Maritime realists are, furthermore, mediators of class divisions, providing "new strategies The critic occupies an important position in this argument. For Keefer, what she calls following A. Nuttall transparent criticism names the interpreter of Maritime texts as the guarantor of the "mimetic authenticity" of the writer's fictional world.
Taken together, critic and writer contest "canonical reality — that which is complacently and agreeably life-affirming" , an attitude, she suggests, that is "a long-standing literary tradition in the Ma-ritimes, a tradition in which the facts of poverty and experience of impoverishment engage both author and text" Such a revisionist framework shares important features with the liberal pluralism that has energized the canon debate in North America over the last decade. John Guillory has recently argued that canon revision is based on an "imaginary politics," by which he means the critique and correction of stereotypical images of social groups 8.
Imaginary politics, Guillory argues, while important and necessary, confuses the political and aesthetic meanings of the word "representation.
Second, the literary works revisionists seek to include in the canon are seen to be realistic reflections of the experience of the social groups from which their authors come The reason for this conflation lies in the fact that, for revisionists, the author is more important as a social identity than as a genius, a paragon of literary excellence Moreover, writes Guillory, the category of social identity "is too important politically to yield ground to theoretical arguments which might complicate the status of representation in literary texts, for the simple reason that the latter mode of representation is standing in for representation in the political sphere" But not only do revisionists conflate politics and aesthetics; they also neglect important institutional questions about the variable distribution of what Guillory calls "cultural capital" — "access to the means of literary production and consumption" ix.
He understands one such form of cultural capital as literacy, the ability to read and write as well as the acquisition of the means for appropriating literature in ways that confer cultural literacy ix, Revisionists ultimately must take account of some crucial questions in their efforts to promote diversity: How is representation in the canon commensurate with representation in social and political life? How representative are the writers presumed to speak for certain constituencies? How does representation in the canon redress the experience of social and political marginalization?
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Such considerations are particularly relevant for Richards's writing and career. As Lennard Davis, for one, has argued, with the professionalizing of writing the novelist is "looked on as an expert, not just in fantasy or simply wordsmanship but in real life, the sum of communal knowledge, and knowledge of general philosophical and moral issues" ; the way that Richards has been heralded as a voice for the marginalized, making the lives of the dispossessed and inarticulate available to and palatable for his readers through his sympathetic portraits, certainly demonstrates this effect.
In other words, if Richards has gained recognition as a successful regional writer almost an oxymoron in Canada, where to succeed is to graduate from being regional , it is the "regional" half of that label which has been emphasized in his career. This celebration of his "representation" of the region, his providing access to a marginal world, raises a number of problems, not the least of which is the difficulty of reconciling such a view with Richards's writing. Keefer's treatment of Richards in Under Eastern Eyes provides a good example of this privileging of world over text in assessments of Richards's work.
But if Keefer bases her definition of Maritime realism on such a politics of the image and argues for a revaluing of the cultural capital of regional literature, Richards's recently completed trilogy, beginning with Nights Below Station Street , is fundamentally at odds with such a revisionist politics. Not only does Richards refuse a mediation conceived in political terms, but his novels, in raising questions of access to literacy, of social power, and of self-reliance, appear to foreclose the possibility of redressing what he takes to be a neglect of Maritime writers through a politics grounded in the affirmation of a marginalized identity.
Keefer's account of Richards's writing concluded with his powerful novel Lives of Short Duration. A number of developments in Richards's work and career since then prompt a reassessment of her critical perspective on his work: Richards's writing since Lives of Short Duration has been pared down; the style has shifted from what can be called a phenomenological realism to a prose which, as he puts it, allows both narrative analysis and subjectivity Scherf Furthermore, both inside and outside the region, Richards has achieved canonical status, predicated largely on the view of him as representative of the regional working class.
Finally, Richards has challenged what he takes to be a liberal hegemony in the Canadian literary establishment, insisting that his work has been wrongly represented as regional and leftist. His vocal resistance to progressive social thought has been accompanied by an eschewal of the role of spokesman for the region; and didactic interpolations in his prose, echoing the voice of his recently published essays, have laid out the philosophical and moral assumptions of his vision.
