invites reflection on its generic structure and how this relates to its content. In Bakhtin’s analysis, the work of Rabelais is associated in particular with the carnivalesque impulse in ritual and literature and with Menippean satire as a basis for the novel as a literary mode.^[25] Little remains of the work of Menippus (second half of the third century C.E.) who received a unanimously bad press in antiquity as a philosopher who went over the top by mocking philosophy and its claim to truth – too much of a mad dog, even for his fellow Cynics, who aimed at shocking their audience by questioning conventional moral assumptions in their diatribes. Menippus drove this critique to its ultimate conclusion by making it nihilistic and self-parodic. In the second century C.E., the Greek satirist Lucian actually casts Menippus as a character in his dialogue Bis Accusatus (The Double Indictment)^[26] in order to define the genre as a biting satire and as a comic mixture of literary elements, “like a Centaur”. The ambiguous state of the Centaurs in between humans and animals is emblematic of Elle’s situation. In classical mythology the wise Chiron is a teacher of natural medicine and a helper of heroes, but the other Centaurs run wild.^[27] At the same time, Glover’s novel is strongly reminiscent of the genre as analyzed by Bakhtin, presented below in its reformulation by Anne Payne.^[28] As the genre and Glover’s novel are fond of catalogues (86, 105, 196)^[29] or ‘anatomies’ as Frye would call them, I shall use this device to try and ‘capture’ some of the elements of the novel. Ultimately, the generic form has significant bearing on the interpretation of the novel.

Generally, Menippean satire is characterised as a mixed bag, a potpourri or farrago. The Latin satura (not to be confused with Greek satyr) actually refers to stuffed sausage. These terms all connote an unconventional mixture of genre, style and tone, and an absolute absence of inhibition on freedom of speech, the Cynic ideal of parrhesia. Classical and neo-classical theory of genre was highly hierarchical, so the combination of comedy and philosophy, high and low style and serious and burlesque was a shocker.^[30]

Paraphrasing Bakhtin, Payne notes the following^[31] specifics of Menippean satire:

1. Character

There is often an investigation of unusual psychic states: insanity, split personalities, unrestrained daydreaming, strange dreams, suicidal thoughts. These phenomena destroy the epic-tragic integrity of man and his fate; in him the possibilities of another man and another life are revealed; he loses his “finalizedness” and singleness of meaning. He ceases to coincide with himself …. [T]hese traits … afford a new vision of man. The dialogical attitude of man to himself also destroys his “finalizedness.”

With a change of gender, we have the precise situation of Elle. The state of mind invoked on almost every second page is that of the dream, along with nightmare, vision, obsession/possession and madness. Occasionally Elle contemplates death as an escape from the Canadian condition. There is no return to her unreformed French-ness after her return to France: she has become permanently split between Old and New, both bear and woman, permanently double. The narrative takes the form of a dialogue of the main character with herself, constantly examining alternative or opposite positions, echoing the split personality and the double point of view. This affords a “new”, essentially tragic view of “man” as permanently alienated, inauthentic selfhood. Not mentioned by Payne is the characteristic of the fumbling, bumbling author/main character of Menippean satire, who learns basic things about existence the hard way, allowing for survival lessons in the wild and making the Canadian setting an existential one, both physically and symbolically. Dream visions are typical in which the main character is transported from everyday reality to an exotic location (heaven or hell) and so obtains a glimpse of other worlds and ultimate realities. Elle becomes a dreamer as she acquires her second, Canadian self; for her, as for Native people, dreams are real (139)

2. Subject Matter and Plot

[Menippean satire] is characterized by extraordinary freedom of invention in philosophy and plot …. The purpose of the fantastic is “to create extraordinary situations in which to provoke and test a philosophical idea”.

The extraordinary setting of Elle allows for an almost continuous series of reflections on her existential situation, i.e. alienation through colonization in reverse. This condition is explored through the drastic motif of theriomorphism as well as through a continuous, obsessive dialogue of the self with the self. Her ironic wit (131) and self-mockery, recurring features of Menippean satire, are symptoms of that divided self. The philosophical problem of the self is approached semiotically. Canada is said to signify only itself (134): it does not connote, i.e. it is empty of any association whatever and therefore constitutes utter emptiness/otherness. Similarly, Elle in the end has no home, no self, no soul (167). Her existence has lost all meaning. In literary terms, hers is an anti-quest, her return is that of the anti-hero (167). In fact, “instead of returning you find yourself frozen on the periphery, the place between places, in a state of being neither one nor the other” (167). Her counterpart is the Native hunter on the ever smaller ice floe drifting across the Atlantic towards Europe, never to reach it. She is said to be “infected with otherness” (157), reified by the physical symptoms that correspond with bearishness: hirsuteness, polythelia or supernumerary nipples, and claw-like hands (117). There is slippage from the mythical to the medical and vice-versa in Elle’s metamorphosis. Conversely, the New World has been infected by the Old (166). Linguistically, she is a “garbled translation” (147), culturally an exile (159), outsider (151) and intruder (162) in not one but two cultures. Menippean satire likes to confront two irreconcilable points of view, here an interminable dialectic of Old and New Worlds (141-2, 167, 178, 193-4), and is in effect aporetic: there is no comforting, mediatory solution, no compromise.

3. Genre, Style and Tone

“Menippean satire is frequently an organic combination of free fantasy, symbolism, and mystical religious elements with … extreme, crude underworld naturalism.”

