as the hope and pattern for Canada; or William Kirby's The Golden Dog (1877), a historical novel in the high romantic fashion, posits Old World villainy in New France to be countered by Providence and the English, who thereby deserve the fidelity of the not conquered but liberated French. Admittedly, Francis Grey's more convincing study of the complicity of church and state in turn-ofthe-century Quebec, The Curé of St. Philippe (1899), does acknowledge the problem of 'two nations — no other word is adequate — separated, not only by race and creed, but by language as well.' Most of these novels, however, are much more about English Canadian attitudes and aspirations than French Canadian actualities and, as such, erase difference rather than record it.
Another difference was differently inscribed in the case of the Canadian West, which looms large in the country's literature precisely because it is Canadian (that is, non-American). The standard trappings of American frontier fiction are excluded from the start, as when Ralph Connors, in best-selling missionary Westerns such as The Sky Pilot: A Tale of the Foothills (1899), casts the preacher's sermons, not the sheriff's pistols, as the way to civilization. Dick Harrison, in Unnamed Country: The Struggle for a Prairie Fiction, argues at length that a different Western history in which the frontier was largely missing precluded in Canada the male-centered dichotomies of good and bad endlessly adumbrated in the American Western — cowboys and rustlers, cavalry and Indians, lawmen and outlaws. Canadians could consequently write different versions of their different West against the pervasive American version that regularly threatened to incorporate Canada into its imaginative space.
Writing the Canadian West foregrounded more the processes of narrative than the product of the West and the Western, which is to say that there is a distinct metafictional element in much of this Canadian fiction. Thus Howard O'Hagan's Tay John (1939) begins -562- with the problem of naming the protagonist. The title is the English version of the French version, Tête Jaune, of the blond Indian protagonist's original Shushwap name, which also meant 'yellow head.' Poised between Indian and white names, Indian and white mythologies, this ambiguously mythic hero only sporadically inhabits his novel and finally walks, apparently, back into the earth from which he was miraculously born to inscribe on that earth and in the text a circle of problematic emptiness. The novel itself is mostly the telling of not telling his story: 'Indeed, to tell a story is to leave most of it untold,' Jack Denham, the main narrator of Tay John, finally admits before he turns the novel over to another who does no better. 'You have the feeling you have not reached the story itself, but have merely assaulted the surrounding solitude.'
As Tay John suggests, a different dialectic between white and Indian characterizes the Canadian Western as compared to the American. The American vision of Manifest Destiny necessarily casts Native American people as the savage 'other' who must be defeated, supplanted. In Canada, however, and perhaps as a reflection of Canada's own sense of marginality, the Indian is more often portrayed as an alternative than as an enemy. In W. O. Mitchell's The Vanishing Point (1973), for example, a teacher at a reserve school sets out to civilize his prize pupil but she ends up Indianizing him. Or in Robert Kroetsch's Gone Indian (1973), the protagonist, a United States graduate student, finally finds — after the pattern of Grey Owl (alias Archibald Bellaney) — his real life as a fake Indian in the Canadian north. Or in a rather different vein Rudy Wiebe can 'doubt the official given history' of the Canadian West. To tell 'another' and 'maybe even truer' side of the story, he writes novels such as The Temptations of Big Bear (1973) that radically deconstruct the official history and the Western form on which they are based. Much the same deconstructive enterprise also informs Peter Such's Riverrun (1973), Canada's most Eastern Western and a powerful account of the extermination of the Beothuk in Newfoundland when the natural cycle of their existence (one of the Joycean references of Such's title) was broken by intruding whites. Or, again in a comic vein, George Bowering in Burning Water (1980) and Caprice (1987) portrays impossibly contemporary, ironically postmodern Indians (but no more unlikely, it must be stressed, than any other depiction), whereas -563- Philip Kreiner's Contact Prints (1987) emphasizes the imposture implicit in any white rendering of Native life and art.
