“Essays on Saskatchewan Writing” edited by E.F. Dyck

Recent years have seen the publication of several anthologies of poetry and fiction from the prairies. It was inevitable that such collections would be followed by anthologies of critical writing. As our writers grow in number, so do our critics, like a shadow army following in the dust of the real thing.

Eight years ago, in an issue of Essays on Canadian Writing devoted to prairie poetry, Dennis Cooley remarked that “Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan are almost overrun with poets: there must be a couple hundred of them altogether, thicker than sow thistles.” Such words can make one take heart at the vitality of writing on the prairies, or cast one into a nightmare vision of the prairies as a vast Grub Street of Canadian literature.

An anthology of critical writing should lead the reader between these extremes of false enthusiasm and despair. It should do justice to the variety of talent in the region, and yet be alert to the quality of the writing and to any common ideas or structure the writers share. E.F. Dyck’s choice of articles for this anthology fulfills these conditions quite well, though the volume as a whole is lacking the liveliness of Birk Sproxton’s Trace, a more erratic but, in the end, more interesting selection.

The selection is divided into four categories: “writing” (which covers the writers’ guild and the presses), fiction, poetry and drama. Several commissioned articles serve the broader perspective of Saskatchewan writing: articles on the writers’ guild and its history by Michelle Heinemann, on contemporary fiction by David Arnason, on contemporary poetry by Fred Wah, and on drama by Diane Bessai.

These articles are witness to the growing strength and sophistication of writing on the prairies to the extent that writers are less amenable to attempts to define a specifically “prairie” experience that shapes their work.

And yet, some of the strongest writing in this collection is found in articles that ground their discussion of the literature in a strong sense of place. Two of these, Edward McCourt’s “The Canadian West in Fiction” and Henry Kreisel’s “The Prairie: A State of Mind,” are now limited in their value as criticism and are partially responsible for ways of looking at prairie literature that have become virtual clichés, standing in the way of a more recent appraisal. But in Eli Mandel’s “Romance and Realism in Western Canadian Fiction” and Robert Kroetsch’s “The Fear of Women in Prairie Fiction: An Erotics of Space,” that notion of place is developed with growing sophistication and a sense of the self-conscious manipulation of literary form. Each author brings a larger literary and cultural perspective to his writing, and relates prairie writing to larger questions of how art confronts experience.

Eli Mandel’s “Romance and Realism in Western Canadian Fiction” originally was part of his collection of essays, Another Time, published in 1977. Focussing on Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook and Robert Kroetsch’s The Studhorse Man, Mandel develops the promising but unfulfilled idea in the title of Henry Kreisel’s essay, “The Prairie: A State of Mind.” He does so by using Kroetsch’s paradoxical argument that we are defined and made “real” by our fictions. Throughout his writing, Mandel has the ability to use an idea to discuss a novel without ever pretending that the book is exhausted by the interpretation. He is a critic who respects the vitality of the text.

Mandel’s authority is based on his own struggle to write about prairie experience. Nowhere is that more evident than in “Writing West: On the Road to Wood Mountain.” This article has always seemed like a necessary reference point for anyone trying to write in this place, especially if they share Mandel’s eclectic background: a combination of European and American literature, pop culture and prairie life. His description of the duplicity of his own life, of the split between mind and body, culture and physical place, which makes the writer “a man not so much in place, as out of place and so one endlessly trying to get back, to find his way home, to return, to write himself into existence…,” seems as painfully relevant now as it was 10 years ago when this paper was first read at a conference in Banff.

The problems of writing and personal experience combine in the article to give it remarkable force, as in this description of Wood Mountain:

But on that hot July 1, as I stood looking at the traces of some fifty or sixty years of life—a door frame still standing, an iron bedstead and Quebec stove resting in the grass, two or three sheds, a shell of a house, a huge concrete vault, the colonies papers still there on the damp dirt floor—I was possessed not only by a troubling sense of transience, lost hopes, small human marks on a vast landscape, my own past disappearing, but by a question that had slowly been forming itself in my mind for the whole summer. Would this mute, intransigent place ever say anything? Was the only language one I imposed or whatever impelled my own speech? What would Doc Savage do in a crisis of these dimensions?

Robert Kroetsch’s contributions to the collection carry an equally strong conviction, although without the personal references. His writing has a vital wit that gives his articles a lasting interest. The comparison of Willa Cather’s My Antonia and Sinclair Ross’ As For Me and My House is an intriguing exploration of the relation of writing to physical space and sexuality. The comments on the relation of book and world are as insightful as Mandel’s.

Kroetsch’s 1976 piece, “Effing the Ineffable,” with its aphoristic comments on “voice,” captures in brief the agony of any writer who has struggled with the language and the temptation to fall into that paralysing silence that may last a lifetime: “if you are unlucky, the great-given swamps you, and even when you speak, you are silent. If you are incredibly lucky, and if you work your ass off, the great-given sounds, not over, but in your unique speaking. If that happens, then you have found a Voice.”

The articles commissioned for the anthology tend to have a more practical, informative value. Michelle Heinemann’s survey of the Saskatchewan Writers Guild is an interesting history of what has become the most extensive writers’ organization in the country. Its companion piece, a 1981 article by Patrick Lane on Saskatchewan presses, is adequate to a point but rather dated. It could have used an editorial update on recent presses.

The more specifically literary of the commissioned articles argue for the variety of writing on the prairies, and for abandoning the old categories of prairie survival and dust-bowl epics. This is true, in particular, of the essays by David Arnason, Fred Wah and Diane Bessai. These pieces are as much a mapping of the territory as criticism.

At the same time, there is, particularly in Arnason and Wah, a strong sense of distinguishing among the vast body of competent writers practising their craft and those few exceptions who achieve “vision,” to use Arnason’s term. As examples of the latter, he cites the work of Geoffrey Ursell, David Williams and Guy Vanderhaeghe, as opposed to the uncritical realism of less gifted writers.

That distinction between craft and vision is taken up by E.F. Dyck in his introduction, where he argues for the primacy of technique: “vision is always a technical matter first and a spiritual matter second.” He concludes that the risks taken by such writers as Ursell and Williams are technical: “and in these risks lies the immediate future of Saskatchewan writing.” Addressing this argument is beyond the scope of any review; suffice to say that though vision and craft must finally be one, Dyck’s line of thought raises the spectre of an increasingly complex, self-reflexive literature that bears little or no relation to experience.

The problem of too narrow and impoverished a definition of prairie writing is one that recurs in many of these articles. Susan Gingall’s review of Laurence Ricou’s Twelve Prairie Poets and Thunder Creek Co-op’s Number One Northern makes the point that, in its choice of poetry, the former tends to confirm Ricou’s own valid but limited view of prairie poetry, as opposed to the greater variety of form and content in the latter.

That same resistance to dogma appears in the excerpt from Dennis Cooley’s RePlacing and Mark Abley’s “Laying Down the Law.” The latter is a response to the prairie poetry issue of Essays on Canadian Writing, edited by Cooley in 1980. Abley’s article is an eloquent argument against cutting off the lobster’s claws to fit it into the box: “If poets are to be confined to the language and images of the prairies, if they are forbidden to find bridges to other cultures, other landscapes, other periods of history, their work will eventually dry up. Poetry springs from an inner life, not just from the alleys of Moose Jaw or Swift Current, and in the anarchic glory of the inner life, any images can be ‘appropriate’.”

The anthology is successful to the degree that it forces one to think of these questions when reading the growing body of writing from Saskatchewan. ♦

Robert Quickenden is a Winnipeg freelance critic who frequently reviews for the Winnipeg Free Press.