alouette plucked of every feather of decency and dignity.' Fortunately, there are now many texts for the picking, and the Canadian novel has been canonized even as it was coming into its own. Taking Stock: The Calgary Conference on the Canadian Novel, for example, sets forth both the top ten Canadian novels and the top one hundred, as voted on by 'teachers and critics across the country.' The top ten, -577- incidentally, are Laurence's The Stone Angel, Robertson Davies's Fifth Business (1970), Ross's As For Me and My House, Buckler's The Mountain and the Valley, Roy's Bonheur d'occasion, Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Watson's The Double Hook, Hugh MacLennan's The Watch That Ends the Night (1959), Mitchell's Who Has Seen the Wind (1947), and Laurence's The Diviners (1974). There is, of course, something dubious in any such listing. The inclusion of only one Francophone text, for example, is particularly suspect, nor do any enunciated criteria justify placing MacLennan and Mitchell ahead of, say, Aquin or Anne Hébert (and it is hard to imagine what such criteria might be). But, as one of the participants in Taking Stock pointed out, the first Nobel Prize for literature awarded in 1901 while Tolstoy, Chekhov, Ibsen, Strindberg, and Hardy were all alive was given to the French poet René-FrançoisArmand Sully-Prudhomme — a fact of literary history that anyone assessing the relative merits of different writers would do well to remember. Still, canonization has consolidated the recently achieved status of the novel, as is attested by a whole new industry of publishing, teaching, and writing on Canadian texts. Scholarly editions are available (at last a Canadian Wacousta instead of the American one), while series such as McClelland and Stewart's New Canadian Library make literally hundreds of works available for public school and university courses. (I would here parenthetically note that Canadians of my generation typically did not read a single Canadian novel during the course of their public schooling — a situation that has now radically changed.)
Robert Lecker has recently maintained that the Canadian 'canon is the conservative product of the conservative [academic] institution that brought it to life.' Concerned with nationalism and with naming, 'the canonizers' exhibit 'a preoccupation with history and historical placement; an interest in topicality, mimesis, verisimilitude, and documentary presentation; a bias in favor of the native over the cosmopolitan; a concern with traditional over innovative forms; a pursuit of the created before the uncreated.' All in all, they prefer 'texts that are ordered, orderable, safe.' Lecker's argument with the canon as so far conceived brings me to another major point, the observation that conservative novels tend to be valued more than experimental ones, and consequently Canadian fiction is generally -578- perceived as being formalistically old-fashioned. The only structurally idiosyncratic novel in Taking Stock's 'top ten' is The Double Hook, and its textual experiments derive from Eliot and early modernism. Conversely, Robertson Davies, despite his deployment of Jungian archetypes and esoteric learning, has been aptly described as the twentieth century's 'oldest living Victorian novelist,' yet he writes the second 'most important' novel, whereas Ann Rosenberg's wonderfully inventive assessment of 'beeing' and humanness, The Bee Book (1981), has been little noted and is now out of print.
Experimentation, particularly in English Canadian fiction, tends to be modest and modernist instead of a radical postmodern fracturing of language and form. Language does occasionally play with the breakdown of meaning as when Audrey Thomas 'sees the 'other' in 'mother,'' as one critic notes, or Nicole Brossard conjoins both the sea ('la mer') and the bitterness ('l'amer') of the sea with mother ('la mère') in her L'Amèr, ou le chapitre effrité (1977; These Our Mothers; or, The Disintegrating Chapter, 1983), which is itself a merging of poetry and fiction. And experiments with form do tend to be more the kind of generic blurring seen in L'Amèr rather than radical fracturings of the text. Michael Ondaatje, for example, similarly merges poetry and the novel in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) or autobiography and the novel in Running in the Family (1982). Or forms can be used to new ends as when Atwood creates her intriguing Lady Oracle (1977) out of the formulaic gothic romance, or André Major in his 'deserteurs' trilogy uses the detective novel for a sustained symbolic assessment of Quebec during the 1970s.