The combination of theology with the sensual and the bawdy is evident from the first episode of the novel. Philosophical reflection is combined with elements of fantasy, fabliau and farce: the ridiculous and the sublime meet and clash. Elle’s dream journey into Native myth, magic and religion has its own bearish symbols and feverish mystic visions. Her bear-ness is an equivocal symbol of divinity, difference, and even the inauthentic self (144, 147). Learned reflections and references alternate with low life observations. Characteristically, there is display of learning and a ridicule of it in the same breath. Rabelais is a fountain of encyclopaedic knowledge (a favourite butt of Menippean satire) but he treats knowledge as a game and a joke: he is the rhetorician of ironic reversal (173, 179).

European literacy is confronted with Native orality as an expression of knowledge. Books are valued intellectually and erotically (30, 31, 33, 59, 65) but eaten for physical sustenance in Canada (42). Generically, Glover’s Elle has elements of the writer’s diary, travelogue, exploration narrative, philosophical tract, religious broadsheet, satire, encyclopaedia, allegory and myth. The novel presents a version of a myth, and at the same time, provides a self-conscious commentary on that myth: therefore, it combines, in Frye’s terms, both first and second-phase writing.^[32] The procédé is to break all formal conventions of literary expression as well as the entire aesthetic canon of classicism, and to deny grand narratives and unequivocal solutions. There is no idealisation of nature in Elle. The story of Elle, her extreme dislocation correlated with utter alienation of the self, finds an appropriate and convincing expression in Menippean satire, a genre that mocks conventional answers to fundamental questions. It is also essentially rebellious, as is Elle (and Rabelais), “a headstrong girl” and a heretic, and characterized by a total freedom of speech, the parrhesia of the Cynics who deliberately affected a savage life style, living on the margins of society, in a barrel and dressed in rags or animal skins, in order to point out their fellow citizens’ hypocrisies, biting the bourgeois like the dogs after which they were named. The broad humour and burlesque serve to turn the world upside-down in carnivalesque fashion, to shock the public out of its comfortable assumptions through inversion (62, 66, 67, 77, 115), a process that characterizes the New World. The Old World is based on a dream of order which is undone in the New (107). The setting of the novel, Quebec’s North Shore, is the crucial site where the crisis of contemporary identity is examined through the imagined experience of the first European woman settler in a landscape where the problems of human existence manifest themselves as starkly as the features of the natural environment. The North Shore represents Canada metonymously as well as the archetypal experience of Canada as a place that signifies only itself. , the scene of confrontation of a human being with total Otherness, where the drama (and the comedy) of the search for identity is enacted to this day. In Glover’s words: “The Côte-Nord is part of the country of my imagination.”^[33]

—Haijo Westra & Adam Westra

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Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

In his Author’s Note (Douglas Glover, Elle: A Novel [Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane, 2003] 8 ) Glover states that he first came across the story in the history of New France by Francis Parkman, who gives the version by Nicolas Thevet (see below, n. 7). It is reproduced by Samuel Eliot Morison in The Parkman Reader (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1955) 82-84. Although the earliest versions by Marguerite de Navarre (see below, n. 3) and Thevet differ significantly, the report is held to be historical: see the entry “La Roque, Marguerite de”, in Dictionnaire Biographique du Canada, vol. 1 (Montréal: Université Laval, 1966) 437. The island is variously called Ile de la Demoiselle or Ile des Démons.↵
Arthur P. Stabler, The Legend of Marguerite de Roberval (Seattle: Washington State University, 1972).↵
Simone de Reyff, Marguerite de Navarre: Heptameron (Paris: Flammarion, 1982) 458-460; Stabler, Legend 3-4.↵
Cf. Emily Wilson, “Loves Unseen”, TLS 22 & 29 August 2008, p. 12.↵
Elle, p. 114. All subsequent references to the novel will be given in the body of the text in parentheses.↵
Stabler, Legend, 5-11; for the genre of the histoire tragique see ibid. p. 6, n. 5; see also his “The Histoires Tragiques of François Belleforest: A General Critique, With Special Reference to the Non-Bandello Group”, diss. University of Virginia, 1958.↵
Stabler, Legend, 11-24; 37. For Thevet’s sources of the story of Marguerite, see Roger Schlesinger and Arthur P. Stabler, André Thevet’s North America: A Sixteenth-Century View (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986) xxii-xxiii.↵
Stabler, Legend, p. 37.↵
Stabler, Legend, 213.↵
Stabler, Legend, 17.↵
Robert Melançon, « Terre de Cain, Age d’Or, prodigues du Saguenay : représentations du Nouveau Monde dans les voyages de Jacques Cartier » , Studies in Canadian Literature / Etudes en Littérature Canadienne 4 (1979) 22-34.↵
The account of Cartier’s third voyage is no longer extant: see Schlesinger and Stabler, North America, xxxvii.↵
Cf. Donald Haks, Huwelijk en gezin in Holland in de 17de en 18de eeuw (Utrecht : HES Uitgevers, 1985), 70-72.↵
Stabler, Legend, 33-42.↵
Stabler, Legend, 42-45↵
D.W.S. Ryan, ed. The Legend of Marguerite by George Martin (St. John’s: Jesperson’s, 1995).↵
Stabler, Legend, 45-49, here p. 47.↵
Similarly, in the Memoir of a Basque Lieutenant Nun Transvestite in the New World of 1599 by Catalina de Erauso, the female protagonist is associated with a sword that is unsheathed at every possible (and impossible) opportunity.↵
John Hunter-Duvar, De Roberval, A Drama; also The Emigration of the fairies and The Triumph of constancy, a romaunt (St. John, N.B. 1888; rpt. Toronto: J & A. MacMillan, 1980); Stabler, Legend, 49-52.↵
Thomas G. Marquis, Marguerite de Roberval (c. 1899; Toronto: Copp, Clark, 1986) ; Stabler, Legend, 52-57.↵
In Shirley Barrie’s play, I Am Marguerite (Toronto: Playwrights Union of Canada, 1996), she shoots three bears and kills a deer with a knife. Anne Hébert’s play, L’ île de la demoiselle, in La cage, suivie de L’ile de la demoiselle (Montréal: Boréal, 1990), features the screeching birds of the legend as told by Thevet and adds a black raven which Marguerite would like to kill in order to adorn herself with its feathers (p. 229).↵
See Gary Snider, The Practice of the Wild (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990) 155-61 for a version of this myth that thematizes the problems of cross-species co-habitation. See also Paul Shepard and Barry Sanders, The Sacred Paw: The Bear in Nature, Myth and Literature (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985) and Stith Thompson, Motif Index of Folk Literature, rev. ed., vol. 1 (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1955), p. 461, # B 601.1 and p. 465, #B 632.↵
This is turning into a peculiarly Canadian motif: see the opening scene in Guy Vanderhaeghe, The Last Crossing.↵
Double displacement (in England and Nigeria) is the theme of The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2005)↵
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. R.W. Rotsel (N.p.: Ardis, 1973) 87-113.↵
A.M. Harmon, Lucian, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University and William Heinemann, 1921, rpt. 1969) 84-151.↵
Geoffrey Kirk, Myth: Its Meaning and Function in Ancient and Other Cultures (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1973) 152-162.↵
F. Anne Payne, Chaucer and Menippean Satire (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1981) 3-37 is the best short introduction to the genre. See Joel C. Relihan, Ancient Menippean Satire (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins, 1993) for late antiquity and W. Scott Blanchard, Scholars’ Bedlam: Menippean Satire in the Renaissance (Lewisburg, London and Toronto: Bucknell University Press and Associated University Press, 1995).↵
Cf. Bruce Stone, “Douglas Glover”, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 24 (2004) 1-55, at p. 46.↵
Blanchard, Scholars’ Bedlam, 33-36: Dryden did not approve.↵
See Payne, Menippean Satire, 7-9 for the next three quotes and Bakhtin, Problems, 92-97.↵
Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (Toronto: Academic Press Canada, 1982) 5-16.↵
See the epilogue, “Elle, Sept-Iles, 2003, pp. 203-205, and https://numerocinqmagazine.com/2010/06/10/gens-dici-gens-de-paroles/↵

