1. Guy Vanderhaeghe
Contemporary Canadian Biographies , December 1997
Author
Born April 5, 1951, in Esterhazy, Saskatchewan; son of Clarence Earl (a rodeo cowboy and construction worker) and Alma Beth (a schoolteacher) Vanderhaeghe; married Margaret Elizabeth Nagel (a painter), September 2, 1972. Education: University of Saskatchewan, B.A., 1972, M.A., 1975; University of Regina, B.Ed., 1978.
Addresses: c/o Writers' Union of Canada, 24 Ryerson Ave., Toronto, Ontario, M5T 2P3; phone: (416) 868-6914; fax: (416) 860-0826.
Career
Archivist, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, 1973-75; editor, Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, Regina, Saskatchewan, 1976-78; high school English and History teacher in Herbert, Saskatchewan, 1978-79; researcher, Access Consulting (health care consultants), Saskatoon, 1979-81; first book, Man Descending, a collection of short stories, published, 1982; writer-in-residence, Saskatoon Public Library, 1983-84; book reviewer; TheEnglishman's Boy, Governor General's Award winner, published, 1996.
Selected memberships: Saskatchewan Arts Board; Writers' Union of Canada; Saskatchewan Writers' Guild.
Selected awards: Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, 1982, for Man Descending; Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, 1987, for Man Descending; City of Toronto Book Award, 1990, for Homesick; Canadian Authors' Association Award for Drama, 1993, for I Had a Job I Liked. Once; Governor General's Award for Fiction, 1996, for TheEnglishman's Boy.
Sidelights
Over a fifteen year period, with Governor General's Awards for Fiction as bookends, Guy Vanderhaeghe has established a reputation as one of the country's best young writers based on his stories of prairie life. His straightforward style captures the individual conflicts and hardships of the prairie environment with a gritty realism, rewarding readers with a depth of meaning beyond the surface and internal turmoil of his characters.
Until The Englishman's Boy, noted Catherine Bush in the Globe and Mail, Vanderhaeghe was best known for fiction "firmly rooted in the anxieties of the contemporary everyday. With The Englishman's Boy he takes a bold step forward, masterfully expanding his vision. And while he casts his gaze back in time, this newest work, like all the best historical novels, resonates with contemporary urgency, roving by implication over our whole messy century."
Vanderhaeghe's career, like his fiction, reflects a sense of perseverance, of making a living in modest circumstances in a remote environment. He told Contemporary Authors back in 1985: "I have been described as a writer with a singularly bleak outlook. I reject that description. I regard myself as a writer who celebrates endurance--particularly the endurance of the ordinary person whose life is a series of small victories fashioned from small resources and whose hard-won realism is the result of life lived without the buffers that privilege brings." This approach also extends to his writing career. "I didn't belong to any writer's groups," Vanderhaeghe told the Canadian Press. "I had the feeling if I belonged to a group I would be deflected from what I wanted to do. What I was writing was unfashionable. It was considered traditional ... I just didn't want to be diverted from what I was doing."
Vanderhaeghe was born in the mining town of Esterhazy, Saskatchewan. His father was a rodeo cowboy and construction worker who was often away from home, and his mother was a schoolteacher. He lived with grandparents and aunts, a kind of extended family circumstance that recurs in his fiction. "I saw myself," he told Val Ross of the Globe and Mail, "as a child connected with family history, family relationships." He developed an interest in writing, but gave it up as a teenager. "I didn't want to be known as a brain," he told John Bemrose in Maclean's. "I wanted to be as unlike a brain as possible." He attended the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, and then worked as an archivist, researcher and high school teacher in the 1970s before beginning to write full time. While working on his M.A. in History, Vanderhaeghe was diagnosed with diabetes, which he described as a "wake-up call." Realizing that he might eventually be crippled by the disease, he became more devoted to writing. "Once I got started I couldn't stop," Vanderhaeghe told the Canadian Press. "It was an obsession."
During the period from 1978-82, Vanderhaeghe completed the stories collected in Man Descending (published in 1982) and The Trouble With Heroes (1983). Though the works received good reviews, and Man Descending won a Governor General's Award (which at the time did not translate automatically into increased sales as it does now), Vanderhaeghe continued to teach creative writing at a Saskatoon night school to help support himself and his wife, Margaret, a painter.
The stories in Man Descending reflect the volume's title, as characters try to cope with their shortcomings and delusions in the midst of failing relationships and hopes. W. P. Kinsella, reviewing the collection in Books in Canada, stated that "Vanderhaeghe demonstrates a great deal of poise and maturity as he explores men at various stages of life, through the eyes of narrators both very young and very old. There is also a wide diversity in tone and voice, while the moods of the stories range from manic to morose." David Carpenter, writing in Canadian Literature, agreed: "Our descent into these lives involves a remarkable process of discovery, one made possible by Vanderhaeghe's thorough grasp of his prairie people, radar ears for dialogue, and thorny, elegant prose. One breathes in the squalor, seizes at best a guarded hope which is close to despair."
Vanderhaeghe did not expect the book to win a major prize. He told Ben Rayne of the Ottawa Sun, "I think I was completely shell-shocked. It was a first book. I was at the time kind of an outsider in the literary world. I was sort of embarrassed by it."
Vanderhaeghe's second collection built upon many of the themes and conflicts central to his first book. The Trouble With Heroes contains seven stories that "deal with failed heroes of one sort or another," wrote Anthony Bukoski in Books in Canada. Along with most critics, Bukoski found the stories strong but not as accomplished as those in Man Descending. Among the most noted pieces in that first collection were two stories, the title story and "Sam, Soren, and Ed," both of which focus on Ed, the protagonist of Vanderhaeghe's third publication, and first novel, My Present Age. A self-indulgent loser, Ed is faced with the break-up of his marriage in the two short stories, wanting to do something to prevent it but expecting the worst, which reflects his dim view of life. Thenovel follows Ed's life after the break-up, as he continues to exhibit insights while failing to utilize such wisdom in his actions. "Vanderhaeghe has created a sad-sack loser whose wit and intelligence render him somehow worthy of complicity in his superb failure to measure up to society's demands," noted Douglas Barbour in Canadian Literature. "As his tale careens from slapstick comedy to unnerving angst, Ed holds our attention and concern."
Homesick (1989), Vanderhaeghe's second novel, is set in Connaught, a small Saskatchewan town, and concerns the relationship between an elderly widower, his daughter, and her twelve-year-old son. When the daughter returns home after an absence of more than 15 years, the sources of tension between the two prickly characters gradually surface. In his review in the Globe and Mail, William French noted that Homesick "is a novel of character, rather than a novel of ideas or of moral rectitude. The risk in this kind of fiction is that the characters won't be interesting enough to hold our attention, especially when far removed from the bright lights and easy temptations of the city. But with Vanderhaeghe we needn't worry; he has uncanny ability to bring characters to life with searing fidelity. We may not like them, although in this case they achieve a certain dignity in the end, but we certainly understand them. Homesick, then, is a powerful and moving novel." Things As They Are? (1992), his next collection of stories, continued to mine the vein of prairie life.
Meanwhile, the title story of Man Descending was adapted for television as part of Global's First Time Producers Series in 1992, and Vanderhaeghe wrote a play, I Had a Job I Liked. Once, which premiered in Saskatoon in 1991. Set in a small-town Saskatchewan office of the RCMP where a boy is being questioned about a crime, the play slowly develops as various characters related to the crime enter the scene and reveal their own personalities and motives. As in Vanderhaeghe's fiction, character portraits are carefully rendered and telling while literary and spiritual allusions (in this case, biblical references) enhance the dramatic impact of a recognizable and somewhat commonplace scene. Vanderhaeghe seemed to have settled into a style and range of themes and characters, as well as a modest reputation. Although he told Val Ross in the Globe and Mail, "Quite frankly, I'm basically unknown," and she noted that he said it happily. "I'm a true provincial." Furthermore, rather than settling completely into the tried and true literary mode--and mold--he seemed to have set for himself, Vanderhaeghe soon tested himself, venturing into two areas where he had abiding interests--history (a subject he had earned an M.A. in at university), and cinema (he has expressed a deep fondness for westerns.) The result, The Englishman's Boy, changed his status as a basically unknown "writer's writer."
The Englishman's Boy explores the theme of machismo in the Canadian West of the 1870s and Hollywood of the 1920s. Composed with painstaking research, the story is primarily set in Saskatchewan's Cypress Hills, where in 1873 a group of drifters, mostly Americans, murdered almost two dozen native people over a stolen horse. "The novel contains two intertwined stories which, late in the book, converge explosively," noted John Bemrose in Maclean's. "One, set in the Hollywood of the 1920s, focuses on Saskatchewan-born Harry Vincent, a writer of scenarios for the silent movies." The other narrative concerns a witness of the massacre, the title character, who once worked as a servant for a British tourist, and who later joins up with men collecting wolf pelts for bounty. The wolfers are pursuing Indians they accuse of being horse thiefs, culminating in the bloodbath at Cypress Hills.
"I started this book a long time ago," Vanderhaeghe told Suzette C. Chan of the Edmonton Sun. "At first it was going to be about a pre-Raphaelite painter in Europe who was looking for his brother in the West, but it was still going to be about Cypress Hills. Then the painter was (changed) to a set designer in Hollywood." He continued: "It seemed to me that the novel in part was about the indeterminacy of history. I wanted to be looking at the same thing from different points of view. (Multiple narratives) seemed to me the way to write the novel rather than in flashbacks."
