Double-Voicing the Canadian Short Story

Laurie Kruk

• Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780776623245
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Double-Voicing the Canadian Short Story is the first comparative study of eight internationally and nationally acclaimed writers of short fiction: Sandra Birdsell, Timothy Findley, Jack Hodgins, Thomas King, Alistair MacLeod, Olive Senior, Carol Shields and Guy Vanderhaeghe. With the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature going to Alice Munro, the "master of the contemporary short story, " this art form is receiving the recognition that has been its due and—as this book demonstrates—Canadian writers have long excelled in it. From theme to choice of narrative perspective, from emphasis on irony, satire and parody to uncovering the multiple layers that make up contemporary Canadian English, the short story provides a powerful vehicle for a distinctively Canadian "double-voicing". The stories discussed here are compelling reflections on our most intimate roles and relationships and Kruk offers a thoughtful juxtaposition of themes of gender, mothers and sons, family storytelling, otherness in Canada and the politics of identity to name but a few. As a multi-author study, Double-Voicing the Canadian Short Story is broad in scope and its readings are valuable to Canadian literature as a whole, making the book of interest to students of Canadian literature or the short story, and to readers of both.

1

Hands and Mirrors: Reflections on Gender in the Short Stories of MacLeod and Findley

I still think … we load the words manhood and manly and masculinity with meanings that are … killers. In themselves.

—Timothy Findley, The Voice Is the Story

At first glance, the short stories of Alistair MacLeod and Timothy Findley appear distinctly different, especially in their representation of gender. Seemingly old-fashioned MacLeod, his roots in the oral tradition and Cape Breton’s Celtic culture, has been eulogized by Michael Ondaatje as the author of “one of the greatest collections of short stories [Island, his collected stories]—from anywhere in the world.”¹ Yet Findley, a publicly gay or homosexual² writer, whose critically popular work has been described by many as both postmodernist in form and feminist in outlook, would hardly be described as traditional or universal. While Findley has been noted for creating “remarkable women” possessing “hyper-realistic sight,” as one critic puts it (Murray 217), the heterosexual MacLeod’s work is presented from a distinctively masculine (though not masculinist) perspective. Aside from the powerful appeal of the stories in question, initially, their differences are more apparent than any similarities. As Claire Omhovere suggests, “Critical responses to MacLeod’s work testify to an enduring interest in writing that announces its scope and concerns as universal, as if immune—or perhaps indifferent—to five decades of posthumanist critique and deconstructionist doubt” (288). Yet I propose to argue that the visually oriented, feminist-sympathetic Findley and the verbally oriented, “universalist” MacLeod travel over some of the same territory by “double-voicing” on masculinity and subjectivity. Perhaps as a result of Findley’s perspective as a homosexual, his men and women are self-conscious about “seeing” as well as being “seen,” leading to his recurring figure of the mirror. While not unaware of the performative elements of our identities, as evidenced by his use of the photograph, MacLeod’s storytelling often grounds itself in the Celtic bardic tradition. As this pairing reveals, Findley and MacLeod also may be seen to share common ground in nature imagery and a fascination with the father–son relationship.

Whether comfortable or not with the increasingly fuzzy term “realist writer,” both writers believe strongly in getting at the real. In interview, MacLeod described realist writing simply as “telling the truth as I happen to see it” (Kruk, Voice 170). Findley pointed out that realism is “the articulation of the ordinary in a way that makes the ordinary seem cohesive, when in I fact it’s not. It clarifies the messed-up lack of cohesiveness in real life” (Kruk, Voice 94). At the same time, Findley added—not surprisingly, given his earlier acting career—that “theatricality [is a] very positive thing [and] writing is a performance art” (93, 79). These aspects of Findley’s fiction writing seem aligned with the view of gender endorsed by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble, one described as “performative—that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed” (24–25). Obviously, neither writer presents the rigorously deconstructive philosophy Butler advocates; both men, it must be acknowledged, may be characterized as adhering to “a metaphysics of substance that confirms the normative model of humanism as the framework for feminism” (20). Indeed, that is the framework within which I am operating: As a female and feminist reader, I take a largely social-psychological approach to the discussion of gender and treat these male authors’ “gender reflections” as demonstrations of realist fiction’s capacity to create a compelling “representation” of our lives as men and women, lives which are both emphatically embodied (“hands”) and culturally constructed (“mirrors”).³ This shared acknowledgement of full human complexity, which I argue extends to the creation of moments of “deconstructionist doubt” about the universality of traditional gender roles, is the first and most obvious way in which Findley and MacLeod philosophically “double-voice” as writers.