New Statesman – Claude Lévi-Strauss: the Poet in the Laboratory

Nov 132010

Lively review of a new biography of Claude Lévi-Strauss, but this quote was the most interesting bit because it lines up with some of the ideas I tried to get across in Elle and The Life and Times of Captain N. The new technology of writing destroys oral cultures and we somehow feel nostalgic for those lost ways of being, but to think that any one culture is essentially less alienating than another is a sentimental mistake.

Derrida showed that Lévi-Strauss’s position, far from breaking with a Eurocentric model, reproduced it. He demonstrated how the notion that the Nambikwara inhabited a different and better world, one before writing, reflected a long-held western prejudice that ignored the way in which any system of language had all the features of a writing system that Lévi-Strauss considered distinctively modern. The Amazonian enjoyed no more direct and unmediated a relationship with his surroundings than the western anthropologist…

via New Statesman – Claude Lévi-Strauss: the Poet in the Laboratory.

On Elle, Gordon Lish, novels, point of view, conflict, character and other dark topics — Douglas Glover

Oct 212010

I just did Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s University of Toronto online class on Elle over three days this week. Since I hate to let words disappear into the ether, I am posting a digest of my answers to class questions here. I have deleted the actual questions since it would be too much work to get permissions from all the students (it was an intelligent, perceptive and eloquent group). Most of the questions are implicit in the answers.

On researching Elle and historical novels in general: This is a vast question and speaks to some extent to an author’s intention. I don’t set out to create costume melodramas or documentary histories which might require huge amounts of research. I don’t try to recreate contemporary dialogue (always a failed project). I tend to research looking for precise kinds of facts. What did people think about? What were their motives? How did they act? Always assuming that people distantly removed in time from us are alien in systematic and peculiar ways but also in an evolutionary line and I look for crucial details that will dramatize and ironize that difference. I do a kind of anthropology, if you will. And I look for small, precise facts that will convince the reader I know everything there is to know.

Practically speaking, I read general books about a period. And then focus and refocus the research until I get to the stage of tracking through the bibliographies of scholarly papers looking for obscure essays on small details of custom or behaviour.

The best books I read, of course, are listed in the author’s note in the novel itself.
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On my editor’s contribution: The editor was quite restrained in her remarks. They mostly dealt with copy editing issues. And, no, I don’t recall any issues with historical accuracy. I had already published another historical novel, The Life and Times of Captain N, in which I used deliberate anachronism for structural effect. I don’t think anyone was confused.

On the other hand, I cut another 5,000 words out of the ms. after it came back to me. I always cut things at the last minute, the more the better.
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On Gordon Lish and learning to cut: Thanks for your kind words about the birth scene. It was a deep pleasure to write. The thing to remember is that in prose though the words are written and read serially the effect can be simultaneous. So the passage works by the serial juxtaposition of images of deformity and death and images of maternal love.