The result was what many consider Vanderhaeghe's strongest work, and also one of the major works of the late twentieth century. For example, Bemrose called The Englishman's Boy "one of the finest historical novels ever written by a Canadian, an impossible-to-put-down adventure story that also packs some keen insights into the way civilization works--or fails to work--in that raw, lawless transition zone known as the frontier." Bemrose also reported that Vanderhaeghe reacted coolly to the suggestion that The Englishman's Boy will bring him wider fame, and maybe even fortune. "As I tell my writing students if that's what you're after, you're better off buying a lottery ticket." As for himself, continued Bemrose, Vanderhaeghe feels that he has been writing too long now to ever consider doing anything else. "I think I've got to the point of no return."
Selected writings
Man Descending (short stories), Macmillan of Canada, 1982.
The Trouble With Heroes (short stories), Borealis Press, 1983.
My Present Age (novel), Macmillan of Canada, 1984.
Cages (script), Beacon Films, 1985.
Homesick (novel), McClelland & Stewart, 1989.
Things as They Are? (short stories), McClelland & Stewart, 1992.
I Had a Job I Liked. Once (play), Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1992.
The Englishman's Boy (novel), McClelland & Stewart, 1996.
Contemporary Authors, vol. 113, Gale, 1985.
Canadian Literary Archives - Guy Vanderhaeghe, http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/rmherrin/121t/vander.htm
Periodicals
Books in Canada, August/September 1982; March 1984.
Calgary Herald, October 10, 1992.
Canadian Forum, September 1982.
Canadian Literature, Summer 1984; Summer 1985.
Canadian Press, December 10, 1983; November 12, 1996.
Canadian Theatre Review, vol. 77, 1983.
Edmonton Sun, November 3, 1996.
Globe and Mail, October 7, 1989; October 25, 1989; April 22, 1991; September 26, 1992; September 23, 1996; September 28, 1996.
Maclean's, September 23, 1996.
Ottawa Sun, November 14, 1996.
Toronto Star, February 5, 1984.
Born April 5, 1951, in Esterhazy, Saskatchewan; son of Clarence Earl (a rodeo cowboy and construction worker) and Alma Beth (a schoolteacher) Vanderhaeghe; married Margaret Elizabeth Nagel (a painter), September 2, 1972. Education: University of Saskatchewan, B.A., 1972, M.A., 1975; University of Regina, B.Ed., 1978.
Addresses: c/o Writers' Union of Canada, 24 Ryerson Ave., Toronto, Ontario, M5T 2P3; phone: (416) 868-6914; fax: (416) 860-0826.
Career
Archivist, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, 1973-75; editor, Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, Regina, Saskatchewan, 1976-78; high school English and History teacher in Herbert, Saskatchewan, 1978-79; researcher, Access Consulting (health care consultants), Saskatoon, 1979-81; first book, Man Descending, a collection of short stories, published, 1982; writer-in-residence, Saskatoon Public Library, 1983-84; book reviewer; TheEnglishman's Boy, Governor General's Award winner, published, 1996.
Selected memberships: Saskatchewan Arts Board; Writers' Union of Canada; Saskatchewan Writers' Guild.
Selected awards: Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, 1982, for Man Descending; Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, 1987, for Man Descending; City of Toronto Book Award, 1990, for Homesick; Canadian Authors' Association Award for Drama, 1993, for I Had a Job I Liked. Once; Governor General's Award for Fiction, 1996, for TheEnglishman's Boy.
Sidelights
Over a fifteen year period, with Governor General's Awards for Fiction as bookends, Guy Vanderhaeghe has established a reputation as one of the country's best young writers based on his stories of prairie life. His straightforward style captures the individual conflicts and hardships of the prairie environment with a gritty realism, rewarding readers with a depth of meaning beyond the surface and internal turmoil of his characters.
Until The Englishman's Boy, noted Catherine Bush in the Globe and Mail, Vanderhaeghe was best known for fiction "firmly rooted in the anxieties of the contemporary everyday. With The Englishman's Boy he takes a bold step forward, masterfully expanding his vision. And while he casts his gaze back in time, this newest work, like all the best historical novels, resonates with contemporary urgency, roving by implication over our whole messy century."
Vanderhaeghe's career, like his fiction, reflects a sense of perseverance, of making a living in modest circumstances in a remote environment. He told Contemporary Authors back in 1985: "I have been described as a writer with a singularly bleak outlook. I reject that description. I regard myself as a writer who celebrates endurance--particularly the endurance of the ordinary person whose life is a series of small victories fashioned from small resources and whose hard-won realism is the result of life lived without the buffers that privilege brings." This approach also extends to his writing career. "I didn't belong to any writer's groups," Vanderhaeghe told the Canadian Press. "I had the feeling if I belonged to a group I would be deflected from what I wanted to do. What I was writing was unfashionable. It was considered traditional ... I just didn't want to be diverted from what I was doing."
Vanderhaeghe was born in the mining town of Esterhazy, Saskatchewan. His father was a rodeo cowboy and construction worker who was often away from home, and his mother was a schoolteacher. He lived with grandparents and aunts, a kind of extended family circumstance that recurs in his fiction. "I saw myself," he told Val Ross of the Globe and Mail, "as a child connected with family history, family relationships." He developed an interest in writing, but gave it up as a teenager. "I didn't want to be known as a brain," he told John Bemrose in Maclean's. "I wanted to be as unlike a brain as possible." He attended the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, and then worked as an archivist, researcher and high school teacher in the 1970s before beginning to write full time. While working on his M.A. in History, Vanderhaeghe was diagnosed with diabetes, which he described as a "wake-up call." Realizing that he might eventually be crippled by the disease, he became more devoted to writing. "Once I got started I couldn't stop," Vanderhaeghe told the Canadian Press. "It was an obsession."
During the period from 1978-82, Vanderhaeghe completed the stories collected in Man Descending (published in 1982) and The Trouble With Heroes (1983). Though the works received good reviews, and Man Descending won a Governor General's Award (which at the time did not translate automatically into increased sales as it does now), Vanderhaeghe continued to teach creative writing at a Saskatoon night school to help support himself and his wife, Margaret, a painter.
The stories in Man Descending reflect the volume's title, as characters try to cope with their shortcomings and delusions in the midst of failing relationships and hopes. W. P. Kinsella, reviewing the collection in Books in Canada, stated that "Vanderhaeghe demonstrates a great deal of poise and maturity as he explores men at various stages of life, through the eyes of narrators both very young and very old. There is also a wide diversity in tone and voice, while the moods of the stories range from manic to morose." David Carpenter, writing in Canadian Literature, agreed: "Our descent into these lives involves a remarkable process of discovery, one made possible by Vanderhaeghe's thorough grasp of his prairie people, radar ears for dialogue, and thorny, elegant prose. One breathes in the squalor, seizes at best a guarded hope which is close to despair."
Vanderhaeghe did not expect the book to win a major prize. He told Ben Rayne of the Ottawa Sun, "I think I was completely shell-shocked. It was a first book. I was at the time kind of an outsider in the literary world. I was sort of embarrassed by it."
Vanderhaeghe's second collection built upon many of the themes and conflicts central to his first book. The Trouble With Heroes contains seven stories that "deal with failed heroes of one sort or another," wrote Anthony Bukoski in Books in Canada. Along with most critics, Bukoski found the stories strong but not as accomplished as those in Man Descending. Among the most noted pieces in that first collection were two stories, the title story and "Sam, Soren, and Ed," both of which focus on Ed, the protagonist of Vanderhaeghe's third publication, and first novel, My Present Age. A self-indulgent loser, Ed is faced with the break-up of his marriage in the two short stories, wanting to do something to prevent it but expecting the worst, which reflects his dim view of life. Thenovel follows Ed's life after the break-up, as he continues to exhibit insights while failing to utilize such wisdom in his actions. "Vanderhaeghe has created a sad-sack loser whose wit and intelligence render him somehow worthy of complicity in his superb failure to measure up to society's demands," noted Douglas Barbour in Canadian Literature. "As his tale careens from slapstick comedy to unnerving angst, Ed holds our attention and concern."
Homesick (1989), Vanderhaeghe's second novel, is set in Connaught, a small Saskatchewan town, and concerns the relationship between an elderly widower, his daughter, and her twelve-year-old son. When the daughter returns home after an absence of more than 15 years, the sources of tension between the two prickly characters gradually surface. In his review in the Globe and Mail, William French noted that Homesick "is a novel of character, rather than a novel of ideas or of moral rectitude. The risk in this kind of fiction is that the characters won't be interesting enough to hold our attention, especially when far removed from the bright lights and easy temptations of the city. But with Vanderhaeghe we needn't worry; he has uncanny ability to bring characters to life with searing fidelity. We may not like them, although in this case they achieve a certain dignity in the end, but we certainly understand them. Homesick, then, is a powerful and moving novel." Things As They Are? (1992), his next collection of stories, continued to mine the vein of prairie life.