The Miramichi trilogy reflects a shift from a largely phenomenological realism, one in which memory and perception are dominant narrative strategies, to a spare, analytical, discursive narrative prose. What is striking in this regard is the way in which the interest in a phenomenological bracketing, in order to evoke a subjective sense of time and place, has been transformed into a broad philosophical and ideological statement about the relationship of the individual to the social sphere.
If an attitude of attentiveness to things, emotions, and memories in the context of immediate perception is characteristic of novels such as Blood Ties and Lives of Short Duration , the narrative discourse of the Miramichi trilogy is marked by a defensive and polemical tone. Moreover, Richards's construction of his protagonists in the trilogy — all of whom have been socially marginalized to some degree for having, to quote Richards's description of one of them, "qualities greater and lesser than the qualities it took to make oneself socially acceptable" Wounded — is characterized by a curious combination of a disruption of causality and a certain sense of inevitability.
It is said of Ivan Bastarache, the protagonist of Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace , for instance, that he "knew very well that, no matter his own part, he had become a scapegoat in some larger affair that he had no control over, until it ran its course" ; the same might be said of the principals of all three novels. Nights Below Station Street focuses on the attempts of Joe Walsh, a chronically unemployed, reformed alcoholic, to achieve a certain social respectability and security for his family, while withstanding the condescension of fair-weather friends and acquaintances who feel they have achieved that respectability already.
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While Ivan quietly watches over the people he cares for and suffers the hostility created by his alleged offence, the narrative describes a ripple effect, as developments within the community of family and friends outside of which he stands gain momentum, reverberate and ebb. The final volume of the trilogy, For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down , takes this pattern of social transgression and ostracism a step further. Jerry Bines is a convicted murderer though some doubt is cast on the validity of the conviction who has taken on an almost mythic status in his community.
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The novel centres on his return to the Miramichi and his inevitable demise at the hands of his nemesis, Gary Percy Rils. But just as significant is a series of encounters between Jerry and Vera Pillar, a feminist who treats Jerry as a case study of the effects of oppressive patriarchal relations.
The endings of all three novels share a certain romanticism, as the protagonists prevail — if not survive — under circumstances that position them as the moral superiors of their critics: Joe, having been patronized by his neighbor Myhrra and her boyfriend Vye throughout Nights Below Station Street, saves Vye when he and Myhrra have a car accident during a blizzard just after their wedding, Joe "not knowing the processes of how this had all happened, only understanding that it was now irrevocable because it had" Jerry Bines dies at the conclusion of the trilogy trying to protect his family and others — including Vera and her brother Ralphie — from the malevolent Rils.
Richards's resistance to the role of class mediator or regional spokesperson — as Keefer characterizes the role in Under Eastern Eyes — is accompanied by an insistent valorizing of 'life' over form, as instanced in his claim for the imaginative life' of his characters and in the central importance in his fiction of characterization and narrative conflict. However, as narrative theory has shown, texts cannot forego some form of mediation. While Richards has argued that his narrative strategies must be viewed as the pragmatic negotiation of his characters in their environments Scherf , the narratorial interpolations that distinguish his recent novels nevertheless reveal a prescriptive universalism.
Indeed, the aesthetic practice of the entire trilogy appears to be a kind of naturalism grounded in religious and moral terms. As Frank Davey's reading of Nights Below Station Street has shown, Richards's narrative discourse is set within a resolutely deterministic framework. The narrative voices across the trilogy are predisposed to place under suspicion reason, causality, and larger complexes of social meaning, privileging instead spontaneity, chance, and un-self-consciousness. In Nights Below Station Street, for instance, an important contrast is developed between the academic, reasoned concern of Vera and the unshakeable, spontaneous generosity of the Walshes, who find it difficult to achieve the kind of social respectability that Vera has acquired.
Vera embodies a consistent theme in the trilogy: In this conflict between un-self-conscious, independent action and collective, premeditated altruism, Richards sides with the Walshes, as his comments about the novel reveal: However Rita and Joe have been doing things for others all their lives with no recognition of their deeds as being altruistic" qtd. Richards is right, of course, that everyday heroism is a subject worthy of literary representation and that those who are socially stigmatized for whatever reason deserve as well to be celebrated.