The question about editing is interesting. Thanks for pushing me a little more. My best lessons in cutting came from Gordon Lish who was my editor for The Life and Times of Captain N at Knopf. He also took a story of mine for The Quarterly and I interviewed him once when I had a radio show at the Public Radio station in Albany.

He did very little hands on editing with the novel. He just sent it back with a note that said cut about 5,000 words of history, background and explanation. I did that and sent it back to him. Then he sent it back to me again and said cut another 5,000 words of history, background and explanation. He also said not to forget the commas around non-restrictive clauses beginning with “which.”

Every cut I made was like melting fat off a bone. The drama became quicker and clearer. As soon as the words were deleted, I forgot them. I have never regretted a cut scene or explanation. Later, when I interviewed him (I should get out the tape and listen to it again), we talked about his idea of “mystery,” how the white space on the page should somehow float the words in mystery. If you write too much, the mystery dissipates. Mystery here isn’t the same as being mysterious or obscure; it has an almost metaphysical tinge. When he explained it, I almost understood it.

Lesson learned though. At Vermont College, I am known as “the shredder” for my tendency to draw lines through page after page of student work. Boring and dull lines dilute energy. You want only the lines that burn left on the page. So much explanation, commentary and background is unnecessary.
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On making things seem real in a text: The question of verisimilitude is pretty broad and, in fact, I never think about it much. Though I do have an essay in the current issue of upstreet about truth, novels and history which might be enlightening in a general sort of way.

One tries to get the larger facts straight so that the general reader isn’t stopped by obvious errors. But beyond that, truth in fiction is a matter of consistency and coherence rather than reference. Kafka wrote a story about a young man who turns into a bug. The fact that this can’t be real in a certain sense doesn’t stop readers from believing in the story in another sense.

So you concentrate on giving enough precise and striking detail to make the reader sense the world of the fiction and then you repeat references to many of those details to give the reader a little pop of recognition here and there along the way. Repetition creates familiarity and familiarity (as in Kafka) is enough to make the reader feel that the fictional world is trustworthy enough to live inside for a while.

Also I think that a lot of verisimilitude in narrative derives from the author inventing plausible and consistent motives for character action. So much of what makes a reader identify with a story has to do with making him engage with the character’s hopes and dreams.
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On image patterns: Okay, yes. I call that image patterning. It’s part of the repetitive structure of the novel (or story). All writers do this to some extent. Margaret Atwood, for example, works wonders.

Basically, you take an image, some significant aspect of the character’s scene, and you repeat it. You can add or control meaning by giving the image a little story or by juxtaposition and association. And then you can split off sub-patterns of the main image. If I could do the art work here, I would draw you a diagram.

Once you get the hang of this, it’s a lot of fun. And then you start to set yourself impossible tasks. At the beginning of Elle, the girl throws the tennis ball off the ship and the dog jumps after it. Ball and dog gone, dead, defunct, out of the text. I knew I was doing to bring them back somehow. The problem was how. In the back of his or her mind, the reader is wondering this, too. Then there is the delight of recognition and discovery when Itslk shows up with the dog and the ball. Then the dog and the ball keep coming in again and again.

The tennis ball belongs to the tennis pro lover who dies very quickly in Canada. It’s an aspect of the opening scenes of the novel. It is a part of French culture imported to Canada. It doesn’t do much except remind us over and over of Richard and his failed attempt at colonization. The dog, on the other hand, becomes a kind of subplot. He ends up staying in Canada, the only member of the whole expedition to do so. You can chart the various colonizing strategies and levels of failure (these all count as subplots). Richard tries to make in Canada a replica of the Old World and dies. The General tries to force his French vision onto the new Canada with violence and fails. Elle, more open, finds herself turning hybrid and will never be at home again anywhere. And the dog finds a way to be happy in Canada.

The use of images helps control and focus the meaning of a story. It also creates a density of repetition and reference such that lines of text can be vibrating, as it were, on several different frequencies at once: plot, scene, image pattern, subplot, etc.

And then, of course, some of the repetitions carry barely any weight at all–I think the tennis rackets idea is mostly for fun. But the act of repetition in a text, as I said in my earlier response about verisimilitude, creates consistency, recognition and unity within the text. It relentlessly reminds the reader that, ah, yes, this is the world of the novel I am in.

In my novel The Life and Times of Captain N, there is a more inclusive and systematic use of image patterning. The main image is the Iroquois Whirlwind mask, painted half red and half black. The image represents the split of the Revolution, the split between oral and literate cultures, translation, etc. Everyone in the book eventually bears the mark of the split face. And then I splinter of sub-patterns. The Iroquois word for mask is also the word face. Death is Without-a-Face. And so on. But you can also learn a lot about patterning by reading Atwood’s novel Cat’s Eye in which the main pattern is a cat’s eye marble.
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How long did it take to write Elle: Your question is pretty complex. How long did it take to write? Well, I got the idea years before I wrote the novel. At some point, I started to write it as a play, and some of the theatrical dialogue actually made it into the novel. Then I started it as a novel, writing a few paragraphs of Elle’s voice, much of the initial What do you do with a headstrong girl? passage. At the time, as often happens, I didn’t notice that this was actually pretty good. Later, I picked it up and started again. Once I got rolling, I think it took about nine months to write. But I had gathered a lot of notes and research materials prior to this final sprint.

I don’t really think about “inspiration” as such. I only think about what is going to happen next, the next line, the next bit of dialogue, the next scene, the next plot step. And I am always playing with a set of technical structures (repetitions, images, subplots, aphorisms) which are fun. And certain problems come up in the writing of any complicated novel. E.g. If I am in a strong first person single character narration, how can I possibly get in information about her uncle and the Quebec colony hundreds of miles away? And, then, since the novel has a mirror or butterfly-wing pattern at the centre (life in Canada and life back home in France), I had to invent a set of events for Elle’s return to France that were interesting and somewhat reflected what had happened to her in Canada. Thus I am always finding that form drives content.