Meanwhile, the title story of Man Descending was adapted for television as part of Global's First Time Producers Series in 1992, and Vanderhaeghe wrote a play, I Had a Job I Liked. Once, which premiered in Saskatoon in 1991. Set in a small-town Saskatchewan office of the RCMP where a boy is being questioned about a crime, the play slowly develops as various characters related to the crime enter the scene and reveal their own personalities and motives. As in Vanderhaeghe's fiction, character portraits are carefully rendered and telling while literary and spiritual allusions (in this case, biblical references) enhance the dramatic impact of a recognizable and somewhat commonplace scene. Vanderhaeghe seemed to have settled into a style and range of themes and characters, as well as a modest reputation. Although he told Val Ross in the Globe and Mail, "Quite frankly, I'm basically unknown," and she noted that he said it happily. "I'm a true provincial." Furthermore, rather than settling completely into the tried and true literary mode--and mold--he seemed to have set for himself, Vanderhaeghe soon tested himself, venturing into two areas where he had abiding interests--history (a subject he had earned an M.A. in at university), and cinema (he has expressed a deep fondness for westerns.) The result, The Englishman's Boy, changed his status as a basically unknown "writer's writer."
The Englishman's Boy explores the theme of machismo in the Canadian West of the 1870s and Hollywood of the 1920s. Composed with painstaking research, the story is primarily set in Saskatchewan's Cypress Hills, where in 1873 a group of drifters, mostly Americans, murdered almost two dozen native people over a stolen horse. "The novel contains two intertwined stories which, late in the book, converge explosively," noted John Bemrose in Maclean's. "One, set in the Hollywood of the 1920s, focuses on Saskatchewan-born Harry Vincent, a writer of scenarios for the silent movies." The other narrative concerns a witness of the massacre, the title character, who once worked as a servant for a British tourist, and who later joins up with men collecting wolf pelts for bounty. The wolfers are pursuing Indians they accuse of being horse thiefs, culminating in the bloodbath at Cypress Hills.
"I started this book a long time ago," Vanderhaeghe told Suzette C. Chan of the Edmonton Sun. "At first it was going to be about a pre-Raphaelite painter in Europe who was looking for his brother in the West, but it was still going to be about Cypress Hills. Then the painter was (changed) to a set designer in Hollywood." He continued: "It seemed to me that the novel in part was about the indeterminacy of history. I wanted to be looking at the same thing from different points of view. (Multiple narratives) seemed to me the way to write the novel rather than in flashbacks."
The result was what many consider Vanderhaeghe's strongest work, and also one of the major works of the late twentieth century. For example, Bemrose called The Englishman's Boy "one of the finest historical novels ever written by a Canadian, an impossible-to-put-down adventure story that also packs some keen insights into the way civilization works--or fails to work--in that raw, lawless transition zone known as the frontier." Bemrose also reported that Vanderhaeghe reacted coolly to the suggestion that The Englishman's Boy will bring him wider fame, and maybe even fortune. "As I tell my writing students if that's what you're after, you're better off buying a lottery ticket." As for himself, continued Bemrose, Vanderhaeghe feels that he has been writing too long now to ever consider doing anything else. "I think I've got to the point of no return."
Selected writings
Man Descending (short stories), Macmillan of Canada, 1982.
The Trouble With Heroes (short stories), Borealis Press, 1983.
My Present Age (novel), Macmillan of Canada, 1984.
Cages (script), Beacon Films, 1985.
Homesick (novel), McClelland & Stewart, 1989.
Things as They Are? (short stories), McClelland & Stewart, 1992.
I Had a Job I Liked. Once (play), Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1992.
The Englishman's Boy (novel), McClelland & Stewart, 1996.
Contemporary Authors, vol. 113, Gale, 1985.
Canadian Literary Archives - Guy Vanderhaeghe, http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/rmherrin/121t/vander.htm
Periodicals
Books in Canada, August/September 1982; March 1984.
Calgary Herald, October 10, 1992.
Canadian Forum, September 1982.
Canadian Literature, Summer 1984; Summer 1985.
Canadian Press, December 10, 1983; November 12, 1996.
Canadian Theatre Review, vol. 77, 1983.
Edmonton Sun, November 3, 1996.
Globe and Mail, October 7, 1989; October 25, 1989; April 22, 1991; September 26, 1992; September 23, 1996; September 28, 1996.
Maclean's, September 23, 1996.
Ottawa Sun, November 14, 1996.
Toronto Star, February 5, 1984.
Source Citation:
"Guy Vanderhaeghe." Contemporary Canadian Biographies. Gale, 1997. Gale Canada In Context. Web. 11 Oct. 2011.
2. Guy Vanderhaeghe
Contemporary Novelists , 2001
- Born: May 04, 1951 in Esterhazy, Saskatchewan, Canada
- Nationality: Canadian
- PublicationsNovels
- My Present Age. Toronto, Macmillan of Canada, 1984 ; Ticknor & Fields, 1985 .
- Homesick. Toronto, McClelland & Stewart, 1989 ; Ticknor & Fields, 1990 .
- The Englishman's Boy. New York, Picador USA, 1997 . Short Stories
- Sundogs: Stories from Saskatchewan (with others), edited by Robert Kroetsch. Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Thunder Creek Publishing Cooperative, 1980 .
- Best Canadian Short Stories (with others). Oberon Press, 1980 .
- Best American Short Stories (with others). 1982 .
- Man Descending. Toronto, Macmillan of Canada, 1982 ; New York, Ticknor & Fields, 1985 .
- The Trouble with Heroes. Ottawa, Borealis Press, 1983 .
- Things as They Are? Short Stories. Toronto, McClelland & Stewart, 1992 .
- Myths and Voices: Contemporary Canadian Fiction (with others), edited by David Lampe. Fredonia, New York, White Pine Press, 1993 . Plays
- I Had a Job I Liked, Once: A Play. Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Fifth House, 1992 . Other
- Aurora: New Canadian Writing (with others). New York, Doubleday, 1978 .
- Aurora: New Canadian Writing (with others). New York, Doubleday, 1979 .
- Aurora: New Canadian Writing (with others). New York, Doubleday, 1980 .
- Dancock's Dance. Winnipeg, Manitoba, Blizzard Publishers, 1996 .
Nationality: Canadian. Born: Esterhazy, Saskatchewan, 5 April 1951. Education: University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, B.A. 1972, M.A. 1975; University of Regina, B.Ed. 1978. Family: Married Margaret Elizabeth Nagel in 1972. Career: Archivist, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, 1973-75; Editor, Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, Regina, Saskatchewan, 1976-78; high school English and history teacher, Herbert, Saskatchewan, 1978-79; Researcher, Access Consulting (health care consultants), Saskatoon, 1979-81; writer, 1981--; writer-in-residence, Saskatoon Public Library, 1983-84. Lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.Awards: Governor General's award for English fiction, 1982, 1996. Agent: c/o Writers Union of Canada, 24 Ryerson Ave., Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5T 2P3.
Having established himself on the Canadian literary scene on the strengths of such story collections as Man Descending, for which he was awarded the Governor General's award in 1982, and The Trouble with Heroes, Guy Vanderhaeghe turned to the novel form in 1984 with My Present Age. Pivoting on the quixotic quest of Ed, a character from his earlier stories who sets off to find a wife who has abandoned him, this is a story that is equal parts journey to the past and exploration of the future. More importantly, Ed's sometimes comic (mis)adventures prove an opportunity for extended exploration of many of the themes and issues that Vanderhaeghe probes in the strongest of his shorter fictions: the complex influences of time and place on the lives of individuals and communities; questions of what constitutes a hero and an act of heroism in the postmodern world; the moral implications of a cultural tendency toward stultifying self-deceptions; and the resiliency of the human spirit and the ability of individuals to search out spiritual and emotional nourishment in even the bleakest of environments.
Similar questions and struggles are revisited in Homesick, Vanderhaeghe's second novel, as the widow Vera Monkman works toward reconciling herself with her own father and the prairie town in which she lives. With clear affiliations with the works of such antecedent prairie novelists as Margaret Laurence (the Manawaka books) and Sinclair Ross (notably As for Me and My House), it is a story that reveals a community torn between an intense, almost obsessive yearning for a sense of home and an equally powerful fear of the realities of the harsh geography in which they find themselves.
Although both novels were well received by critics and reviewers, it was Vanderhaeghe's third book, the richly textured The Englishman's Boy, that secured him a position in the upper ranks of Canadian novelists. Awarded the Governor General's award and nominated for the prestigious Giller prize, it is a carefully crafted narrative that weaves together two causally linked stories: one of a little known late nineteenth-century massacre of an encampment of Assiniboine by a group of white wolf hunters (based on an actual event in Canadian history), the other of a 1920s Hollywood mogul's determination to renarrate the details of the event in support of his megalomaniacal, and degradingly revisionist, goals. Connecting these two historical threads is Harry Vincent, a Canadian expatriate and frustrated writer hired by the mogul to find an infamous "Indian fighter," Shorty McAdoo, who might (or might not) hold the key to the many mysteries clouding the historical "truth" of the slaughter. Myopic and passive, Vincent proves the ideal witness to the increasingly sinister events that unfold in the novel; drawn deeper and deeper into the story of the Cypress Hills massacre, he proves a less than astute reader of the events that unfold around him. Developing slowly and with careful attention to subtle ironies and to the rhythms and nuances of language, The Englishman's Boy forces other readers (those of the novel proper) to confront questions of how they come to know the past, and how, via a traditional cultural commitment to such abstractions as historical truth and objectivity, each of us is to varying degrees complicit in the attitudes and policies that help sustain the machineries of exploitation and institutional repression serving the present.
