translator of Angstelle's 'novel' is Maude Laures; both names obviously evoke Laure Conan whose Angéline de Montbrun has here been transposed to a starker and more vivid setting (a mauve desert rather than a brown mountain) and has been thus incorporated into a different text that especially dramatizes differences in the text.
Another feature of the contemporary Canadian novel is its cosmopolitan maturity. It can, as Mauve Desert demonstrates, confidently claim a place on the same stage as its American cousin instead of trying to pass off, say, a Winnipeg 'Love Story' as a New York one (indeed, with the lesbian love stories of Mauve Desert we have come a long way from boy meets girl in Winnipeg or New York). Or Thomas Kinsella's Shoeless Joe (1982), to take another example, has even been called 'a great [contemporary] American novel' for its -581- idyllic portrayal of the power of dreams and of baseball. If Canadians are finally competing again (for we do have that first entry) in the Great American Novel Sweepstakes, other likely candidates are Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985), with its vision of religious America run amok to produce the nightmare that has always haunted the dream of a new and perfect life in the new land, or Victor-Lévy Beaulieu's three-volume novel/biography Monsieur Melville (1978; On the Eve of Moby-Dick, When Moby-Dick Blows, and After Moby-Dick; or, The Reign of Poetry, 1984) in which Beaulieu as Melville pursues Melville as Moby-Dick. Moreover, and as Atwood's updating of The Scarlet Letter or Beaulieu's researching for Melville/ Moby-Dick each suggests, the Canadian novel also claims the right to rewrite and reread a whole range of other master texts. Findley's Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984), for example, reenvisions the biblical flood to counter the patriarchal narratives of Noah and of God, while Bersianik's L'Euguelionne (1976; English translation, 1981), as a French-Canadian feminist anti-Bible, totally subverts God's story of man, and Freud's and Lacan's accounts too. Or in Famous Last Words (1981) Findley has Ezra Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley write on a bare wall (a wall is all that is left to him) his account of what his fascist 'age demanded' — which is hardly authenticity, biblical (that writing on the wall) or otherwise: 'All I have written here,' Mauberley can finally claim, 'is true; except the lies.' Still more intricately, Aquin, in his last great novel Neige noire, redoes Hamlet as an attempt to make a snuff movie version of a television production of the play. In this Hamlet with a difference two Ophelias survive by rescripting their part and falling passionately in love with each other. Or — another recasting of Shakespeare — Leon Rooke's Shakespeare's Dog (1983) is a 'woof-woof and arf-arf damn you all' directed at Elizabethan England as well as a canine account of the Bard's beginnings. Still different workings of intertextuality are van Herk's Places Far from Ellesmere (1990), which conjoins setting and text, the work in hand and the work read in that work (Tolstoy's Anna Karenina) as all 'geografictions' and ultimately 'unpossessible' ('Oh Anna,' Places ends, freeing Tolstoy's protagonist from his death sentencing), or Kroetsch's Badlands (1975), as a search for source turns on an archaeological textual layering of virtually every quest narrative in Western literature, from Gilgamesh to-582- Atwood's Surfacing (1972). As all of the novels just noted attest, 'parody and irony' have 'become major forms of both formal and ideological critique in Canadian fiction' — so much so that Linda Hutcheon's Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction (her subtitle) is conducted almost entirely in terms of those tropes of retextualization.
