For Those Who Want to Get Their Dander Up …

Posted 7 April, 2008 in Literary Criticism, Book Reviews |

… my review of Stephen Henighan’s new collection of essays, A Report on the Afterlife of Culture, is online, here.

Henighan is, to put it mildly, a polarizing figure. Writing in the Quill & Quire about Henighan’s 2002 essay collection, When Words Deny the World, James Grainger said that the book contained “[s]ome of the most blistering and erudite pieces of Canadian literary criticism ever published.” Responding to the same volume in The Danforth Review, Shane Neilson complained that “Henighan makes a mediocre Chicken Little but a poor explicator of how to repair the sky.”

The reasons for Henighan’s spotty reception among the denizens of CanLit have much to do with his gleeful willingness to take on the Canadian literary establishment — a willingness that is on full display in A Report on the Afterlife of Culture.

He does lay himself open to accusations of churlishness: the charge that Canadian literature has been overtaken by a parochial and greedy cabal of Toronto-area writers and publishers, first floated in the essay “Vulgarity on Bloor” from When Words Deny the World, is reiterated in the new volume, which reprints Henighan’s notorious Geist essay about Margaret Atwood’s influence on Vincent Lam’s 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize win. The essay includes Henighan’s contention that “[f]rom 1994 to 2004, all the Giller winners, with the exception of Mordecai Richler, lived within a two-hour drive of the corner of Yonge and Bloor.” The radius that allows for a “two-hour drive” to Yonge and Bloor is not only a clever way of shoehorning Alice Munro — who lives in Clinton, Ontario — into Henighan’s establishment cabal, but also disingenuously elides the fact that, by virtue of his residency in Guelph, Ontario, this rubric also encompasses … Stephen Henighan.

He is also prone to sweeping generalizations, many of which are problematic if only for being untestable:

The books discussed in book clubs … are read for a shared deadline, discussion may be channelled by the “Questions for your reading group” section at the end of the paperback edition, the level of literary debate descends to whether members of the group “liked” characters or regarded them as laudable models for behaviour, or saw them as raising salient public debates in a congenial way; appreciation of literary form or original uses of language sinks below the horizon.

This may be true of some book clubs, perhaps even the majority of them; it’s impossible to prove that it’s true for all book clubs. Similarly, Henighan asserts that “The culture of the book club novel is sentimental, ‘life-affirming,’ deflected from engagement with the world around it and often obsessed with the therapeutic reconstruction of the individual psyche.” This may indeed be true for Oprah’s book club — the most famous and visible book club in the world — but it’s impossible to show that it’s true across the board. (I’m a part of a book club: the last book we read was A Dead Man in Deptford by Anthony Burgess; the next one is Dead Babies by Martin Amis. I wonder how these two novels would line up with Henighan’s umbrella view of a typical “book club” selection?)

Still, notwithstanding their evident flaws, Henighan’s essays are valuable for their ability to cut through the complacency and platitudinous drivel that so often passes for literary engagement in this country. The new book is more expansive than the previous volume — to a fault: a number of the essays are extraneous — and offers fresh perspectives on significant figures from our own literature and from world literatures. He’s not always easy to like, but Henighan is fearless and bracing, and is therefore a necessary figure on the Canadian critical landscape.

2 comments to “For Those Who Want to Get Their Dander Up …”

Alex, April 7th, 2008 at 5:23 pm:

• That “the saddest people in the world today are adults who read Harry Potter” is “patently absurd”? Hmm. How about if we changed it to “the most pathetic people in the world today . . .”?

Jay, April 8th, 2008 at 8:50 pm:

• I like this review.
  I haven’t read his work, but I am adding it to my list because, frankly, I like a challenge. My dander is permanently in the upright position, and I have a fondness for those who help me keep it there.

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