Still, Findley’s emphasis on the performative aspects of writing does point to a significant divergence in outlook from MacLeod. And this divergence will be revealed through my focus on their reflection of gender relations and identities in their short stories. That is to say, while MacLeod’s treatment of men and women returns us, powerfully, to our physical and sensual existence, Findley probes the performative aspects of our social and sexual roles as gendered beings. In her review of his first story collection, Dinner Along the Amazon, Barbara Gabriel writes, “Findley’s most radical politics are the politics of gender” (89). He uses his perspective as a gay man to reflect on the ways that gender roles entrap both sexes. In Headhunter, his heroine Fabiana declares, “It’s a drag act—men pretending to be men—women pretending to be women” (341). One of Findley’s guiding metaphors appears to be the mirror, linked in turn to his recurring theatrical motif of masks in particular and performance in general. By contrast, MacLeod’s short stories frequently draw our attention to his characters’ work-marked hands. This repeated detail creates a synecdochal effect that reinforces the presentation of his very physical characters as not only shapers of, but also shaped by, the surrounding natural world. As David Creelman sees it, MacLeod blends “psychological realism … with a naturalist tendency to explore and chronicle the impact of the environmental forces on the individual” (129). More recently, examining MacLeod’s treatment of work within an increasingly globalized economy, Herb Wyile astutely describes MacLeod’s oscillation between “an archetypal atavism that defies the passage of time and a historicized contemporaneity that registers … time’s inevitably corrosive effect” (Anne 58).

In this chapter, I will first establish their overall difference in approach to gender identities and relations, by means of an overview of this contrasting imagery. I will then analyze a story by each author—MacLeod’s acclaimed “The Boat” (Gift) and Findley’s “Stones” (Stones)—that, in its thematics of focalization, explicitly raises questions about hegemonic masculine identity. In effect, by using character-bound focalizers, both stories offer the voices of presumably “failed” sons questioning the lives and lessons of their now-deceased fathers. As Christian Riegel notes,

Many of MacLeod’s narrators can be considered to be mourning, and the stories that they tell are an activity of that process: that is, telling stories has the function of helping a narrator memorialize the dead and thus partially work through feelings of grief. (233)

I agree, and would add that the same could also be said of Findley’s first-person narrator or focalizer, since the stories to be discussed offer moving variations on the shared theme of the lost, sacrificed father.

REFLECTING ON SHORT STORIES AND GENDER IDENTITY

Short stories are often neglected by literary critics, viewed as drafts for novels, or as supplements to a more legitimate project. Certainly MacLeod, who has established his career writing short stories,⁴ disproves this view. His stories owe much to the oral tradition, and as Janice Kulyk Keefer notes, “Often he seems to sing rather than tell his stories” (182). By incorporating into his prose sonorous Gaelic rhythms and folkloric repetition, MacLeod enters the company of bards and storytellers preserving their culture even in exile. In fact, Gwendolyn Davies links his work to

that Gaelic diaspora where the next imagined island in the chain of the Hebrides is Cape Breton, and the clan, with its real and constructed oral history, is the centre of resistance against a dominant English culture no matter where branches of the clan might be physically located. (139)

Except for two (“The Tuning of Perfection” [Birds], “The Golden Gift of Grey” [Gift]), all of MacLeod’s stories take advantage of the intensity of a first-person narrator, or character-bound focalizer. More importantly, all of them focus on a male protagonist, heightening their autobiographical and masculine quality.⁵ By contrast, Findley’s short stories are more varied in form and style, and may be described as exploring the “experimental” aspect of the short story in its more self-consciously literary development.⁶ The first things Findley wrote were short stories, he told me, just as his earliest reading experiences involved “the self-contained entity, [the story] that is taken at one dose” (Voice 77). The fact that several of his stories were related to plays he wanted to write (“Daybreak at Pisa,” “Out of the Silence” [Dinner]; Voice 78–79), or novels such as The Last of the Crazy People (1967), (“Lemonade” [Dinner]) and Headhunter (1993), (“Dinner Along the Amazon” [Dinner]), does not diminish them as separate entries in this genre. But it does suggest that his stories may be more justly seen as experiments in narrative and subject matter. Mary Louise Pratt has suggested that the short story is the place “to introduce new (and possibly stigmatized) subject matters into the literary arena” (187). As mentioned earlier, it is in his short stories that Findley introduces, for the first time, an explicitly homosexual protagonist, Stuart Bragg whose sexual orientation is central to the story.⁷