Similar questions and struggles are revisited in Homesick, Vanderhaeghe's second novel, as the widow Vera Monkman works toward reconciling herself with her own father and the prairie town in which she lives. With clear affiliations with the works of such antecedent prairie novelists as Margaret Laurence (the Manawaka books) and Sinclair Ross (notably As for Me and My House), it is a story that reveals a community torn between an intense, almost obsessive yearning for a sense of home and an equally powerful fear of the realities of the harsh geography in which they find themselves.
Although both novels were well received by critics and reviewers, it was Vanderhaeghe's third book, the richly textured The Englishman's Boy, that secured him a position in the upper ranks of Canadian novelists. Awarded the Governor General's award and nominated for the prestigious Giller prize, it is a carefully crafted narrative that weaves together two causally linked stories: one of a little known late nineteenth-century massacre of an encampment of Assiniboine by a group of white wolf hunters (based on an actual event in Canadian history), the other of a 1920s Hollywood mogul's determination to renarrate the details of the event in support of his megalomaniacal, and degradingly revisionist, goals. Connecting these two historical threads is Harry Vincent, a Canadian expatriate and frustrated writer hired by the mogul to find an infamous "Indian fighter," Shorty McAdoo, who might (or might not) hold the key to the many mysteries clouding the historical "truth" of the slaughter. Myopic and passive, Vincent proves the ideal witness to the increasingly sinister events that unfold in the novel; drawn deeper and deeper into the story of the Cypress Hills massacre, he proves a less than astute reader of the events that unfold around him. Developing slowly and with careful attention to subtle ironies and to the rhythms and nuances of language, The Englishman's Boy forces other readers (those of the novel proper) to confront questions of how they come to know the past, and how, via a traditional cultural commitment to such abstractions as historical truth and objectivity, each of us is to varying degrees complicit in the attitudes and policies that help sustain the machineries of exploitation and institutional repression serving the present.
January 27, 2004: Vanderhaeghe was named a member of the Order of Canada. Source: The Globe and Mail, January 28, 2004.
Source Citation:
"Guy Vanderhaeghe." Contemporary Novelists. Gale, 2001. Gale Canada In Context. Web. 11 Oct. 2011.
3. Narrative geography in Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy
American Review of Canadian Studies , Winter 2001
As Susan Stanford Friedman has pointed out in her critical study aptly titled Mappings (1998), interpretations of narrative have often subtly privileged temporal over spatial analysis. (1) In part, this inclination has been fostered by the nature of narrative itself, which unfolds over time. It has also been supported by prevailing modes of narratology, which focus on the handling of time as a crucial (sometimes the crucial) variable in narrative structure. Following Gerard Genette, James Phelan has emphasized "progression" as the fundamental characteristic of narrative, which "must move, in both its telling and its reception, through time" (Phelan 1989, 15). Psychoanalytic approaches to literature, as well, have privileged temporal development. Peter Brooks has argued that plot is the "principal organizing force" of the meanings we derive from narrative, and that plot "develops its propositions only through temporal sequence and progression" (Brooks 1984, xi). Indeed, analysis of character, generally, tends to be temporally organized, tracing a pattern of development over time.
Recent studies of narrative, however, have begun to attend more fully to spatial constructs and to adopt critical vocabulary based on spatial models. In a world reconfigured by multiple migration, globalization, travel, and new modes of communication, readers have begun to reexamine the extent to which space and movement configure lives and stories. This renewed attention to progression in space affects Western mindscapes in two ways. First, it expands and multiplies concepts of space, altering temporal concepts as a consequence. Material space--geographical or architectural space--which has always been crucial to the metanarratives of the West, is complicated by new conceptions of spatial relationships, encompassing, for example, cultural space, cyberspace, and virtual reality. On the other hand, the linearity of temporal concepts like past and present is challenged as these constructs are collapsed into coexisting elements of the "space" of consciousness. Second, the contemporary preoccupation with space ha s reconfigured the concept of "location" to include cultural as well as physical axes, with such elements of identity as class, gender, race, ethnicity, and national origin conceived as "positions" in a spatial continuum. As Friedman points out, "Space often functions as a trope for cultural location--for identity and knowledge as locationally as well as historically produced" (137).
Friedman calls for readings that trace a text's "narrative geography." Following James Clifford, she argues for "knowledge produced through an itinerary, always marked by a 'way in,' a history of location and location of histories" (Clifford 1992, 105; Friedman 114). A "geographical, as opposed to developmental, rhetoric of identity" recognizes that who we are depends upon our place in a particular constellation of evolving ecologies (Friedman 143). Developing Clifford's play on alternative meanings of the syllable /roots/, theorists in both literary studies and anthropology have advocated "a dialogic movement back and forth between roots and routes"--that is, between rootedness and passage (Friedman 152). "Roots and routes are, in other words, two sides of the same coin: roots [in the botanical sense], signifying identity based on stable cores and continuities; routes [in the sense of a road or a course of passage], suggesting identity based on travel, change, and disruption" (Friedman 153).
Analysis of "narrative geography" has developed in the context of both changing experiences of space and changing uses of space as metaphor. In a critique of established ways of thinking about textual form, Andrew Gibson has argued against conceptions of narrative space as unitary or singular, suggesting instead that narrative discourse configures movement through multiple spaces at once (1996, 16-17). Gibson cautions that "geometric spatial models and ideas of origin, fixity and essence cannot be separated" (21). Similarly, changing notions of subjectivity challenge assumptions of essence and "points" of origin. We have been accustomed to think of subjects--real and imagined--as constructed over time but built around a point of origin, often a national identity of origin. But if consciousness is conceived as a fluid space, whose contours and organization are inflected by the ecologies in which it participates, then essence and its association with origin are always in question, whether articulated in terms o f an East/West binary or in terms of national cultures. Starting points are not as telling as itineraries; what is crucial to identity and the derivation of meaning is not where one started but where one has been.
Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy is a novel of the North American West in which attention to material, cultural, and narrative space is particularly telling. It is also a novel in which temporality is so clearly foregrounded that it may overshadow other narrative and interpretive strategies. The novel unfolds by moving back and forth among nested stories set in different time periods. At the heart of the text is an account of the 1873 Cypress Hills massacre (an actual event in the history of the Canadian West), delivered fifty years after the fact by Shorty McAdoo, a member of the marauding party. Shorty, an old man at the time of his telling, is in Hollywood maintaining himself meagerly as a stuntman and extra on western films. The principal narrator of the novel, however, is Harry Vincent, a Canadian living in Saskatoon, where he operates a movie theatre. In 1953, Harry Vincent writes the story of his effort in 1923 to create a film script of Shorty McAdoo's narrative of the Cypress Hills massacre, a n event that occurred in 1873. It is only after a lapse of thirty years that Harry is able to write about his sojourn in Hollywood, where he was working as a title writer for silent films when he was hired by producer Damon lra Chance to interview McAdoo and compose a film script based on his story. Thus the novel encompasses three time frames, spanning nearly a century, and explicitly problemarizes the recounting of historical events. The question of how we know the past, which can only come to us mediated by character and circumstance, is one of the novel's central themes, signaled by an initial epigraph from Canadian historian Donald Creighton: "History is the record of an encounter between character and circumstance... the encounter between character and circumstance is essentially a story.
But in addition to these specifically temporal elements, the noveldevelops other themes in tropes of border crossing, models of periphery and center, and the counterpoint of surface and depth. These spatial constructs are not entirely distinct-the implications of border crossing, for example, intersecting concepts of periphery and center. Border crossings, both geographical and cultural, are inscribed throughout the novel. Chief among them is the physical crossing of the international boundary between the United States and Canada. Three sets of characters cross the border: the Assiniboine, Shorty McAdoo and the wolfers, and Harry Vincent and his mother. In the narrative frame that bookends the stories of Harry and Shorty, two Assiniboine-Fine Man and Broken Horn-cross the border and capture horses belonging to a rag-tag band of wolf trappers. Although the political boundary is an invention of EuroAmericans that is not meaningful for the Assiniboine, the novel's first chapter ends with the sentence: "The stre am of horses flowed north to Canada" (4). While the international border may have little significance for the Native characters themselves, it is a matter of note for the unnamed omniscient narrator of this chapter. The passage deposits two spatial concepts that structure the narrative to follow: the significance of being north or south of the United States/Canadian border, and the metaphor of flowing water, which recurs in different contexts and culminates in a metafictional comment on the nature of representation itself.
The bulk of the novel, in which Harry tells how he acquired Shorty's story, is organized around real and remembered crossings of the border: Shorty loops north of the border with the wolfers in 1873 and south again the following year, then retraces his route in memory fifty years later in 1923. Harry comes south from Canada in 1919 and returns in 1923, then remembers and records his experiences in 1953. For Shorty and Harry, who are constructed as doubles in many important respects, crossing the border is always a charged event, although its implications are unstable. For both the Canadian and the American, the unfamiliar side of the border is a site of moral vulnerability. But for each, Canada is ultimately portrayed as a bittersweet place of refuge after betrayal and loss.
