Such works represent the novel 'written under erasure.' They also illustrate Canadian deference and deferral with a vengeance — the great Canadian novel as the novel that best avoids advancing any claims to greatness. In this context, Ross is the premier eraser, and his As For Me and My House has been put forward as Canada's 'paradigmatic text.' Philip Bentley's failings as an artist and then as a minister and a husband are rendered in his wife's highly problematic account of an unhappy year the couple spends in what seems (everything in this novel is questionable) a narrow and restrictive small prairie town aptly misnamed Horizon. That calculated misnomer situates both place and promise elsewhere even as it also denies the difference between center and circumference, situation and defining circumstances. And the novel itself similarly becomes what Kroetsch terms 'the missing text,' an 'unwritten novel' implicit in Mrs. Bentley's diary entries addressed to a fiction that is not there.
After the late sixties, however, and through the seventies and the eighties, fiction, unquestionably, is there. Margaret Atwood has recently observed that, if she were now redoing Survival, she would downplay 'The Paralyzed Artist' chapter. Canadian authors began, in the sixties, to write in unprecedented number, and they did so for a number of reasons: the stocktaking engendered by the country's centennial, a sense of national pride in opposing United States policy in Vietnam, a desire to be (in Canada as well as in Quebec) 'masters in our own house,' the fact that the Canada Council had begun to fund substantially writers and publishers, and a growing demand, especially in the schools, for Canadian texts. Canadian writers also began to produce works of unprecedented quality. Indeed, the variety and the scope of the novels written during the last twenty-five years preclude any substantial assessment of types and trends or even of major authors. So I will not try to come up with rubrics that might contain, say, Hugh Hood's ongoing twelve-volume roman fleuve documentation of twentieth-century Canada collectively titled The New Age (1975-) and Susan Kerslake's brief, lyric, intensely poetic and almost impenetrable Penumbra (1984); Timothy Findley's exuberant reimagining of the story of Noah in Not Wanted on the Voyage-566- (1984) and Aritha van Herk's rereading of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina in the far north in Places Far from Ellesmere (1990). Instead I will merely name a few authors (in addition to those already noted) whom anyone seriously interested in English Canadian fiction should read: Robertson Davies, Mavis Gallant, Janette Turner Hospital, Joy Kogawa, Michael Ondaatje, Leon Rooke, Audrey Thomas. But most of all I would here rename Atwood herself. From Surfacing (1972), early hailed as a feminist classic, to the dystopian warning of The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and the reprising in Cat's Eye (1988) of her major fictional and feminist concerns, Atwood has been a protean novelist, engaged and challenging. She especially exemplifies the accomplishment of recent English Canadian fiction on both the national and an international level. There is even a newsletter and an official society devoted to the study of her work, and a writer can hardly be more established than that.
For French Canada the story of narrative coming into being is, if anything, even more impressive. The Durham Report of 1840 described the French Canadians as a poor people, without history and without literature, and saw them as destined to be soon swallowed up by English Canada. They themselves had other ideas, one of which was the 'revenge of the cradle.' Huge farm families would ensure that the habitant survived. Literature could also prove Lord Durham wrong. The first French Canadian novel, L'Influence d'un livre by Philippe-Ignace-François Aubert de Gaspé, had appeared in 1837, the same year as the rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada that led to the Durham Report. A melodramatic account of an alchemist's adventures, including his search for a main de gloire, the dried hand of a hanged murderer, this first novel was followed by other romantic fictions, some of which were soon given a more historic cast. Coincidentally, one of the best of the historical romances is Les Anciens Canadiens (1863; Canadians of Old, 1974) by Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé, Philippe-Ignace's father, who published his own first novel when he was well into his seventies.