Yet the idea that premeditated action, especially that of the socially respectable, is always a form of oppression needs to be questioned. Such a philosophical world-view obviously discounts the possibility that "determined action" — which appears to include not only personal machination but also social reform and state planning — can be a force for good in society. In Richards's fictive world, voluntarist affirmations of social identity are the object of deep suspicion, even hostility. This suspicion is reflected particularly in the consistent disjunction between conscious intention and the act of speaking, most prominently in the case of Ivan's father Antony: But it seemed that every thing he said was for a reason, all of which would become clear" This disjunction suggests that self-affirmation and premeditation are self-serving because meaning can never be grasped at the moment of utterance and is afterwards endorsed as if it were meant to be.
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Consequently, the characters receiving the most sympathetic treatment are those least able or least inclined to articulate their identities, their desires, their sense of what is right. In contrast, the most striking feature of the resistance to the kind of voluntarist affirmations of social identity on which Keefer's pluralism is based is the way in which any kind of socialized agency is treated in the trilogy. The negotiation of the social realm is fraught with misrepresentation, is suspect or false — almost always valued negatively in Richards's narrative discourse, as the description of Antony's grumbling indicates: The Acadian carnival Vera and her husband Nevin attend in Nights Below Station Street punctures their expectations of a warm, inclusive and authentic experience, and is explicitly questioned by the narrator: And when people tell you that they are not restrained or inhibited, and have authenticity, they are also suggesting that you are restrained and inhibited and lack that which is authentic" Such affirmations of identity and particularly the motivation of characters advocating progressive causes tend to be viewed skeptically, either by the narrator, by Richards's protagonists, or by other socially marginalized characters such as Adele Walsh or the curmudgeonly Dr.
Hennessey, who serves as something of a touchstone throughout the trilogy. Hennessey is constructed as being kind and sympathetic beneath a gruff and confrontational posture, and his belligerent yet contradictory opposition to progressive causes generally seen as anachronistic by those he opposes often mirrors the perspective of Richards's narrators. At one point in Evening Snow, as Ivan is being publicly blasted for his alleged brutality, Hennessey defends him and questions the integrity of Ivan's accusers: Today's way is progressive concern" As Davey observes of Hennessey, "his conservatism is constructed as resting on more profound moral concerns than do the liberalisms he opposes" While there is little question that altruism can harbour a mixture of motives, the crucial question is the representative validity of such observations as Hennessey's; indeed, the issue extends beyond the overt didactic interpolations in the trilogy to the larger question of characterization as well — particularly that of Richards's ostensibly progressive antagonists.
The majority of the antagonists in the novels have achieved a certain level of social respectability — enough, certainly, so that they are acutely conscious of others' lack of it — and come across as self-aggrandizing, hypocritical, calculating, yet insecure. Ruby's actions in particular are generated by a desire for power, attention, and ti-tillation, including her counselling Cindi to have an abortion:.
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The observations of the narrators direct the reader in interpreting the significance of the action, particularly where the motives of the socially empowered are concerned. At the apex of Cindi's celebrity as a social cause in Evening Snow, for instance, the narrator observes that the people who "rushed in and out of [Cindi's] life In fact, if they had been told this, they would deny it with that tumultuous anger that liberal thinkers often mistake for concern over human rights" Throughout the trilogy, premeditated social concern is consistently portrayed as compromised, contradictory, and whimsical.
In the final volume of the trilogy, For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down, the confrontation of the socially empowered and the socially marginalized assumes centre stage, with a parallel being drawn between the sociological feminism of Vera and the physical menace of Gary Percy Rils, who stalks Jerry Bines like a hunter throughout the latter stages of the novel; the sense of merciless pursuit suggested by the title is clearly intended to implicate Vera as well.