For Shorty McAdoo, the Englishman's Boy of the novel's title, crossing into Canada with a gang of marauders represents the crossing of a moral boundary. It marks a fall that culminates in the transgression that blights his life. What we know of Shorty's experience in the United States before this passage into Canada is rife with violence and confrontations with oppressive authority. But until he crosses the border, he feels himself justified in conscience. As a youth, when he has had enough of his brother's abuse, Shorty pounds him into the dust with the blade of a shovel. He frees himself from indentured labor by threatening to kill the farmer to whom he had been "sold" by the county. When he needs a room for the dying Englishman, he threatens the reluctant hotel proprietor with arson. Later, when the hotel man attempts to appropriate gear that Shorty regards as rightly his own, he defends himself with a knife, nearly killing his antagonist. Having joined the wolfers, he reconciles himself to the abandonment of the hapless Hank. But there is no justification for the rape and murder of a young Native woman-not even the "necessity" of self-preservation during armed conflict. Crossing the border is thus charged with moral and psychological significance. The moral implications of border crossing are reinforced when, fifty years later, Shorty crosses the border in memory to tell the story. The telling is itself a moral transgression, in which-against his better instincts-Shorty betrays the young Native victim again for money and canned peaches, recognizing all the while that what he and Harry Vincent are doing is "fattening on the dead" (203).
Harry comes south from Canada "in the winter of 1919, hungry for a future" (34). But in what even he knows is a fall, he seeks his future in Hollywood, a city that functions in literature and in life as a cultural metaphor for aesthetic compromise and moral risk. Harry is seduced by Damon Ira Chance, and he seduces Shorty in turn. Chance, who seldom tells the truth, is nonetheless accurate when he insists on Harry's complicity:
"You want to believe you obeyed your conscience. I find that sheer hypocrisy. Because all along you had no qualms about lying to McAdoo, misleading him. Why? I'll tell you why, Harry. Because you have a sick mother in an expensive asylum and I was paying you a lot of money to mislead him."
"And then the way you played McAdoo, discreetly, delicately, so he hardly realized the hook was in his mouth-well, Fitz couldn't have done it and neither could I."
"You may wash your hands of me, Harry, but not your part in my picture. That is for the record." (295-298)
The moral implications of Harry's retelling, in 1953, are less clear. There remains in Harry's account of himself an uneasy balance between self-justification and the clarity of his acknowledgment that "the apocalypse has its attractions" (325). Having withdrawn for thirty years, Harry recognizes one evening, as he crosses the black iron bridge over the South Saskatchewan River, that "the past cannot be so easily dismissed" (326).
If, in moral terms, border crossings are dangerous, it is also true that for both Harry and Shorty, twentieth-century Canada is portrayed as a place of stasis, refuge, and truth, while the United States is aligned with change, vulnerability, and falsehood. Canada is the place where Shorty defines himself, where he is forced to confront his own guilt and despair. As a young man, during the gang rape of the Native girl, Shorty asserts to the other wolfers, "I ain't a hog" (305). But subsequently, in shame and disgust, he wanders alone in the Canadian wilderness, surviving by discovering and imitating his creature spirit, a pig rooting the mud. Fifty years later, after he sells his story in Hollywood, Shorty wants to escape to Canada again, taking with him the child-like Wylie. "'I'm taking him to Canada with me. It's his best chance. I been to Canada,' [McAdoo] says. His voice changes, as if he is speaking out of a cavern. A cavern of regret, or sorrow. 'I went Indian up in Canada"' (151). Shorty compares his s elfexile in the Canadian wilderness after the Cypress Hills massacre with a Native American vision quest: "Them old-timey, genuine Indians used to go off solitary in the wilderness so's to find their creature spirit.... That's where they learned it, in the wilderness.... Hardship and the country taught them it" (157).
In Hollywood, Harry and Shorty both have opportunities to become someone else, to assume a new identities. When Rachel Gold asks Harry to define the American spirit, he responds with the word "expansive": "And everything the word implies. Energy, optimism, confidence. A quicksilver quality" (180). In Hollywood, Harry can be a player, with all of the possibilities and deceptions the term implies. He is moving up, making money, going to parties, doing work that Chance has convinced him really matters, intellectually and spiritually. Yet after the script he writes is twisted to fit Chance's political agenda, after Chance is murdered and Shorty disappears, Harry retreats to Canada, disillusioned and ashamed. He sums up the next thirty years of an uneventful life in Saskatchewan in a few sentences: he manages a movie theatre; he lives with his mother until she dies; he never marries.
The implications of living on one side or the other of the international border are aligned with the rhetoric of periphery and center threaded throughout the novel. In Shorty, marginality is aligned with class. Shorty emerges from, and never finally escapes, the underclass. As a child, he lives a hardscrabble existence, unschooled and uncared for, until he becomes the Englishman's boy--a position of servitude one step up from slavery and one step down from the yeoman class of farmers, trappers, drivers to which he aspires. The boy's motivations for joining and remaining with the wolfers form a tangled skein, twisting together desperation, convenience, a narrow adherence to what he perceives as law (if he rides away from the marauders, he will be a horse thief), and a misplaced identification with the outlaw Hardwick, who--like Damon Ira Chance, many years later--preaches a doctrine of necessity.
Among the wolfers, the boy is always linked with marginal members of the group, those who for one reason or another do not belong. He acquiesces in the abandonment of Hank because he does not wish to be like him, too weak to keep up with the others, too vulnerable to survive alone. In the course of the journey into the Cypress Hills, he associates particularly with two members of the group, both Canadian, both better men than the ruffians they are riding with. In each case, class distinctions are foregrounded; the Canadians are better educated, more reflective, more chastened by conscience than the Americans with whom they have associated themselves. In the estimation of the Englishman's boy, Scotty--a Scotsman on a thoroughbred who seeks out the boy because of his Harris tweed coat--does not "seem to belong with this bunch, seemed not aware of the company he was keeping. He had the Englishman's way of talking. Gentleman's airs. Didn't care to blaspheme. Kept himself spruce and neat.... writing in a little bo ok after he finished eating, just how theEnglishman did" (73-74). Long before the murders at Cypress Hills, Scotty is traumatized by the brutality and blood lust exhibited by the wolfers: At the carnage of buffalo, as the other men rip into raw meat and offal, "the Scotchman sits alone on the grass, looking past the bloody banquet. Like a bystander in shock at a train wreck. Refusing to see" (118). After the Scotsman's deterioration, the boy pairs with Grace, a Canadian who does see and who knows that he cannot be with the group and not of them: "I was born in old Ontario," he said. "My mother had a piano in the parlour. We had books. One of them had a picture in it of a centaur. [...] I've been knocking around this country ten years--it changes a man. But I'm not all the way there yet. I'm not Tom Hardwick. I'm betwixt and between--half civilized, half uncivilized. A centaur" (191).
The Canadian members of the party and the Englishman's boyare shown to be complicit in the raid that leads to the Cypress Hills massacre, but peripheral to the evil at its center. The novel's intersecting narratives circle around and around the revelation of what actually happens to the Native girl. In the rape scene, the boy is unable to challenge Hardwick directly but tries to save the young woman from further torment by claiming marginal status for himself--by positioning himself as one who would taint the others:
"Look at me. [...] Don't you recognize me? [...] A curse." He pointed to the corpse on the floor. "Ask Grace. Ask my dead Englishman. Farmer Hank.... You know me, don't you, Scotchman? The Scotchman knows there ain't no bad luck blacker than the seed the Devil cursed. [...] Who did you think I am? Nobody asked my name. I'll tell you who I am. I'm what the black belly of the whale couldn't abide. I'm your Jonah." (305-306)
In the glimpses we have of Shorty's later life, his underclass status persists, and he continues to claim his marginality. He is a wanderer, a troublemaker, an "extra" in the social hierarchy as well as in the professional hierarchy of the film world. And after he sells his story to Chance, his planned retreat to Canada is, from the producer's point of view, an acceptable solution to the embarrassment of his presence and his potential to contradict the altered tale Chance means to tell. Chance comments to Harry, "For our purposes, Shorty McAdoo in Canada is as good as dead" (208).
Similarly, Harry Vincent is doubly marginalized--marginalized as an individual and marginalized as a Canadian. And like Shorty's, his is a marginality that he at first resents, but ultimately claims. Harry recounts that even as a child in Canada, his physical handicap--a limp--relegated him to the periphery:
I hated those female teachers whose faces went sweetly vacuous and temporizingly benign when they turned to me. Although they didn't mean them to, those looks thrust me on the outside. Outside became a state of mind. Maybe that's what Chance's intuition detected in me, that, and a sense of grievance. Because of Chance, for the first time in my life I felt myself gratefully moving to the centre of something important, admitted to an inner circle. (33)
Harry's resentment at being on the margins is set against his reluctance to be in the wrong, to be implicated, to be responsible for the moral chaos at the center of the Hollywood film world. It is not only Chance, who is never honest, who accuses him of hypocrisy, but also Rachel, who is never less than honest: "I am afraid for you, Harry, because you don't know what you want and you're weak. You lack the courage to take responsibility for your intelligence. You actually prefer writing title cards rather than scripts because then you're not responsible for the end result" (179). Rachel's rhetoric of titles rather than scripts, of labeling rather than composing the story, is acknowledged and made more explicit by Harry, who casts Canadians metaphorically as watchers on a riverbank, lured by and fearful of the pull of the current: "[W]hen I listen to Chance, maybe I understand that my memory is the truest picture of my country, bystanders huddled on a riverbank, cheering as the world sweeps by. In our hearts w e preferred the riverbank, preferred to be spectators, preferred to live our little moment of excitement and then forget it" (181-182). Harry's return to Saskatoon after the debacle of his participation in Chance's film is both an assertion of conscience and a withdrawal from the possibility of constructive action. For thirty years, he manages a movie theatre--not composing stories, but watching them. His experience of the world is always mediated; evildoers--Hitler, Mussolini, Joseph McCarthy--are images, "phantoms and spectres" sliding across his screen. He is safe at the periphery, on the bank, living beside the river.