If I am stuck for a way to move ahead, I tend to put in a linebreak and then start with something I have already put in the novel earlier (a character, a moment, a repetition, a theme), and out of that text something new often develops.

And then I am always frothing the text, as it were, looking for verbal excitement and surprise. That’s always fun, too. I am always thinking where can I go with this that will make the reader gasp or sit up and say, Wait a sec! You can’t do that. But I do it anyway. Good readers like to have their assumptions damaged.
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On outlines: No, I don’t work from an outline at all. For both my historical novels, the putative historical facts provided a framework of sorts. But in the case of Elle, there was very little to go on, and I deformed some of it anyway. For example, in one contemporary source, it was said that she killed three bears “white as an egg.” This didn’t make much sense. I couldn’t find evidence of polar bears that far south. So I invented a mythic bear. Also the record indicates that she was on the island for two years and some months, but I ran out of plot events after a year, so she gets rescued in my book earlier than in real life (always assuming there was a real girl).

Instead of an outline, I think in terms of form: plot, repetition, reflective structures. If I knew too much of what was going to happen ahead of time I wouldn’t be so inventive.
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Reading recommendations: If you are interested in novel form and structure, you might want to look at my book about Cervantes The Enamoured Knight. The middle section is about the history of the form, the main elements of the form, and various theories of what a novel is and how they create unfortunate conflicts in people who don’t understand the differences.

The foundational document in terms of my views on writing and literature is an essay I wrote called “The Novel as a Poem” which you can find in my essay collection Notes Home from a Prodigal Son.

I later wrote an essay on novel form that appeared in The New Quarterly No. 87, Summer 2003, along with an essay on short story form. A somewhat rewritten version of this is currently in print in a book called Words Overflown by Stars (an anthology of Vermont College of Fine Arts faculty craft essays and lectures) edited by David Jauss.
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On writing across genders: Elle is not my first female narrator by a long shot. Many stories and huge sections of my novel The Life and Times of Captain N are written from a woman’s point of view.

It’s really not unusual at all for a male writer to adopt a female voice or a female writer to adopt a male voice. As Brian Moore once said, It’s just part of the job. He meant that as a writer you’re supposed to imagine yourself into the minds of characters who are not like you.

At an early stage in my writing life, I got incredibly bored with myself and anyone like myself and discovered a feisty, talkative, sardonic female narrator I really liked to be around. If I recall correctly, she came to life in my short story “Red” which, amazingly enough, was first published in Playgirl (I believe it was the first issue with a fully erect centrefold). She released me from the drudgery of male domination and allowed me to think about and poke fun at all sorts of things including men and women.

Whether I do it well or not is for other people to decide, but composing, now and then, from a female point of view has made writing a lot of fun. I don’t think there is any trick to it. I don’t sit there thinking, well, what are women like and how would a woman act in this case. As soon as you start thinking about how men or women act, you’re dead as a writer because you’re always supposed to be writing about a particular man or a particular woman and people differ vastly in their particulars.
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The state of marginality or liminality has been an especially interesting theme in my last two novels. And to me it has tremendous metaphorical throw. Every relationship contains a frontier zone wherein all the definitions have to be translated. It’s fascinating to think about love that way.

Same goes for the space between the official and the unofficial. Mikhail Bakhtin talks about the novel as a form that encapsulates the struggle between discourses. His idea of the carnivalesque, in part, derives from this–the idea that carnival is an upturning of the official by the unofficial, the spiritual by the carnal. I tend to think that way about fiction. It’s always meant to subvert some authoritative or generally accepted discourse, to surprise the reader with access to something real.
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On women writers (lost and found) and captivity narratives: But you should always examine and test your premises. Were there, in fact, as few female voices as you suggest? One of the main contemporary sources for the Elle legend is a famous collection of early short stories called the Heptameron by Marguerite de Navarre. She was brilliant and well known in her time.

Of course, at a certain level it’s true that some female writers have been overlooked. One of the joys of feminist criticism is its relentless search and rediscovery mission in favour of female writers. But you should always look around before you reiterate the received wisdom about the dearth of female voices from the past. They tend to surprise you by their presence.

As to captivity narratives, I have read a lot. But mostly they were of use in writing The Life and Times of Captain N which is, in part, the story of a captivity (whereas Elle is not). Mary Jemison’s little book was especially helpful because she actually knew Hendrick Nellis, my protagonist, although she misremembered his name as “Captain Nettles.” She also knew his Seneca captive wife Priscilla Ramsay. But beyond coincidental discoveries like that, the literature of captives–not just their narratives and biographies–is rich with anthropological implication. The scholar James Axtell is especially good on this.

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Did she actually turn into a bear? Both Elle and The Life and Times of Captain N are about people who find themselves between languages and between cultures. And I don’t just mean the Euro-white protagonists. There are crossover characters coming the other way such as Itslk or Tom Wopat (a character in Captain N). Elle is between a European culture that’s Christian and literate. The natives she meets are from tribal, oral cultures with a shamanic elements in their religions. What is common sense and real in one culture is not necessarily real in the other culture. I ask the question: As one enters the world of the Other, does one actually begin to perceive a different reality? If so, what does that feel like? How does the subject perceive it’s own transformation? In my own mind, I wonder if the world really does look different within another cultural construct? What would I have been like had I been raised in a community that believed in shape-changing, animal totems and ritual curing.

