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Reprinted from The Times Literary Supplement,
London, 17 January 2003, page 25

According to Stephen Henighan, Canadian culture has `a propensity for self-abasement, an insufficiently creative and critical approach to foreign models, a craving for the approval of powerful friends, a latent desire to dispense with the awkwardness of being Canadian'. `Mass popularity and literary significance are often confused', he tells us, and Toronto publishing, `drenched in an ambience of cautious careerism', has developed an enervating stranglehold on literary production. Some reviewers grew angry when When Words Deny the World was published in Canada. Henighan `is very angry no one's ever heard of him', wrote one newspaper columnist (a minor novelist who is slightingly mentioned by Henighan) referring to Henighan's four works of fiction, calling him a `smarmy pig' whose `rant reeks of sour grapes'. Other critics have been impressed by what the book largely is: a forcefully argued, deeply felt and highly quotable series of essays examining what has happened to English Canadian literature, especially in the past decade.

In Henighan's formulation, Canadian literature was sandwiched between two colonizations by Britain and then, through the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994 (NAFTA), by the United States. Canadian writing began as reports back to the motherland and continued as such with most books published abroad until the mid-twentieth century. There was more assured work in the 1950s from writers who had had to flee to Europe to be noticed (Mavis Gallant, Mordecai Richler, Norman Levine), but Henighan believes that it was the decade between 1965 and 1975, when Canada depended less on Britain and had stepped back from America's involvement in Vietnam, that produced the best, most ambitious writing, from Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood and Richler (who returned to Montreal). Henighan is aware that Canada is `marginal to the epicentres of global culture and global power, yet endowed by history, as if as a joke, with the literary language of the world's two most powerful empires.... The language (does) not fit the experience'. The result is what Australians call `cultural cringe', a lack of assurance which lethally undermines the confidence to use English to reflect Canadian reality. And that is the main thrust of When Words Deny the World, which was shortlisted for a Governor General's Award: that universal resonance and quality can only be achieved by a lived, creative attention to local context. Henighan argues that in the late 1960s Canadians were beginning to achieve this.

Once the Vietnam War was over, Canadians made approaches to America again, but the American stereotype for Canada is that it is boring, and its determined protection of its culture against NAFTA is seen as an irritation (Pat Buchanan recently coined the phrase `Soviet Canuckistan'). If Canada was to have access to the American book market, that reaction had to be avoided, so Canadians began to strip their work of anything which might be thought too Canadian. International success came, and has stayed (as we can see from the 2002 Booker Prize), but at a cost. Another drawback has been that in the mid-1990s Canada became obsessed with political correctness and was particularly afraid of `voice appropriation'. A novel of Henighan's was rejected by a major Canadian publisher solely because his central character was `Ecuadorean, dark-skinned and female', while Henighan is none of these; a senior editor at the publishing house said, `I would rather publish an inferior novel by a real Ecuadorean woman than this novel'. Such censorship was particularly applied to stories about Canadian First Nations. Another publisher provided the following guidelines for children's authors: `We will not ... consider a native myth told by a non-native. But we will look at carefully researched tales of Chinese, Japanese, Egyptian, British Isles and Northern European origins without insisting on seeing the writer's family tree!' Henighan attacks the untenable literary position of on the one hand kowtowing to Britain and America and on the other being hamstrung by colonial guilt. Canada's reputation for blandness and timidity is to some extent earned.

The idiocies of voice appropriation are fading, but market pressure remains, and Henighan reserves particular criticism for Toronto, which during the 1990s became the near-unassailable centre of that market. Dwindling government support for publishers and literary magazines in the rest of Canada has meant that Toronto, better able to participate in large-scale commercial publishing, has prospered; `large-scale publishing' is increasingly coming to mean subsidiaries of foreign-owned conglomerates such as Bertelsmann, with which smaller publishers find it difficult to compete; small bookshops inclined to support home-grown writing have been overcome by the sudden expansion of large chain bookstores; most national media is based in, and focuses on, Toronto. This is all true, and yes, Toronto's literati can be parochial and inward-looking, but this sort of polemic is not as interesting as Henighan's analysis of some Canadian writing of the 1990s. He looks carefully at two international bestsellers, The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje and Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels, and sees the triumph of deracinated, self-conscious beauty and metaphor over specific and historical truth; the fact that both books deal with the Second World War makes them morally suspect in Henighan's view. He also provides some iconoclastic assessments: Fugitive Pieces is `poetic wanking'; Bonnie Burnard's A Good House (winner of a Giller Prize) a `mushy, odious lie'; the `greatest compliment a reader can pay Alias Grace is that one could easily read the first three hundred pages without suspecting that they had been written by Margaret Atwood'.

There are problems with Henighan's approach. He is altogether too negative. Yes, there are two imperiums, but there is also freedom from them; Canadians believe they are participating in a new culture rather than desperately trying to escape pre-existing canons. And Henighan does not take into account that the works he attacks - the books about middle-aged, middle-class women's family values by Burnard and Carol Shields; the books that look towards America by Shields; the books set in exotic locales by Ondaatje, Michaels, Rohinton Mistry and Barbara Gowdy - reflect Canadian reality just as much as works by David Adams Richards and Wayne Johnston do. Canada is a country of immigrants, and it doesn't make sense to criticize Shields for writing The Stone Diaries, the `flagship novel of Free Trade Fiction' in which `Canadians placidly assimilate into continental norms'. Shields grew up in the U. S.; it is natural that she should be comfortable with things American. Furthermore, resisting or co-opting American influence is not a Canadian prerogative. With Mistry, Henighan does provide a caveat - that it is natural for a writer who left Bombay at twenty-two to write about Bombay - but a few pages later, he is insisting that `the equation of foreign settings with ``sophistication'' is merely the latest chapter in the Canadian epic of perpetually forestalled literary innovation.... During the 1990s the trend for immigrant writing merged seamlessly into the trend for foreign settings without leaving a ripple of fresh invention on the surface of Canadian prose'. This is a rather dismissive, trivializing assertion that betrays a general weakness for polemic, for theory at the expense of the telling, observed detail he insists on, and at which he himself is so good.