Nonetheless, the novel also destabilizes the model of margin and center in important ways. It is common in fiction to make central to the story figures who represent the marginalized and the obscure. Shorty McAdoo, who is powerless and peripheral to the historical processes in which he participates, is made central in the narrative geography of this text-as is the young Native woman whose fate is the absence around which the novelspirals. But The Englishman's Boy also locates its own story in relationship to shifting metanarratives. In the evolving narratives of North American history, the Cypress Hills Massacre is for Americans an untold story, and for Canadians a once-told tale about American outlaws invading peaceful territory, which becomes a paragraph in the story of the North West Mounted Police, which is now a chapter in a larger narrative about the appropriation of the western territories. When members of Parliament denounce "American cutthroats, thieves, and renegades," the story is part of a politi cal narrative in which Canada is defined and distinguished from the United States. As a footnote to the story of the North West Mounted Police, the Cypress Hills Massacre becomes part of a heroic myth. When that myth is reconfigured as "a long, red-jacketed march into a vast territory, establishing claim to it. A mythic act of possession" (326), it becomes part of a contemporary metanarrative that understands "settlement" as invasion. The meaning that survives the participants, in other words, arises from the ways in which the story is contextualized-or "located."
Similarly, Chance, whom Harry initially locates at the center of his professional world and whom he sees as the agent who can bring him from the margin to the center, is erased from the larger social, political, and aesthetic narratives in which he seemed to play a part:
I can offer no judgement of Chance's picture Besieged because I never saw it. Not many people did. It got pushed into oblivion; Chance's murder became bigger than the picture itself. As so often happens in Hollywood, scandal became the story, obscuring everything else. The man who wanted to be another D.W. Griffith, a visionary filmmaker, is remembered today only as the man who got killed at a premiere. A small footnote. (326)
These shifting reconfigurations of individual subjects and their stories are conveyed in the image of the river, woven throughout the novelbut particularly prominent at the beginning and the end of Harry's narration. This image focuses the third element of spatial structure in thenovel: the counterpoint of surface and depth. In this novel, the opposition of surface and depth is based not on an opposition of falsehood and truth, but rather on the distinction between facts and meaning. Facts are details of the surface; they can be counted, measured, mapped. Meanings, on the other hand, lie beyond fact; they are currents beneath the surface, unpredictable, always in play.
Facts are not, in themselves, telling. Chance has a "mania for authenticity; like his idol, Griffith, he demands historical accuracy in every detail" (223). He intends to alter completely the meaning of Shorty's story, yet he wants Native Americans for Indian parts, correct costumes, a real herd of buffalo, an authentic adobe fort. He knows that accuracy of the surface can be a kind of seduction:
"Facts are of the utmost importance, Harry. If I can convince the audience the details are impeccably correct, who will dispute the interpretation? The truth of small things leads to confidence in the truth of large things. [...] Details are how most people read the world, the simple letters of their idiotic alphabet. They spell crude and literal meanings such as 'clothes make the man.' Most people don't have what you and I do, Harry."
"What's that?"
"The gift to see beyond a flat cap, or beyond small facts." (230-231)
What lies beyond is represented most clearly in the river. Thirty years after his sojourn in Hollywood, Harry observes: "Living beside the river has taught me something about change. Paved white with snow and ice in winter, slack and brown in summer, the river is never the same" (325). Slack and brown or cold and black, the surface conceals the moiling, tumbling chaos revealed only in moments of crisis. Before the ice goes out, Harry notes, a stranger to the river would have no idea which way it ran. It is "the movement of the knotted ice, of the swirling debris, [that] makes it plain" (5). While the disruption of the river, the disorder of its breakup, reveal its direction, that tumultuous movement cannot be mapped or scripted. "[L]ooking at the river," Harry writes, "I remind myself the map of the river is not the river itself. That hidden in it are deep, mysterious, submerged, and unpredictable currents" (326).
Why Harry writes after a thirty-year silence is never clear. The impulse seems to be associated with the spring break-up of ice, "the frozen jigsaw pieces bumping sluggishly downstream, the cold, black water steaming between them" (5). Yet Harry cannot order his jigsaw pieces. He doesn't know what happened to Shorty. He has long since relinquished his picture of Rachel to the river: "During one of my walks by the river I dropped it into the water. I have no more idea where Rachel Gold ended up than I do where that photograph did. Both moved out of view" (325). In writing his story, however, he does metaphorically map the river, and if the map is not the river itself, it traces the landscape through which the river runs. Harry closes his narrative with an image of ambivalence and perhaps regret, a spatial metaphor of his own identity: "I cross the black iron bridge, my limp a little worse each year, the water rushing underneath me in the darkness, pulling for the horizon" (326).
NOTE
(1.) As her subtitle--"Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter"--suggests, Friedman's objective is to advance feminist theory by calling for a self-consciously locational form of feminist critical practice. However, much of this valuable book is devoted to analyzing the centrality of space to postmodern concepts of identity: "a discourse of spatialized identities constantly on the move" (19).
REFERENCES
Brooks, Peter. 1984. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Vintage.
Clifford, James. 1992. "Traveling Cultures." In. Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Crossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler. London: Routledge. 96-116. (Republished in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.)
Friedman, Susan Stanford. 1998. Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Genette, Gerard. 1980. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. 1972. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Gibson, Andrew. 1996. Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Phelan, James. 1989. Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Vanderhaeghe, Guy. 1998. The Englishman's Boy. 1996. New York: Picador.
PATRICIA LINTON is Associate Professor of English at the University of Alaska Anchorage, where she teaches twentieth-century literature and film. She has published articles on contemporary fiction in Modern Fiction Studies, MELUS, and Studies in American Indian Literatures.
Recent studies of narrative, however, have begun to attend more fully to spatial constructs and to adopt critical vocabulary based on spatial models. In a world reconfigured by multiple migration, globalization, travel, and new modes of communication, readers have begun to reexamine the extent to which space and movement configure lives and stories. This renewed attention to progression in space affects Western mindscapes in two ways. First, it expands and multiplies concepts of space, altering temporal concepts as a consequence. Material space--geographical or architectural space--which has always been crucial to the metanarratives of the West, is complicated by new conceptions of spatial relationships, encompassing, for example, cultural space, cyberspace, and virtual reality. On the other hand, the linearity of temporal concepts like past and present is challenged as these constructs are collapsed into coexisting elements of the "space" of consciousness. Second, the contemporary preoccupation with space ha s reconfigured the concept of "location" to include cultural as well as physical axes, with such elements of identity as class, gender, race, ethnicity, and national origin conceived as "positions" in a spatial continuum. As Friedman points out, "Space often functions as a trope for cultural location--for identity and knowledge as locationally as well as historically produced" (137).
Friedman calls for readings that trace a text's "narrative geography." Following James Clifford, she argues for "knowledge produced through an itinerary, always marked by a 'way in,' a history of location and location of histories" (Clifford 1992, 105; Friedman 114). A "geographical, as opposed to developmental, rhetoric of identity" recognizes that who we are depends upon our place in a particular constellation of evolving ecologies (Friedman 143). Developing Clifford's play on alternative meanings of the syllable /roots/, theorists in both literary studies and anthropology have advocated "a dialogic movement back and forth between roots and routes"--that is, between rootedness and passage (Friedman 152). "Roots and routes are, in other words, two sides of the same coin: roots [in the botanical sense], signifying identity based on stable cores and continuities; routes [in the sense of a road or a course of passage], suggesting identity based on travel, change, and disruption" (Friedman 153).
Analysis of "narrative geography" has developed in the context of both changing experiences of space and changing uses of space as metaphor. In a critique of established ways of thinking about textual form, Andrew Gibson has argued against conceptions of narrative space as unitary or singular, suggesting instead that narrative discourse configures movement through multiple spaces at once (1996, 16-17). Gibson cautions that "geometric spatial models and ideas of origin, fixity and essence cannot be separated" (21). Similarly, changing notions of subjectivity challenge assumptions of essence and "points" of origin. We have been accustomed to think of subjects--real and imagined--as constructed over time but built around a point of origin, often a national identity of origin. But if consciousness is conceived as a fluid space, whose contours and organization are inflected by the ecologies in which it participates, then essence and its association with origin are always in question, whether articulated in terms o f an East/West binary or in terms of national cultures. Starting points are not as telling as itineraries; what is crucial to identity and the derivation of meaning is not where one started but where one has been.
Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy is a novel of the North American West in which attention to material, cultural, and narrative space is particularly telling. It is also a novel in which temporality is so clearly foregrounded that it may overshadow other narrative and interpretive strategies. The novel unfolds by moving back and forth among nested stories set in different time periods. At the heart of the text is an account of the 1873 Cypress Hills massacre (an actual event in the history of the Canadian West), delivered fifty years after the fact by Shorty McAdoo, a member of the marauding party. Shorty, an old man at the time of his telling, is in Hollywood maintaining himself meagerly as a stuntman and extra on western films. The principal narrator of the novel, however, is Harry Vincent, a Canadian living in Saskatoon, where he operates a movie theatre. In 1953, Harry Vincent writes the story of his effort in 1923 to create a film script of Shorty McAdoo's narrative of the Cypress Hills massacre, a n event that occurred in 1873. It is only after a lapse of thirty years that Harry is able to write about his sojourn in Hollywood, where he was working as a title writer for silent films when he was hired by producer Damon lra Chance to interview McAdoo and compose a film script based on his story. Thus the novel encompasses three time frames, spanning nearly a century, and explicitly problemarizes the recounting of historical events. The question of how we know the past, which can only come to us mediated by character and circumstance, is one of the novel's central themes, signaled by an initial epigraph from Canadian historian Donald Creighton: "History is the record of an encounter between character and circumstance... the encounter between character and circumstance is essentially a story.
But in addition to these specifically temporal elements, the noveldevelops other themes in tropes of border crossing, models of periphery and center, and the counterpoint of surface and depth. These spatial constructs are not entirely distinct-the implications of border crossing, for example, intersecting concepts of periphery and center. Border crossings, both geographical and cultural, are inscribed throughout the novel. Chief among them is the physical crossing of the international boundary between the United States and Canada. Three sets of characters cross the border: the Assiniboine, Shorty McAdoo and the wolfers, and Harry Vincent and his mother. In the narrative frame that bookends the stories of Harry and Shorty, two Assiniboine-Fine Man and Broken Horn-cross the border and capture horses belonging to a rag-tag band of wolf trappers. Although the political boundary is an invention of EuroAmericans that is not meaningful for the Assiniboine, the novel's first chapter ends with the sentence: "The stre am of horses flowed north to Canada" (4). While the international border may have little significance for the Native characters themselves, it is a matter of note for the unnamed omniscient narrator of this chapter. The passage deposits two spatial concepts that structure the narrative to follow: the significance of being north or south of the United States/Canadian border, and the metaphor of flowing water, which recurs in different contexts and culminates in a metafictional comment on the nature of representation itself.
The bulk of the novel, in which Harry tells how he acquired Shorty's story, is organized around real and remembered crossings of the border: Shorty loops north of the border with the wolfers in 1873 and south again the following year, then retraces his route in memory fifty years later in 1923. Harry comes south from Canada in 1919 and returns in 1923, then remembers and records his experiences in 1953. For Shorty and Harry, who are constructed as doubles in many important respects, crossing the border is always a charged event, although its implications are unstable. For both the Canadian and the American, the unfamiliar side of the border is a site of moral vulnerability. But for each, Canada is ultimately portrayed as a bittersweet place of refuge after betrayal and loss.
For Shorty McAdoo, the Englishman's Boy of the novel's title, crossing into Canada with a gang of marauders represents the crossing of a moral boundary. It marks a fall that culminates in the transgression that blights his life. What we know of Shorty's experience in the United States before this passage into Canada is rife with violence and confrontations with oppressive authority. But until he crosses the border, he feels himself justified in conscience. As a youth, when he has had enough of his brother's abuse, Shorty pounds him into the dust with the blade of a shovel. He frees himself from indentured labor by threatening to kill the farmer to whom he had been "sold" by the county. When he needs a room for the dying Englishman, he threatens the reluctant hotel proprietor with arson. Later, when the hotel man attempts to appropriate gear that Shorty regards as rightly his own, he defends himself with a knife, nearly killing his antagonist. Having joined the wolfers, he reconciles himself to the abandonment of the hapless Hank. But there is no justification for the rape and murder of a young Native woman-not even the "necessity" of self-preservation during armed conflict. Crossing the border is thus charged with moral and psychological significance. The moral implications of border crossing are reinforced when, fifty years later, Shorty crosses the border in memory to tell the story. The telling is itself a moral transgression, in which-against his better instincts-Shorty betrays the young Native victim again for money and canned peaches, recognizing all the while that what he and Harry Vincent are doing is "fattening on the dead" (203).
Harry comes south from Canada "in the winter of 1919, hungry for a future" (34). But in what even he knows is a fall, he seeks his future in Hollywood, a city that functions in literature and in life as a cultural metaphor for aesthetic compromise and moral risk. Harry is seduced by Damon Ira Chance, and he seduces Shorty in turn. Chance, who seldom tells the truth, is nonetheless accurate when he insists on Harry's complicity:
"You want to believe you obeyed your conscience. I find that sheer hypocrisy. Because all along you had no qualms about lying to McAdoo, misleading him. Why? I'll tell you why, Harry. Because you have a sick mother in an expensive asylum and I was paying you a lot of money to mislead him."
"And then the way you played McAdoo, discreetly, delicately, so he hardly realized the hook was in his mouth-well, Fitz couldn't have done it and neither could I."
"You may wash your hands of me, Harry, but not your part in my picture. That is for the record." (295-298)
The moral implications of Harry's retelling, in 1953, are less clear. There remains in Harry's account of himself an uneasy balance between self-justification and the clarity of his acknowledgment that "the apocalypse has its attractions" (325). Having withdrawn for thirty years, Harry recognizes one evening, as he crosses the black iron bridge over the South Saskatchewan River, that "the past cannot be so easily dismissed" (326).
If, in moral terms, border crossings are dangerous, it is also true that for both Harry and Shorty, twentieth-century Canada is portrayed as a place of stasis, refuge, and truth, while the United States is aligned with change, vulnerability, and falsehood. Canada is the place where Shorty defines himself, where he is forced to confront his own guilt and despair. As a young man, during the gang rape of the Native girl, Shorty asserts to the other wolfers, "I ain't a hog" (305). But subsequently, in shame and disgust, he wanders alone in the Canadian wilderness, surviving by discovering and imitating his creature spirit, a pig rooting the mud. Fifty years later, after he sells his story in Hollywood, Shorty wants to escape to Canada again, taking with him the child-like Wylie. "'I'm taking him to Canada with me. It's his best chance. I been to Canada,' [McAdoo] says. His voice changes, as if he is speaking out of a cavern. A cavern of regret, or sorrow. 'I went Indian up in Canada"' (151). Shorty compares his s elfexile in the Canadian wilderness after the Cypress Hills massacre with a Native American vision quest: "Them old-timey, genuine Indians used to go off solitary in the wilderness so's to find their creature spirit.... That's where they learned it, in the wilderness.... Hardship and the country taught them it" (157).
In Hollywood, Harry and Shorty both have opportunities to become someone else, to assume a new identities. When Rachel Gold asks Harry to define the American spirit, he responds with the word "expansive": "And everything the word implies. Energy, optimism, confidence. A quicksilver quality" (180). In Hollywood, Harry can be a player, with all of the possibilities and deceptions the term implies. He is moving up, making money, going to parties, doing work that Chance has convinced him really matters, intellectually and spiritually. Yet after the script he writes is twisted to fit Chance's political agenda, after Chance is murdered and Shorty disappears, Harry retreats to Canada, disillusioned and ashamed. He sums up the next thirty years of an uneventful life in Saskatchewan in a few sentences: he manages a movie theatre; he lives with his mother until she dies; he never marries.
The implications of living on one side or the other of the international border are aligned with the rhetoric of periphery and center threaded throughout the novel. In Shorty, marginality is aligned with class. Shorty emerges from, and never finally escapes, the underclass. As a child, he lives a hardscrabble existence, unschooled and uncared for, until he becomes the Englishman's boy--a position of servitude one step up from slavery and one step down from the yeoman class of farmers, trappers, drivers to which he aspires. The boy's motivations for joining and remaining with the wolfers form a tangled skein, twisting together desperation, convenience, a narrow adherence to what he perceives as law (if he rides away from the marauders, he will be a horse thief), and a misplaced identification with the outlaw Hardwick, who--like Damon Ira Chance, many years later--preaches a doctrine of necessity.
Among the wolfers, the boy is always linked with marginal members of the group, those who for one reason or another do not belong. He acquiesces in the abandonment of Hank because he does not wish to be like him, too weak to keep up with the others, too vulnerable to survive alone. In the course of the journey into the Cypress Hills, he associates particularly with two members of the group, both Canadian, both better men than the ruffians they are riding with. In each case, class distinctions are foregrounded; the Canadians are better educated, more reflective, more chastened by conscience than the Americans with whom they have associated themselves. In the estimation of the Englishman's boy, Scotty--a Scotsman on a thoroughbred who seeks out the boy because of his Harris tweed coat--does not "seem to belong with this bunch, seemed not aware of the company he was keeping. He had the Englishman's way of talking. Gentleman's airs. Didn't care to blaspheme. Kept himself spruce and neat.... writing in a little bo ok after he finished eating, just how theEnglishman did" (73-74). Long before the murders at Cypress Hills, Scotty is traumatized by the brutality and blood lust exhibited by the wolfers: At the carnage of buffalo, as the other men rip into raw meat and offal, "the Scotchman sits alone on the grass, looking past the bloody banquet. Like a bystander in shock at a train wreck. Refusing to see" (118). After the Scotsman's deterioration, the boy pairs with Grace, a Canadian who does see and who knows that he cannot be with the group and not of them: "I was born in old Ontario," he said. "My mother had a piano in the parlour. We had books. One of them had a picture in it of a centaur. [...] I've been knocking around this country ten years--it changes a man. But I'm not all the way there yet. I'm not Tom Hardwick. I'm betwixt and between--half civilized, half uncivilized. A centaur" (191).