The passages you’re referring to in the novel are an attempt to represent the confusing state of transition from one reality to the other. A native would say, yes, she changed into a bear; a European would say she was hallucinating. In our cynical day, it’s very easy to fall back on cultural relativism which amounts to saying that people believe different things but they’re all wrong except for the scientific observer (cultural relativism amounts, in my mind, to a covert reassertion of the metaphysical correctness of the Euro-white point of view).

On a slightly more personal level, imagine the state of falling in love, when you have to learn the other person’s definitions, point of view, and you begin to change yourself so that you fit into your lover’s sentences. What you thought was true might change or at least be altered ever so slightly. The world is different.

Or think of learning another language.

In philosophical terms, people used to talk about conceptual systems and wonder if different conceptual systems actually described actual different realities.

Frankly, I like the idea that she actually turned into a bear. I like a world where that is possible even though, I know myself, that I am incapable of that sort of transformation.

The objects that are taken out of her body are similarly multi-valenced. a) It’s common shamanic curing practice among the Algonquian natives to massage objects out of the flesh of patients. b) A white westerner sees obvious trickery and doesn’t believe the objects are actually inside the person being treated. c) The objects inside Elle, some of them, are images from other places in the novel (this is me playing with literary effect, even making little jokes). d) I never use the word symbol to describe what I am doing in a piece of writing.
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Irony: Basically, I think every sentence should turn the screw a couple of times so that the meaning of the text is both refining itself and becoming more complex (often by inversion) as it proceeds. Irony is a lovely tool.

And, of course, I and my characters generally take a dim view of life on earth, a view that has to express itself as comedy or we’d all be cutting our wrists.
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On the first person point of view: I think that if your first person character changes inappropriately from scene to scene it’s because you haven’t imagined yourself into the character deeply enough. In some ways, writing is like Method Acting–you have to become your character, at least, in your imagination. This isn’t a matter of knowing your character objectively, or writing out tedious character biographies on the side. I never even think of characterization as a technical issue. Characters are what they do and why (motivation). And perhaps that is the key–because consistent motivation is a major part of structure in all sorts of ways. A plot is a series of events on a consistent line of desire and resistance. Desire is motivation.

Okay, I’ve given two jumbled answers in one paragraph.

Inhabit your character. In other words, work hard to imagine yourself inside the character’s mind and body in an intuitive and tactile manner. Body is important. Sometimes at the end of a scene, if I don’t know where things are going next, I try to recede into the character’s body, imagine the effects of the scene just finished, imagine the overall desire/motive of the character in the text, and then feel the character’s next move. Given the overall direction of the text and the scene that has just taken place, where does my character go next and why? Sometimes characters change inappropriately from scene to scene simply because the author is foisting a plot move on the character that is out of character–that is, the author has a plan for the story as opposed to letting the story develop organically and playfully. Plans are terrible inhibitions. A sense of form, on the other hand, allows for discovery and play.

The fact that you retreat into the third person is interesting. It seems as if you are trying to escape your problem by pulling even farther away from your character’s subjectivity. Truth is there is very little difference between a close third person single character narration and a first person narration.

There is an awful lot of silly talk in the creative writing world about point of view. The best introductory book I’ve seen is one called Points of View by Moffett and McIlheney. There are two versions: try to find a copy of the older one which is out of print. It’s safe to say that most learning writers have an incredibly narrow idea of how point of view works. No point of view choice is wrong; they all have advantages and disadvantages. The main thing is that whatever point of view you pick, you need to be inventive and flexible. You need, as E. M. Forster says, to “bounce” the reader. Every point of view choice gives you technical options in terms of modulating distance (getting closer or farther away from the character’s mind) and in terms of incorporating other points of view (e.g. one of the disadvantages of the first person point of view is the narrator’s tendency to monopolize the text; but there are some lovely techniques for giving other characters a counter-voice in a first person text so the disadvantage can actually be avoided). You can even mix points of view to keep the reader from being bored. The main thing is to keep the point of view structure alive, surprising and flexible.

It’s possible that your first person character changes from scene to scene because you’ve manacled yourself with a constricting point of view structure and, in the back of your mind, you’re bored with it–so you change the character.

Of course, I say all this without the advantage of having read you work so I might be completely off base.
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Solving the first person monopoly problem: You may call that a standard technique for avoiding the first person monopoly, but I find most learning writers haven’t figured it out yet. It’s nice to see that you have.

So, yes, one thing you can do is have your first person narrator imagining, intuiting, speculating on, deducing and interpreting how other characters feel. In Pickwick Papers, Dickens introduces a dog’s point of view simply by having the narrator notice the dog as the coach drives by and imagine what the dog sees.

But the most useful technique would be conflict. The world outside the narrator intrudes upon the text by disagreeing with him and taking action against him. So you construct your scenes and plot such that things don’t go the way the protagonist expects. Reality (and other people) is always surprising, disappointing, hindering. This may seem obvious except that, in fact, in student stories, over and over, I find characters ambling through scenes (hitting all the jumps and gates according to the story plan) without any concrete opposition (passive avoidance, no one telling the truth–these are the worst). The character might as well be inhabiting a dream where everything is a projection of his thoughts.

If you think of a scene or event in a narrative as a win/lose situation, you can see that the most boring text would involve the main character winning every scene (interchange) and thinking about how he won it (self-congratulation). Other points of view become concrete by thwarting the main character. This can be in the dialogue as well–That’s what you think? Let me tell you what I think?
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More reading recommendations: Thinking about that last question, the point of view question: I wrote an essay on point of view called “The Masks of I” that’s in my collection Notes Home from a Prodigal Son if you are interested.