Claims of prominence, however, sometimes still ring a little hollow, like the earlier political promise that the twentieth century would belong to Canada, and Canadian novels frequently display a certain anxiety of influence especially as they try to write the United States into its place as other, elsewhere, and different. Consider, in this context, Atwood's opening sentence in Surfacing noting 'the disease…spreading up from the south' or, later, the fact that the callous killers of the heron, taken first to be Americans, turn out to be Canadians, but are 'still Americans,' and 'what's in store for us [other Canadians], what we are turning into' (unless, like the narrator, we can turn into something more mythically elemental than the 'astronaut finish' of these 'Americans'). Similarly, in Susan Swan's Biggest Modern Woman, after the protagonist Anna Swan (who is based on an actual nineteenth-century Nova Scotia giantess) joins the circus and marries 'the Kentucky Giant,' Martin van Buren Bates, she soon finds that she has dwindled from a giantess into a wife and that this transformation especially mirrors Canadian/American contrasts. As she at one point writes to her mother, she must now play the 'wifely manipulator whose sole purpose is moderating the behavior of her husband,' and in so doing she is 'acting out America's relationship to the Canadas. Martin is the imperial ogre while I play the role of the genteel mate who believes that if everyone is wellmannered, we can inhabit a peaceable kingdom. That is the national dream of the Canadas, isn't it? A civilized garden where lions lie down with the doves.' The irony cuts both ways, undermining each dream by opposing them (note that the 'national dream of the Canadas' is presented as a question), but not erasing their differences. And her husband's different dream of a world of giants (he advocates a eugenics program to that end — the American dream of the world as 'me') is a dream of no difference, even though as a giant he is different. The paradoxes of differences proliferate to deny the sameness that would subsume Anna (Canada) into this marriage. Never-583- theless, Anna still married Martin even though there was a preferable and authentically Canadian male giant back home. Circuses have their necessities too.
At a time when the United States is flooding the globe and especially Canada with its pop-products, Canadian assertions of distinct difference and achieved postcolonial status are not totally convincing. The chronological implications of the term 'postcolonial' serve to place any history of cultural subservience safely in the past, yet rampant American neoimperialism hardly warrants such placing. This combination of postcolonial aspirations and more colonial apprehensions constitutes what I would term the 'paracolonial perplex' that characterizes much of the Canadian fiction asserting — and doubting — national identity, as evidenced, for example, by the two novels noted in the previous paragraph. I would also suggest that this same 'paracolonial perplex' partly explains a Canadian proclivity to set novels in Africa. There is a whole body of work — what W. H. New has called 'Africanadiana' — that both explores and distances colonialism, some of the best examples of which are Dave Godfrey's The New Ancestors (1972), Audrey Thomas's Blown Figures (1974), or the early works of Margaret Laurence. The West Indies has also provided a setting that serves much the same paracolonial project, as is seen in such novels as Atwood's Bodily Harm (1981), Kreiner's Heartlands (1984), and Bissoondath's A Casual Brutality.
Francophone and Anglophone; Eurocentric and Native American; oldest and newest; conservative and experimental; conservative and feminist; colonial, postcolonial, and paracolonial — this excess of adjectives does not bring the subject into clearer focus, and 'The Novel in Canada' necessarily remains itself a fiction, a narration of narrations produced in a place that is as much a narrative entity as a geographical or a historical one. Or perhaps not so much a narrative entity as a discordance of different narratives; as Robert Kroetsch has recently claimed, the 'very falling apart of our story is what holds our story — and us — together.' Yet the French stories are different enough from the English stories, the western from the eastern, the immigrants' from the Native peoples', that we regularly wonder (as with the recent failure of Canada's Meech Lake accord) if this very excess of stories might not eventually undo the country itself. Moreover, the governing questions of which 'Canada' to tell and what -584- novels to select for that telling constitute from the outset a kind of ouroboros trickster conjunction, a snake with its tale in its mouth, that tale being the recounting into existence of this particular snake. 'Our fictions make us real,' Kroetsch also asserts. One must pick one's fictions carefully, realizing that any picking is both an impossible and an enabling fiction.
Fortunately, Canadian fiction can sustain many pickings, many realities, and so exceeds any summary assessment such as the one here provided. As for all the authors and works I have overlooked, I can only acknowledge that their different stories are as valid as this account that leaves them out, which is to say that the master narrative of the Canadian novel might well be its resistance to master narratives, first to those imposed from Britain and the United States and then, following such training, to ones formulated in Canada as well. There is more to Canadian fiction than The Bush Garden or Butterfly on Rock or Patterns of Isolation or Sex and Violence or Survival or being Between Europe and America. The very divergences of these larger readings (and more could be provided, including A Due Sense of Differences) suggest, as Linda Hutcheon has recently observed in another context, that a postmodern 'valuing of difference…makes particular sense in Canada.' In this sense, the Canadian novel is especially Canadian in