Not only do Joe, Ivan, and Jerry develop this sense of responsibility without training or role models; they retain it in spite of the negative examples of their parents. Evident throughout the trilogy, the superiority of intuitive goodness over socially prescribed forms of goodness is perhaps most explicit in Wounded where university-trained Vera Pillar serves as a foil to the almost illiterate Jerry in various exchanges. When, for example, Jerry recalls going to live with his father after discovering him dead drunk in the street and stopping to protect him, Vera tries to lead him to attribute his actions to a perceived burden of obligation.
That the heroic goodness of Joe, Ivan, and Jerry is both innate and tenacious is emphasized by its emerging in spite of adverse social conditions and their early mistakes in life. Given their backgrounds, it is all but inevitable that they all exhibit antisocial behavior early in life, and, partly in consequence of this behavior, they become outsiders, looked down on by respectable circles within the community.
Not only does Joe drink too much, but he also loses control of himself when he does. In his mid-teens in Nights Ivan is wild and involved in petty crime. In The Wounded , Jerry has served four terms in prison by the time he is in his early twenties. Being outsiders has obvious practical disadvantages for these characters, but it also offers one important benefit: The idea of an older culture in conflict with a newer set of ideas brought into the area through university education and mass media is central in the second trilogy, and, as outsiders lacking formal education, the three central characters are linked to the indigenous culture.
All three shy away from the sorts of superficial relationships that pass for friendship among many of the minor characters and prefer to retreat from the town, where they are outsiders, to the woods, where they are more at home.
For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down (Miramichi trilogy, book 3) by David Adams Richards
This affinity for the wilderness points to their connection with the more primitive, more traditional life in the Miramichi Region, where lumbering has always been the primary industry and where, not long ago, hunting and fishing were important sources of food. In traditional local society people relied more on neighbors for assistance than on social institutions, and, although they are outsiders, Joe, Ivan, and Jerry all show an old-fashioned willingness to help anyone in need. While Joe, Ivan, and Jerry possess the strength and courage to defend themselves against the sort of direct, physical aggression they might have faced in a frontier society, their guilelessness makes them vulnerable to the kind of verbal abuse they face in their own time.
It is, of course, ironic that these characters become the victims of groups that use as their primary justification their professed concern for victims. Given their limitations and misfortunes, it would be easy to view these characters as anti-heroes, victims in a society they can neither understand nor hope to change for the better. While the central characters face many external difficulties, their basic achievement consists of overcoming their own fears and weaknesses in order to realize their heroic potential.
Heroism is a state of being that has little to do with the status acknowledged by society, and the heroic goodness of the central characters is defined more by the motives than the consequences of their actions. In the end, Joe is inwardly a stronger person, more at peace with himself and so better able to take care of his family and to help others through his continuing involvement in Alcoholics Anonymous.
Ivan, who is almost saintly in his generosity, has fewer failings to overcome. His victory consists of remaining true to his generous impulses in spite of the bad influence of those around him and the pressure placed on him to become less noble than he by nature is. Throughout his fatal struggle to save the horse, Ivan tries to convince himself to leave, but he simply cannot bring himself to act contrary to his heroic nature.
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The horse has little economic value. Ivan is not responsible for its misfortune. No one will thank or praise him if he succeeds in saving it.
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But in the fictional world of Evening Snow such considerations matter very little; in effect, the absence of any practical advantage for Ivan emphasizes the selflessness of his actions. While many will suspect his motives and dismiss his death as the final sordid episode in a violent, criminal life, the reader knows that it is the culmination of a series of acts of atonement growing out of his acceptance of responsibility for his past mistakes. In view of the priority given inward experience over external efficacy, it may seem oddly irrelevant that Joe, Ivan, and Jerry are courageous and capable fighters.
These characters have been tested and have learned not to be intimidated, and it is their bravery much more than their ability as fighters that is important. To a large extent, they have outgrown violence, but they have not outgrown courage. This goodness grows out of a sound intuitive sense of fairness and responsibility, and it draws on the moral and physical courage required for independent action. Despite their social awkwardness, they are characteristically sensitive to the feelings of other people, and notwithstanding the exterior hardness that the circumstances of their lives have forced on them, they retain an almost childlike innocence.