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Literary Criticism
March 2002
192 pages
ISBN 0-88984-240-X
$19.95
`it's the liveliest,
Readers who are interested
`Henighan repeats all the
Readers who are interested
`As always in the culture
most cogently argued,
most provocative and most
infuriatingly self-satisfied
work of literary criticism
to be published in this country
in at least the last decade.'
- Robert Reid,
Kitchener-Waterloo Record
in theoretical essays on the
subject of Canadian literature
may also be interested in
Ripostes: Reflections on
Canadian Literature (1998)
by Philip Marchand
of the Toronto Star
and also quite possibly
This Is Our Writing (2000)
by T.F. Rigelhof
of Dawson College.
standard myths, and combines
bitter mockery of writers
with simple nonsense.'
- Russell Smith,
The Globe and Mail
in theoretical essays on the
subject of Canadian literature
may also be interested in
Ripostes: Reflections on
Canadian Literature (1998)
by Philip Marchand
of the Toronto Star
and also quite possibly
This Is Our Writing (2000)
by T.F. Rigelhof
of Dawson College.
of personality, the contradiction
belongs to the author. When it
comes to the Toronto media's
myopic vision of Canadian
literature, Smith, who can
see that the emperor has
no clothes, wants to keep
wearing his black turtleneck.'
- Stephen Henighan,
The Globe and Mail
When Words
Deny the World
The Black Turtleneck Conspiracy
`A rift has opened between the upper and
lower tiers of our literary culture, with Toronto-based commercial
publishers now enjoying a clout, in terms of distribution, publicity
budget, media attention and, consequently, sales, many times that of
their small-press rivals. The advantage of being published by, say,
McClelland and Stewart rather than Talon Books, has become many times
greater than it was in the 1980s. This is especially true in the realm of
access to the media, where promotion has become gruellingly difficult
for smaller publishers.
`In 1990, as an unknown author promoting a first
novel published by a minor press, I embarked on an extensive promotional
tour including nearly a dozen radio and print interviews; by 1999, when, as a
moderately well-known literary author promoting a well-reviewed fourth book
published by a small press whose publicity was centralized in its
large-press parent company, my tour was much shorter: several of the radio
stations where I had been interviewed in 1990 were no longer accessible to
me, having become the exclusive province of `name-brand' authors.
`Here, as in other domains of our society, a certain rough equality has
vanished. Writers published by the `national' publishers - most of which are
not national at all, but are U.S. branch plants (whose ultimate ownership
may be in Germany, England or elsewhere) such as HarperCollins, Knopf,
Random House and Doubleday - occupy a different universe, financially as
well as socially, from other writers. A national sense of literary
community, with its accompanying possibility of creative exchange, has been
split by a literary class division. In cultural terms, the relationship
between Toronto and the rest of the country has come to resemble the
relationship between Americans and Canadians: they know nothing about
our country, but we are obliged to know everything about theirs.'
- Stephen Henighan, `From CanLit to TorLit: There's a problem
at the centre of the universe'. Quill & Quire, March 2002
Stephen Henighan at the BookShelf Café, Guelph. March 23, 2002.
`But in the arts and publishing, the mockery takes on a much darker tone.
Toronto is not just ridiculous, it's oppressive:
It's part of a cabal of ``superficial and commercial'' publishers
and writers, and secretly collaborative media, who conspire
to ruin Canadian literature and keep all its hoarded riches to itself. ...
`The latest one of these jealous sallies appeared in this month's issue
of Quill & Quire, the Canadian publishing-industry journal. It's
written by a writer called Stephen Henighan, who is very angry that no one's
ever heard of him, and blames it on Toronto.'
`Hatred of Toronto, and all the people who live there, is not a rational thing;
it's just a national tradition, like sugar shacks and Carnaval; it binds the country.
And it usually is a humorous inclination: We construct a myth of a city
of callous bankers and yuppie lawyers who are terrified of a little snow
on their shoes. It's lighthearted, and it makes other cities feel not so bad
that they don't have three universities, an art college, all the media
and all the publishing industry in their downtowns.
- Russell Smith, `The Myth of the black turtleneck conspiracy'. The Globe and Mail, March 16, 2002. [ Russell Smith is also the author of Noise ]
Russell Smith on camera, Queen Street, Toronto. October, 1994.
`In his column of March 16, Russell Smith attacked an excerpt
from my recent book When Words Deny the World that had appeared
in the magazine Quill & Quire. Though I had been expecting
disagreement with my ideas, I was surprised by the emotional tone
of Smith's response. It's not every day one is called a `smarmy prig' in
The Globe and Mail.
`Smith's anger suggested that I had struck a raw nerve. In my book,
I argue that the increasing centralization of the media in Toronto has
coincided with Toronto's integration into the global book market. A
Toronto media culture of personality and image holds sway over literary
Canada. This has instilled a parochialism in Toronto writers, who
acknowledge as writers people whom they know, or whose photographs
they recognize. Finding out about other writers by reading, I mischievously
insinuated, was un-Torontonian.
`The interpretation of my argument presented in The Globe was
probably best summed up by the column's headline, `The myth of the black
turtleneck conspiracy.' In fact, I was deriding neither black turtlenecks
(I own one myself) nor conspirators. I was trying to describe some of the ways
in which, in my view, globalization has fragmented the idea of a national
Canadian culture. I was pointing out evidence of the widening cultural
and financial chasm between writers who live in Toronto and those who live
elsewhere in the country, particularly as reflected in the increasing
disparity between the amounts of media coverage received by these two groups.
`The mere fact of my article's having provoked a strong response seemed
to confirm this geographical bias. Excerpts from my book have been published
in the past. But when I published them as a resident of Montreal, the Ottawa
Valley or London, England, no one in Toronto considered me worth refuting.
By virtue of having moved to southern Ontario, I have become significant
enough to be condemned.'
- Stephen Henighan, `Yes, Toronto, I do own a black turtleneck'.
The Globe and Mail, April 6, 2002