Novels such as Les Anciens Canadiens, set in the Seven Years War and after, grounded French Canadian life in history and in surmounting the setbacks of that history. Another fictional development grounded the continuation of that life in remaining on the land. What -567- has been called le roman de la terre made its appearance in 1846 with Patrice Lacombe's La terre paternelle, a celebration of French Canadian heritage passed from father to son and centered in the family farm. In these novels, British Canada was not the only force that had to be resisted. In Louis Hémon's Maria Chapdelaine (1916; English translation, 1921), one of the best of the novels of the land, the female protagonist must choose between two suitors, one offering her escape to the wealth and ease of industrial New England and the other only the harsh country life that she has always known. Continuing that life of, among other things, female sacrifice in the service of patriarchal order, Maria marries the second of the two, a decision vindicated in the novel by the 'voices' of the land. Their directive is to 'stay in the province where our fathers have stayed, and live as they have lived, to obey the silent command which formed in their hearts and which passed to ours, and which we must pass on to our numerous children: In the country of Quebec nothing must die and nothing must change.'
Change comes nonetheless, and one measure of that change is Felix-Antoine Savard's Menaud, maître-draveur (1937; Master of the River, 1976), a masterful reprising of Maria Chapdelaine in which a logger attempts to heed the warning sounded by the voices in the land in Hémon's novel but succeeds only in driving himself insane to repeat endlessly a tag phrase from the same crucial passage that had earlier inspired him to action. A poetic study of self-sacrifice is transmuted into a psychological study of self-disintegration; the prophetic warning that 'strangers have come' to take 'almost all the power…almost all the money' gives way to the flat assertion that 'Strangers came! Strangers came!…,' which, in its mad reiteration, suggests mostly that they will go on coming to further the victimization of Menaud and his people. Yet the darker implications of the latter novel are not, it should be noted, entirely missing from the earlier one. Maria makes her crucial decision only because the choice she would have much preferred has already been precluded by the death of her fiancé, François Paradis (Paradise lost?), in the frozen north.
Although Maria's life is movingly portrayed, the contemporary reader, especially if of an anticlerical and/or feminist bent, is apt to question the heavy constraints under which she acquiescently labors. -568-
Other novels more explicitly countered the ethos of le roman de la terre and particularly the idea that the twentieth century could be faced on the basis of a nineteenth-century reinscription of eighteenthcentury French ideals about country living and landownership. Albert Laberge's La Scouine (1918; Bitter Bread, 1977), for example, is a sustained indictment of a brutal rural existence represented not so much by the work of the harvester as by the work of the gelder. Or Ringuet's (Philippe Panneton's) Trente arpents (1938; Thirty Acres, 1960) describes how old Euchariste Moisan is tricked out of his thirty acres by one son and sent to visit another in the United States where he remains in permanent exile and cultural isolation, unable to speak to even his own grandchildren. Euchariste ends up a nightwatchman in an American factory, a total reversal of the day work he earlier did on his Canadian farm and the very fate from which the farm should have saved him. Still more recently, Marie-Claire Blais, in novels such as Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel (1965; A Season in the Life of Emmanuel, 1966) can comically transmogrify the whole pastoral/ Catholic tradition of the earlier fiction with such telling details as brutalized children in a large farm family who are regularly identified only by number or the religious daughter who passes from the convent to the brothel barely noticing the change, with, indeed, 'tears in her eyes' that there were 'so many strangers who needed her.'
Laberge's La Scouine and Ringuet's Trente arpents anticipate the massive social and literary changes that Quebec experienced in the post-World War II era. More and more the province went in exactly the directions earlier works had warned against, and the novel, in documenting those transgressions, changed too. The enduring truths of the family farm gave way to tales of disordered city living such as Roger Lemelin's best-selling novel of urban poverty and crime, Au pied de la pente douce (1944; The Town Below, 1948), or Gabrielle Roy's landmark novel, Bonheur d'occasion (1945; The Tin Flute, 1947), which studies the case of the Lacasse family as they try in ways both heroic and tawdry to transcend poverty. Early recognized as one of Quebec's and Canada's major novels, Bonheur d'occasion especially situates fiction