The Canadian members of the party and the Englishman's boyare shown to be complicit in the raid that leads to the Cypress Hills massacre, but peripheral to the evil at its center. The novel's intersecting narratives circle around and around the revelation of what actually happens to the Native girl. In the rape scene, the boy is unable to challenge Hardwick directly but tries to save the young woman from further torment by claiming marginal status for himself--by positioning himself as one who would taint the others:
"Look at me. [...] Don't you recognize me? [...] A curse." He pointed to the corpse on the floor. "Ask Grace. Ask my dead Englishman. Farmer Hank.... You know me, don't you, Scotchman? The Scotchman knows there ain't no bad luck blacker than the seed the Devil cursed. [...] Who did you think I am? Nobody asked my name. I'll tell you who I am. I'm what the black belly of the whale couldn't abide. I'm your Jonah." (305-306)
In the glimpses we have of Shorty's later life, his underclass status persists, and he continues to claim his marginality. He is a wanderer, a troublemaker, an "extra" in the social hierarchy as well as in the professional hierarchy of the film world. And after he sells his story to Chance, his planned retreat to Canada is, from the producer's point of view, an acceptable solution to the embarrassment of his presence and his potential to contradict the altered tale Chance means to tell. Chance comments to Harry, "For our purposes, Shorty McAdoo in Canada is as good as dead" (208).
Similarly, Harry Vincent is doubly marginalized--marginalized as an individual and marginalized as a Canadian. And like Shorty's, his is a marginality that he at first resents, but ultimately claims. Harry recounts that even as a child in Canada, his physical handicap--a limp--relegated him to the periphery:
I hated those female teachers whose faces went sweetly vacuous and temporizingly benign when they turned to me. Although they didn't mean them to, those looks thrust me on the outside. Outside became a state of mind. Maybe that's what Chance's intuition detected in me, that, and a sense of grievance. Because of Chance, for the first time in my life I felt myself gratefully moving to the centre of something important, admitted to an inner circle. (33)
Harry's resentment at being on the margins is set against his reluctance to be in the wrong, to be implicated, to be responsible for the moral chaos at the center of the Hollywood film world. It is not only Chance, who is never honest, who accuses him of hypocrisy, but also Rachel, who is never less than honest: "I am afraid for you, Harry, because you don't know what you want and you're weak. You lack the courage to take responsibility for your intelligence. You actually prefer writing title cards rather than scripts because then you're not responsible for the end result" (179). Rachel's rhetoric of titles rather than scripts, of labeling rather than composing the story, is acknowledged and made more explicit by Harry, who casts Canadians metaphorically as watchers on a riverbank, lured by and fearful of the pull of the current: "[W]hen I listen to Chance, maybe I understand that my memory is the truest picture of my country, bystanders huddled on a riverbank, cheering as the world sweeps by. In our hearts w e preferred the riverbank, preferred to be spectators, preferred to live our little moment of excitement and then forget it" (181-182). Harry's return to Saskatoon after the debacle of his participation in Chance's film is both an assertion of conscience and a withdrawal from the possibility of constructive action. For thirty years, he manages a movie theatre--not composing stories, but watching them. His experience of the world is always mediated; evildoers--Hitler, Mussolini, Joseph McCarthy--are images, "phantoms and spectres" sliding across his screen. He is safe at the periphery, on the bank, living beside the river.
Nonetheless, the novel also destabilizes the model of margin and center in important ways. It is common in fiction to make central to the story figures who represent the marginalized and the obscure. Shorty McAdoo, who is powerless and peripheral to the historical processes in which he participates, is made central in the narrative geography of this text-as is the young Native woman whose fate is the absence around which the novelspirals. But The Englishman's Boy also locates its own story in relationship to shifting metanarratives. In the evolving narratives of North American history, the Cypress Hills Massacre is for Americans an untold story, and for Canadians a once-told tale about American outlaws invading peaceful territory, which becomes a paragraph in the story of the North West Mounted Police, which is now a chapter in a larger narrative about the appropriation of the western territories. When members of Parliament denounce "American cutthroats, thieves, and renegades," the story is part of a politi cal narrative in which Canada is defined and distinguished from the United States. As a footnote to the story of the North West Mounted Police, the Cypress Hills Massacre becomes part of a heroic myth. When that myth is reconfigured as "a long, red-jacketed march into a vast territory, establishing claim to it. A mythic act of possession" (326), it becomes part of a contemporary metanarrative that understands "settlement" as invasion. The meaning that survives the participants, in other words, arises from the ways in which the story is contextualized-or "located."
Similarly, Chance, whom Harry initially locates at the center of his professional world and whom he sees as the agent who can bring him from the margin to the center, is erased from the larger social, political, and aesthetic narratives in which he seemed to play a part:
I can offer no judgement of Chance's picture Besieged because I never saw it. Not many people did. It got pushed into oblivion; Chance's murder became bigger than the picture itself. As so often happens in Hollywood, scandal became the story, obscuring everything else. The man who wanted to be another D.W. Griffith, a visionary filmmaker, is remembered today only as the man who got killed at a premiere. A small footnote. (326)
These shifting reconfigurations of individual subjects and their stories are conveyed in the image of the river, woven throughout the novelbut particularly prominent at the beginning and the end of Harry's narration. This image focuses the third element of spatial structure in thenovel: the counterpoint of surface and depth. In this novel, the opposition of surface and depth is based not on an opposition of falsehood and truth, but rather on the distinction between facts and meaning. Facts are details of the surface; they can be counted, measured, mapped. Meanings, on the other hand, lie beyond fact; they are currents beneath the surface, unpredictable, always in play.
Facts are not, in themselves, telling. Chance has a "mania for authenticity; like his idol, Griffith, he demands historical accuracy in every detail" (223). He intends to alter completely the meaning of Shorty's story, yet he wants Native Americans for Indian parts, correct costumes, a real herd of buffalo, an authentic adobe fort. He knows that accuracy of the surface can be a kind of seduction:
"Facts are of the utmost importance, Harry. If I can convince the audience the details are impeccably correct, who will dispute the interpretation? The truth of small things leads to confidence in the truth of large things. [...] Details are how most people read the world, the simple letters of their idiotic alphabet. They spell crude and literal meanings such as 'clothes make the man.' Most people don't have what you and I do, Harry."
"What's that?"
"The gift to see beyond a flat cap, or beyond small facts." (230-231)
What lies beyond is represented most clearly in the river. Thirty years after his sojourn in Hollywood, Harry observes: "Living beside the river has taught me something about change. Paved white with snow and ice in winter, slack and brown in summer, the river is never the same" (325). Slack and brown or cold and black, the surface conceals the moiling, tumbling chaos revealed only in moments of crisis. Before the ice goes out, Harry notes, a stranger to the river would have no idea which way it ran. It is "the movement of the knotted ice, of the swirling debris, [that] makes it plain" (5). While the disruption of the river, the disorder of its breakup, reveal its direction, that tumultuous movement cannot be mapped or scripted. "[L]ooking at the river," Harry writes, "I remind myself the map of the river is not the river itself. That hidden in it are deep, mysterious, submerged, and unpredictable currents" (326).
Why Harry writes after a thirty-year silence is never clear. The impulse seems to be associated with the spring break-up of ice, "the frozen jigsaw pieces bumping sluggishly downstream, the cold, black water steaming between them" (5). Yet Harry cannot order his jigsaw pieces. He doesn't know what happened to Shorty. He has long since relinquished his picture of Rachel to the river: "During one of my walks by the river I dropped it into the water. I have no more idea where Rachel Gold ended up than I do where that photograph did. Both moved out of view" (325). In writing his story, however, he does metaphorically map the river, and if the map is not the river itself, it traces the landscape through which the river runs. Harry closes his narrative with an image of ambivalence and perhaps regret, a spatial metaphor of his own identity: "I cross the black iron bridge, my limp a little worse each year, the water rushing underneath me in the darkness, pulling for the horizon" (326).
NOTE
(1.) As her subtitle--"Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter"--suggests, Friedman's objective is to advance feminist theory by calling for a self-consciously locational form of feminist critical practice. However, much of this valuable book is devoted to analyzing the centrality of space to postmodern concepts of identity: "a discourse of spatialized identities constantly on the move" (19).
REFERENCES
Brooks, Peter. 1984. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Vintage.
Clifford, James. 1992. "Traveling Cultures." In. Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Crossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler. London: Routledge. 96-116. (Republished in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.)
Friedman, Susan Stanford. 1998. Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Genette, Gerard. 1980. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. 1972. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Gibson, Andrew. 1996. Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Phelan, James. 1989. Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Vanderhaeghe, Guy. 1998. The Englishman's Boy. 1996. New York: Picador.
PATRICIA LINTON is Associate Professor of English at the University of Alaska Anchorage, where she teaches twentieth-century literature and film. She has published articles on contemporary fiction in Modern Fiction Studies, MELUS, and Studies in American Indian Literatures.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd.
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Source Citation:
Linton, Patricia. "Narrative geography in Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy." American Review of Canadian Studies 31.4 (2001): 611+. Gale Canada In Context. Web. 11 Oct. 2011.
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