The preponderance of women's novels in Canadian fiction is also obvious and deserves note. In contrast to the American 7 percent solution (the proportion of women writers in textbooks and anthologies that, according to Joanna Russ and others, a primarily male literary traffic will bear), the Canadian novel can show a 50 percent solution (Taking Stock's top ten) or even a 70 percent solution (the top ten when the readers of a national literary magazine and not mostly male academics do the voting). But for whatever reasons — a 'deconstructionist urge to displace traditional authority,' the conjunctions of 'colonial space' (in Dennis Lee's usage) and feminine space, the absence of the frontier and its attendant male-centered
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myths, a national case of penis envy ('to be from the Canadas,' a character in Susan Swan's 1983 novel, Biggest Modern Woman of the World, observes, 'is to feel as women feel, cut off from the base of power') — Canadian fiction is strikingly feminine not just in the prevalence of women writers but also in the way in which women's experience and/or writing is regularly validated and sexual polarity is downplayed. Thus the Canadian Kiinstlerroman is typically a portrait of the artist, or the future artist, as a young woman, as in Laurence's A Bird in the House (1970), Munro's Lives of Girls and Women (1971), or Audrey Thomas's Munchmeyer and Prospero on the Island (1971), two novellas published as one novel and contrasting Munchmeyer's and Miranda Archer's different (as even their names suggest) ways toward different careers as writers. I would also here note that male Canadian writers regularly center novels on female characters and affirm female experience. Kroetsch, for example, in Badlands undoes a father's search for origins by having it both doubled and reversed by the daughter's subsequent search, which concludes with her renouncing his record and his rules. Or Aquin concludes Neige noire (1974; Hamlet's Twin, 1979) by affirming a lesbian love affair (lovers here portrayed as doing much better than the heterosexual partners in Aquin's earlier novels who generally managed to drive one or the other to murder or suicide).
But the main consequence of this writing in the feminine is a whole body of major works, only some of which I have previously noted, that give to Canadian fiction much of its force and effect. Angéline de Montbrun (1884; English translation, 1974) by Laure Conan (Marie-Louise- Félicité Angers), for example, tells of a young woman who, after the death of her father and a disfiguring facial injury, renounces her fiancé and immures herself in a convent where, in tortured diary entries, she voices her partly self-inflicted loss. It is a problematic fate that has been read differently by succeeding generations — most recently as 'the huis clos of the patriarchal world' — yet the novel remains as a classic of nineteenth-century Quebec fiction. And my choice for the great twentieth-century Quebec novel would be Anne Hébert's Kamouraska (1970; English translation, 1982), a historic tale of nineteenth-century Quebec marriage and murder both gone very much awry, and, like Angéline, another example of the Canadian proclivity for the gothic. I would also here -580- note that a number of Quebec women writers have envisioned fiction through the lens of French feminism (Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva) to produce experimental works that radically critique both patriarchal language and linear master narratives based on the epistemologies of the father. Thus Louky Bersianik's Le Piquenique sur l'Acropole: Cahiers d'Ancyl (1979) replaces Plato's Symposium with a more physical and feminist one and in the process situates the conscious murder of Iphigenia by her father, not Oedipus's unconscious killing of his father, as 'the story at the heart of Western culture,' and, on a more contemporary note, makes Lacan subject to 'Lacanadienne.' Or Jovette Marchessault, a radical lesbian of Native American descent, seeks, in novels such as La Mèredes herbes (1980; Mother of the Grass, 1989), to conjoin 'the ecstatic vision of the shaman to the heightened consciousness of the contemporary feminist,' thereby to establish a Native and matrilineal language and myth. Or Nicole Brossard's Le Désert Mauve (1987; Mauve Deser t, 1990), as a feminist text incorporating its own intertextuality, is a novel, a reading of that novel, and a translation of the novel. Like the desert in which it is set, the work, too, 'is indescribable' (try visualizing a file folder in the middle of the text — the reader simply must see for him/herself). But if this novel shows just how successfully experimental Canadian fiction, especially in its Québécois manifestations, can sometimes be, it also shows those experiments as thoroughly tied to tradition. The author of the first 'Mauve Desert' in Mauve Desert is Laure Angstelle; the