In making “The Case for Men’s Studies,” Harry Brod has said, “While women have been obscured from our vision by being too much in the background, men have been obscured from our vision by being too much in the foreground” (41), just as the father in “The Boat” is described as filling up the tourists’ photograph, and “so much in the foreground that he seemed too big for it” (117). This intriguing insight has motivated my exploration of the two authors’ portrayal of men. If MacLeod’s tendency is to focus on the totality of the individual’s freedoms and limitations, Findley’s stories highlight the contradictions and burdens of what social psychologists call the “sex or gender role” (Pleck). There is ample evidence within his fiction that Findley’s distinctive perspective as a gay man leads him to treat sympathetically women trapped or exploited by sexual stereotyping, as well as to probe deeply into traditional social or cultural expectations of men—what we might now term hegemonic masculinity. In our interview, Findley agreed with this observation; he also remarked, “unfortunately, a lot of men who don’t like women … I think they miss [seeing] themselves … He could be staring in the mirror and he wouldn’t see himself—he’s too big! Too overwhelming” (Kruk, Voice 83). Don Murray has delineated Findley’s “optical imagery,” and its relationship to themes of physical and psychic survival. He includes among it the use of sight “to locate oneself, especially in stories where mirrors are prominent, in order to confirm one’s existence” (201). Thus, Findley’s use of the mirror in his stories aptly reflects his special consciousness not simply of problems of psychological identity, but of the constructedness of gender identity.⁸ For instance, in “Lemonade” (Dinner), Renalda Dewey’s descent into alcoholism and rejection of her son appears to be facilitated by her own entrapment by a gender role that has outlived its usefulness. The woman described as formerly “one of the most beautiful … you could see anywhere in the world,” loses her main audience after her husband is killed in the Second World War. Her sole activity within the home then consists of her morning performance as a wealthy lady and adored mother. She must reconstruct her feminine identity, with the aid of cosmetics, before her lonely son can enter the sanctuary of her bedroom. Looking in the mirror, for her, becomes a confirmation of the success of her role-playing, yet, increasingly, this image is no longer sufficient: “She looked into the mirror. It was as though she couldn’t find herself there. She had to go very close to it and lean one hand against the table to steady herself and she had to almost close her eyes before she found what she was looking for” (15). Her eventual suicide is foreshadowed by her stagnation in a kind of role-playing that lacks the appropriate audience, trapping her in a static, silent image like the “floating figure in a Japanese print … the mime” she resembles as she prepares her toilette.

Similarly, the poet Annie Bogan, in “The Book of Pins” (Dinner), neurotically obsessed with controlling or “pinning” her environment, focuses on her image in a mirror across the room, an image once again described as “Japanese” (237).⁹ She seeks the mirror’s confirmation that she is not only “dressed” and “erect” but “immensely real” (248). The story draws attention to her obsession with mirrors by starting and finishing, in a kind of chiasmus, with the same description of the same old women reflected in the mirrors in the hotel lobby. Her fascination with “fixing” or “pinning” the world around her into artistic figures gives Annie a kind of sterile self-absorption that would be dangerous to others if it were not ample evidence of the (suicidal) fragility of her own psyche.

Vivien Eliot, in “Out of the Silence” (Dinner) also stares into her mirror for long periods of time, as if questioning not only her sanity, but the contribution of male-dominated society (represented by both husband and doctor) to the undermining of that sanity. This use of the mirror reflection to offer reassurance regarding the achievement of a proper social or sexual image reappears in several places in Findley’s short stories. In “Dinner Along the Amazon,” Fabiana summarizes her acceptance of a passive role as the woman “chosen” by the desiring suitor with her reference to her younger self as always “sitting in the front seat, watching in the mirror” (290). The title character of “Almeyer’s Mother” (Stones) finds comfort in watching herself—in the mirror—lunching with her son and daughter-in-law in the stately Royal Ontario Museum cafeteria. In “Losers, Finders, Strangers at the Door” (Dinner), Daisy McCabe, struggling to maintain her ladylike role as “Mrs. Arnold McCabe” against her despairing rage at the situation her husband’s unusual sexual desires have placed her in, refers bitterly to the confirmation of her mirror that “the loveliness—the innocence” is gone. In her case, the innocence may really be the ignorance of people’s true complexity: a knowledge that is stifled by rigid gender identities, Findley suggests.¹⁰

Men, too, are presented gazing into mirrors in Findley’s stories, but often in a dramatization of a questioning, rather than a confirmation, of their various roles or personae, including gender roles. Bragg, in “A Gift of Mercy” (Stones), glances in the mirror “the way most people do who don’t really want to see themselves” (36); Ishmael, in “Hello Cheeverland, Goodbye” (Dinner) briefly regards “his whole self” with horror in the bathroom mirror before turning away (185). And in “Masks” (Stones), the reclusive Professor Glendenning catches a glimpse in the mirror of the “unmasked” self that he discovers later when trying on the Japanese fox masks at the Royal Ontario Museum (66). In a more explicit example of the imprisoning potential of gender roles, Bud, in “Real ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Double-Voicing the Canadian Short Story
• 1. Hands and Mirrors: Reflections on Gender in the Short Stories of MacLeod and Findley
• 2. Mothering Sons: Stories by Findley, Hodgins, and MacLeod Uncover the Mother’s Double Voice
• 3. Storykeepers: Doubling Family Voice in Stories by King, Senior, MacLeod, and Vanderhaeghe
• 4. Pinking the Triangle, Drawing the Circle: Double-Voicing Family in Findley’s Short Fiction
• 5. Various Otherness: Shields, King, Hodgins, and Birdsell Double-Voice the Short Story
• 6. Innovation and Reflection in the New Millennium: The Double Voice in Shields’s Short Fiction
• 7. Double-Voicing through the Mariposan Looking Glass
• L’Envoi: The Bus to North Bay
• Works Cited
• Index