On Technique in the Canadian Novel

Posted 20 April, 2008 in Literary Criticism |

Stephen Henighan, from his 2002 essay collection, When Words Deny the World:

The Stone Diaries is mediocre fiction but brilliant calculation. It plays to two mutually hostile constituencies, charming the “just folks” market with its tale of a nice, simple, rich woman, complete with family photographs and easy-to-read letters, recipes and lists; these same photographs and lists thrill the academics and avant-garde critics, who see in them a postmodern questioning of traditional narrative techniques. Shields is taking both groups for a ride. The folksy readers aren’t getting the full, fleshed-out story they deserve and the academics, if they are honest about it, will recognize that Shields’s forays into postmodernism are facile and desultory. Planting a recipe in the middle of a chapter does not an Italo Calvino make. Postmodernism is not simply structurelessness; it has its own rigour and discipline, none of which is on view in The Stone Diaries (though the offhand elegance of Shields’s phrasemaking is undeniable).

To me, this reading of Shields’s magnum opus — still the only novel to win both the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Pulitzer Prize — is pretty much unimpeachable. There are writers in Canada who employ postmodern devices to worthwhile effect — Leon Rooke, for example, or Douglas Coupland — but Shields is not among them. It’s hard to think of a more rigorously traditional writer in the CanLit pantheon.

The grafting on of postmodern devices in The Stone Diaries is, as Henighan suggests, an attempt to appear au courant, but it rings hollow; Shields was always more concerned with crafting phrases of “offhand elegance” than she was with attempting any real kind of formal or technical innovation. On a sentence-by-sentence basis her novels always glittered like cut glass, but stylistically they tended to leave this reader flat.

This is true not just of Shields; it’s something that’s fairly endemic throughout Canadian literature. In the last year alone, two widely touted novels — Effigy by Alissa York and The Angel Riots by Ibi Kaslik — have featured prose that is honed to a pristine beauty, but grafted onto a stylistically flat narrative. Both writers employ stylistic tricks — York uses letters, dreams, and flashbacks to tell her story, and Kaslik splits the narrative into two overlapping voices — but in neither case are these devices deployed in a way that seems vibrant or organically relevant. It’s the beauty of the sentences, not the stylistic flourishes, that a reader is apt to notice.

Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero, another novel with painstakingly crafted sentences, does depend upon the postmodern conceit of two competing narratives, the second of which is meant to illuminate and refract the first, to achieve its effects, and to this extent it is a more ambitious — if not entirely successful — work. But even Ondaatje’s technical facility and playfulness — so much in evidence in Coming through Slaughter and Running in the Family – have, post-English Patient, taken a back seat to his obsession with the surface shimmer of his prose.

The problem with all these novels (and the above certainly does not constitute an exhaustive list) is that the form and the content of the works seem extricable, when they should not be. As Mark Schorer writes in his seminal essay, “Technique as Discovery”: “The novel is still read as though its content has some value in itself, as though the subject matter of fiction has greater or lesser value in itself, and as though technique were not a primary but a supplementary element, capable perhaps of not unattractive embellishments upon the surface of the subject, but hardly its essence.”

Readers who are looking for writing that recognizes the essential coherence of subject and technique, of form and content, would be advised to steer clear of the above-mentioned novels and instead pick up a copy of Mark Anthony Jarman’s new collection, My White Planet, which provides a kind of master class in how to seamlessly marry musical prose and technical innovation.

2 comments to “On Technique in the Canadian Novel”

Kerry, April 20th, 2008 at 5:40 pm:

• Oh, how sad though. What happens to a story that is picked apart like that? If someone told me that my forays into postmodernism were facile and desultory (and surely they could) I think I would laugh. There is a plane up there in the place where stories are read in which all of that means absolutely nothing at all.

August, April 20th, 2008 at 7:45 pm:

• When Henighan’s book of essays was first published, I was an undergrad at the University of Waterloo, and wrote to him to say, first, that I enjoyed the book as a whole, but that I disagreed with his characterization of The Stone Diaries, a novel I love, as free-trade fiction, trying to hook and American audience, by explaining that I was from the part of the country that Shields was writing about and found it quite accurate, as the border there is more porous than not (or was before Homeland Security). His reply was that his background in the east was to view the border as “The Front”, and that he thought perhaps as I got older and read more that I might “figure out what I wish to make of my background” and that perhaps my opinion might change. While his entire reply was polite, I very much felt as though I was being told something along the lines of you’ll understand when you’re older.

  I’ve had difficulty taking him seriously ever since.

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