In addition, I’ve gradually been writing essays on reading and writing for another book of essays, moving toward completion.

Several have appeared in The New Quarterly. Probably not impossible to find via interlibrary loan, or you could wait til my next book of essays comes out.

There is one on the use of rhetorical devices in contemporary fiction. It’s called “How to Read a Mark Jarman Story.”

And there are two essays on writing strong sentences: “The Attack of the Copula Spiders” (on the importance of verb choice) and “The Drama of Grammar” (on the dramatic effect of what I call but-constructions).

If you want to dig more into Elle, you can start by reading the interview and essays about Elle in Bruce Stone’s book about my work The Art of Desire. Stone did an excellent interview with me and Stephen Henighan’s essay is one of the best.

And here is a little list of some terrific critical papers–very insightful and well-written.

“I am a Landscape of Desire: Gender, Genre and the Deconstruction of the Textuality of Empire in Douglas Glover’s Elle” by Pedro Carmona Rodríguez, Proceedings of the 29th AEDEAN Conference: Universidad de Jaén 15 al 20 diciembre 2005. CD-ROM. Ed. Alejandro Alcaraz Sintes et al. Jaén: AEDEAN / Servicio de Publicaciones U de Jaén, 2006. 539-45.

“‘…[D]estined always to be on the edge of things’: Prolegomenon to a Dialogue of Transdisciplinary and Curriculum Theory” by Patrick Howard, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Vol. 20. Iss. 4 p.45, Winter 2004

“Canadian Crusoes from Sea to Sea: The Oceanic Communities of Douglas Glover’s Elle and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi” by John Clement Bell, Moveable Margins, The Shifting Spaces of Canadian Literature, Chelva Kanaganayakam, ed., TSAR Publications, Toronto, 2005

“Surviving the Metaphorical Condition in Elle : Douglas Glover’s Impersonation of the First French Female in Canada” by María Jesús Hernáez Lerena, Canon Disorders: Gendered Perspectives on Literature and Film in Canada and the United States, Darias Beautell, Eva, and María Jesús Hernáez Lerena, eds., Ed. Logroño: Universidad de La Rioja/Universidad de La Laguna, 2007

“Visited Graves in Colonial Cemeteries: The Resurrection of Marguerite de Roberval” by María Jesús Hernáez Lerena, Canada Exposed/Le Canada a decouvert, Peter Lang Publishing, Berlin, New York, Brussels, Oxford, 2009

“Self as Garbled Translation: Douglas Glover’s Elle/Elle,” in Traduire depuis les marges/Translating from the Margins, Denise Merkle, Jane Koustas, Glen Nichols and Sherry Simon, eds. Montreal: Edition Nota bene, 2008. 59-74

—Douglas Glover

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Spaceships Spotted in Montpelier? — Richard Farrell

Oct 182010

Spaceships Spotted in Montpelier? Reflections on Close Encounters at VCFA.

By Richard Farrell

In Steven Spielberg’s 1977 blockbuster Close Encounters of the Third Kind, an alien spaceship scorches half of Roy Neary’s face as it flies over his truck. (Richard Dreyfus plays Neary.) Like anyone shaken by such a sublime and weird experience, Roy becomes obsessed with finding the source of those lights. (Call to Adventure.)

The Winooski River wraps around downtown Montpelier like an untied blue ribbon and drains mountain ranges to the northeast of town. The river then meanders northwest toward Burlington, before it empties into Lake Champlain. The word Winooski comes from the Abenaki language. It means “wild onion.”

I walked in the door of Dewey Hall on that first day of grad school, collected a plastic bag filled with paper-thin sheets, and felt certain that I was more talented, more dedicated, more well-read and more likely to succeed in this program than anyone else. I thought I had travelled further, worked harder, and understood the world better than most. I believed my talent would be quickly rewarded.

Roy is the quintessential everyman: he has a wife, three kids, a dog, a modest brick house in Indiana, and a steady job. Until baked by the alien lights, there is nothing unique or particularly interesting about his life.

Dewey Hall, the dormitory on campus, appears to be named for Admiral George Dewey. Admiral Dewey commanded the U.S. Navy ships at the Battle of Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War, and issued the famous order, “You may fire when ready, Gridley.” (Well, it’s famous to Annapolis alums who spent 4 years learning naval lore.) George Dewey was born in Montpelier in 1837 and once attended Norwich University before heading off to the Naval Academy. VCFA merged with Norwich from 1972 until 1993.

On that first night of my first residency, I ate dinner across a table from Douglas Glover in Dewey Hall cafeteria. He tried to explain image patterning to me. I didn’t get it. Fortunately, I had read Elle before coming to Vermont, so I managed to stumble through my half of the conversation by talking about his book. I feigned intelligence and somehow choked down a few bites of whatever root-vegetable medley was on my plate.

After seeing the lights, Roy becomes obsessed by a strange shape. The form mysteriously keeps appearing: in his pillow, his shaving cream, in the mud castle of a little boy, and in mashed potatoes. He can’t identify the source of the shape, but it begins to occupy more and more of his waking thoughts. He believes the shape holds the key to his understanding, but he vacillates, trying to decide if he should pursue this obsession or return to his normal life. (Refusal of the call.)