In other ways, too, novels of the Canadian West contravene the American Western. Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel (1964) portrays an old woman, not a young man, who is searching for a Western escape from the limitations that circumscribe her life. Moreover, this search takes, in part, the odd form of lighting out from the retirement home, not for the frontier. Laurence, in her first Canadian novel, graphically reverses the phallic-thrust teleology of the American Western, the celebration of the conquering of a new land as the simultaneous claiming of a future of boundless possibility. Hagar Shipley, Laurence's protagonist, has most of her life behind her. But she still has to come home to that life, to admit what it has been, to come to terms with it, to reinvent herself as the product of a particular Canadian West (instead of inventing the West as an expression of the id's unbridled desire — male desire, of course).
When the protagonist in The Stone Angel came home, so, too, did the author. After living in and writing of Africa, Laurence returned imaginatively to the small town in Manitoba where she grew up, renamed it Manawaka, and began a series of fictions that soon established her as one of Canada's most respected authors. Both the Manawaka novels and the writing of those novels illustrate another distinguishing feature of Canadian fiction. In contradistinction to the Thomas Wolfe claim that 'you can't go home again,' Canadian writers insist that you can and you must. Or differently put, if the American dream is a dream of the future, a vision of what the country (and/or the representative citizen) might be when it has become all that it should be, the Canadian dream is, in Robert Kroetsch's evocative wording, 'a dream of origins.' Where you originally come from is more important than where you are finally going, which is, after all, as The Stone Angel points out even with its graveyard title, only to death. In her Manawaka novels, Laurence especially asserts claims of place and past, claims that are regularly gendered female instead of male — and this too is typical of much Canadian fiction.
The Canadian West has produced some of the country's best realistic fiction — works such as Frederick Philip Grove's Settlers of the Marsh (1925) or Ethel Wilson's Swamp Angel (1954) — It has also -564- produced some of Canada's best historiographic metafiction (Linda Hutcheon's useful term). Sheila Watson's The Double Hook (1959) crosses the story of an isolated and perhaps Indian community with T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and then poises the account between Christianity and Coyote, the Native trickster deity. Or in Robert Harlow's Scann (1972) the telling of a self-serving mythopoeic history of a British Columbia town self-destructs (the manuscript is burnt) at the end and yet remains as the novel. Or Jack Hodgin's west-coast magic realism conjoins Vancouver Island and Ireland in a fantastic Invention of the World (1977) as both the establishing of a fraudulent religious community and the subsequent attempts to counter and recount that story. Similarly, Bowering, in Burning Water, intersperses the history of George Vancouver's heroic mapping of the British Columbia coast with the account of another George (Bowering himself) recounting it and thereby flaunts the problematic narrativity of both 'stories,' while Daphne Marlatt, in Ana Historic (1988), shows that Ana /woman is not without history/story at all, either in the present or in the past.
Another avenue to effective fiction, and one seen in both Canadian Westerns and 'Easterns,' was to make novels out of the very impediments to their production — a limited audience, a 'colonial cringe' mentality that denigrated anything Canadian, traditions (both English and French) of distrusting and/or censoring literature. Moreover, the paradigmatic story of the country well might be its reluctance to sanction any official story. 'Canadian literature,' Kroetsch has claimed, 'is the autobiography of a culture that insists it will not tell its story.' Or as Sam Solecki has observed, 'No other established literature treats national identity as a question.' No wonder a number of novels are oblique and paradoxical narratives that tell of not telling, or that 'the paralyzed artist' — one of Margaret Atwood's chapter titles in Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature — is a common Canadian protagonist. In Sinclair Ross's As For Me and My House (1949), for example, Philip Bentley's failure to be an artist is so pervasive that even the recounting of it must be turned over to his wife. Or David Canaan in Ernest Buckler's The Mountain and the Valley (1952) does not live up to either of his biblical names. Instead of going to the mountain top to write his story -565- and the story of his people, he dies early, and they are left bookless, still in the valley of artlessness, with no redeeming vision of themselves. Yet that story and that vision constitute the novel itself.