Completed in 1872, College Hall rises atop Seminary Hill. The venerable building originally served as a theological seminary and was constructed on the remains of a Civil War hospital for chronically ill vets. College Green once served as a racetrack and fairgrounds. I found no mention of ice rinks or July 4^th softball games. The pipe organ was installed in 1884.

DG writes this: “Of course, what drives from a writer’s hand always remains secret, sometimes even from himself. We surge toward the shapes we love without knowing why we love them.” (from his essay “Reading a Mark Jarman Story” in The New Quarterly) From dinner, I walked across the snowy sidewalks to College Hall. Continue reading »

“…novels that feature a woman having sex with a bear…”

Sep 162010

DG is being talked about again! This time for his apparent predilection for writing about weird sex (a Canadian thing, according to the author, Jeet Heer, who is, by the way, an otherwise estimable journalist), especially with large, hairy omnivores. DG has gone from being famous for being unknown to transforming bestiality into art. He thinks: Has anyone actually read the book? No one has sex with an animal in his novel! The heroine turns into a bear and grows extra sets of nipples, but she only has sex with humans. (Of course, this will no doubt disappoint many NC readers, a rowdy crowd, usually up for that sort of thing.)

As Katherine Monk points out in her book Weird Sex & Snowshoes, Canadian filmmakers are notable for their interest in outré forms of passion. Think of the acrobatic sexual positions displayed in the movies of Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg, and Denys Arcand.

I’m wondering whether a similar fixation on erotic outrageousness isn’t also a running theme in Canadian literature: after all, the Governor General’s Award has twice been given to novels that feature a woman having sex with a bear (Marian Engel’s Bear and Douglas Glover’s Elle). [My emphasis.]

In many ways, bears make a natural sex symbol. With their hairiness, burliness, and wary aggression, bears embody a certain ideal of rugged Northern masculinity (notably among a subset of husky gay men). The image of ursine/human mating is redolent of both folklore (Beauty and the Beast) and mythology (the many occasions when Zeus took an animal guise in order to seduce a nubile maiden).

via “Sex, Prose, and the Veggie Aisle” by Jeet Heer | The Walrus Blog.

Okay, the last paragraph is interesting. Suddenly, bears come into focus for dg as attractive, sexual beings. He can see a canoe trip novel, something in Algonquin Park, a hunky male human of uncertain sexual orientation falls for a gay bear. All sorts of hanky panky ensues, while canoe-loads of campers look on in amazement.

Joking aside, you really ought to look at Marian Engel’s novel Bear, possibly the best book ever written about a woman having an affair with a bear.

Gens d’ici, gens de paroles

Jun 102010

Stéphanie Roussy who painted the text

I had a terrific surprise this morning when I opened an email from Katie Vibert, an artist and teacher at the CEGEP de Sept-Îles in Quebec, and discovered these photos of an exhibition of banners painted by students at the college. You can see dg in the middle of the photo above. The project is called GENS D’ICI, GENS DE PAROLES and is meant to celebrate authors, songwriters, explorers either from the Côte-Nord or having some passionate literary connection with the place. Art students did the portraits on one side of the banner, and literature students painted an apt quotation on the reverse. And then all the banners

Nadine Bouffard with her portraits

were displayed at the front of the college building. Some of the inspiration for the project came from Pierre Rouxel, founder of the North Shore literary journal Littoral (more on this another time). Of course, this is all because of my novel Elle which was translated into French as Le Pas de l’Ourse. Elle takes place on the Côte-Nord, though somewhat to the north and east of Sept-Îles. But the windswept islands off Sept-Îles in the Gulf of St. Lawrence inspired the island where she is marooned. And the last scene of the novel, the contemporary moment between the new young bear woman and her older lover, takes place on the beach at Sept-Îles. The Côte-Nord is part of the country of my imagination.

It’s difficult to explain how much this touches me. I love the quotation Stéphanie Roussy picked for the banner. It happens to be true and goes to the heart of things. I am an Anglo farm boy from southern Ontario, and now I live far away in a foreign country, and yet these students, artists, and writers have included me in their exhibition. My imagined Canada has become part of their imagined Canada. This is the miracle of books. It makes you want to be a writer.

Princess of Cleves

Jan 142010

So Jacob read Madame de Lafayette’s novel The Princess of Cleves yesterday and noted how it clearly influenced Madame Bovary (a sort of instruction-book idealized version of love set against the real thing). Then his lecturer this morning mentioned that a precursor of The Princess of Cleves was Marguerite de Navarre’s 16th century short story collection Heptameron which contains, coincidentally, the first account of how a young French woman was marooned on an island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence–which is, yes, the story on which my novel Elle is based. A sample title from the Heptameron: “The wife of a saddler of Amboise is saved on her deathbed through a fit of anger at seeing her husband fondle a servant-maid.”

I will stop mentioning Jake (well, probably not). It’s just that he’s reading more than I am (myself I am grinding slowly through Theodor Adorno’s essay “Cultural Criticism and Society”) and we have these fascinating conversations that get my brain going. This was a surprising little loop of a conversation.

Montaigne, Hastily

Jan 132010

My son Jacob is writing an essay on Montaigne’s “Of Experience” and so I was skimming that and then skimming some secondary sources–all the reading I could manage today. In graduate school I wrote an essay on “On Cannibals” and that had an echo later on in my interest in natives that came out in The Life and Times of Captain N and Elle. Montaigne is such a character in his essays, weaving the abstract and the personal, and by “personal” I mean really personal. In “Of Experience” he goes on about his bowel habits. And he says, in my translation, “Kings and philosophers go to stool, and ladies too” which in Jacob’s translation comes out as “and women shit.”