How books on Canadian Literature are still being typically written: as in the case of Writing the Roaming Subject: The Biotext in Canadian Literature by Joanne Saul

Even in 2006, the year Saul's book was published (University of Toronto Press) CanLit is a template (or "palimpsest") for fashionable academic discourse. Literary topic, genre or target  audience being scripted for the same postructuralist discussion. CanLit is shorthand for the stranglehold that Canada-Council, academia and mainstream publishers still have on the maket of ideas. I've discovered that, as a rule, when writers with an interest in things poststructuralist try to stand out from the rest, they tend to go overboard: whether it be reading a dictionary five times (Bök), writing in a consistent "hypo-dyslexia" (bissett) or strangling the lyric voice til there's nothing left but a little prairie dust (bpNichol). Resulting in a type of writing that is cold and lexically rigid: page after page (in the case of Bök's Euonia) of vowelled verses squeezed into tiny little coffins. And always the eyeing of the Sobey, Giller, Griffin or Governor-General prize.

Academics and critics like Saul, eyeing the prize & vying for their place in the right literary franchise, oftentimes follow the same instinct to overdo things. And unwittingly deep-six their subject. The "Biotext' title promised something new but the book smothered it. Buried under academic verbiage, dry peer-edited phrasing and a potentially vibrant idea that was reduced to exact Ph.D specs. They make literary exposition out of the thick stew of privileged author-positions, a mainly male discourse, suspect textual layering, repetition, and a watered down derrideanism (far removed from Canadian waters), with the usual ersatz alienation backdrop. Among the many available multicultural motifs, always the same 'alienation' worked to death.

And the tone throughout is always servilely attentive to a turgid academic prose, designed to please thesis advisors rather than interested readers like me. Over-the-top, imitative & pure Canada-Council grade.Saul's reading, in particular, of Ondaatje's Running in the Family is typical, from beginning to end nothing but standard CanLit fare. And I wonder if it hasn't silenced the voice of the "roaming subject" itself, killed dead in its tracks: Ondaatje's interesting work about the recovery of a Ceylonese past, the vital transformative role of memory or even the limitations of literary autobiography as a poststructuralist genre. Not that Ondaatje isn't complicitous with the contemporary discourse of academic writing, himself slavishly tied to poststructuralist theory and a publishing system that he's helped to create.

This triad of author, theory and government has always seemed incestuous to me. As though participants in the discussion agree to disagree: a pure theatre of politeness (not the Artaudian 'cruelty' it should be) and endless scaffolding rather than critique that counts.(Something similar to this bizarre spectacle of discussion has been lately staged at Mt. Royal University in Calgary, in a ("cage match") debate between Christian Bök and Carmine Starnino on contemporary Canadian poetry). It's almost impossible to tell Saul's from Ondaatje's own discussion of the Running in the Family text. Any consideration of a privileged author-subject is likely to tie into a way of talking favourable to both author and the publishing-academic institution that fosters it. So that literary critic Joanne Saul and subject Ondaatje can write virtually the same thing, in perfect textual synchronicity.

And ironically hegemonic discourse of this sort, affiliated to but not interested in discomfiting real privileged discourse, is always bound to ape a distinctively 'male' language of 'search, write and negotiate'. As though the quest for the missing Father (the dominant trope throughout the entire discussion of Ondaatje) hadn't gone on long or hard enough. Strategies are employed everywhere, opponents destabilized and single subjects, linear discourse and referentiality of any type routinely dismantled. The reader stumbles constantly over modernist corpses. Searching and writing can be not unreasonably seen as a type of colonizing albeit in a homeland that's turned very foreign to Ondaatje, and among a people he finds laughably uncongenial and weird.

For Ondaatje, 'Asia,' in its vastness, lacks specificity; his journey is, at least in part, an attempt to define it, make sense of it, an attempt to make it his own. This is part of Ondaatje's process of cultural recovery, the taking ownership of the past in the present...Running in the Family is a text of cultural recovery in the sense that it allows for unsettlement and doubt while still insisting on the necessity for self-exploration and representation". (The Biotext in Canadian Literature 50-51)

Ondaatje, privileged culture-hunter, isn't portrayed (at least, not intentionally) as the congenial introspective flâneur, after the manner of Walter Benjamin, who speculates deeply on artifacts of civilization as he sees them; he's rather too whimsical, intrusive and laughably involved in his Ceylonese adventures to be regarded as anything but a native son who returns to get material for another literary work. Saul's chapter on Ondaatje reads like a clear case of cultural-textual expropriation. Nino Ricci is another author who can be accused of the same mercenary handling of his Valle del Sole setting, in Lives of the Saints: a cultural exploitation scripted for movie and accolades.

It's Saul's failure to get the irony that causes much of the too-easy textual layering that goes on. Rather than real 'tectonic' grinding between naturally opposing narratives (the authorial self and the 'other', among others), text and its academically fashionable 'poststructuralist' design merge too nicely. Examples of this false "slippage" are numerous: (a) Ondaatje, Canadian immigrant, and the nicely exoticized homeland he records in his journals (reminiscent of Gilpin's picturesque travel narratives); (b) "negotiation of self" (47) that is rather a re-affirmation of both privileged Sri Lankan background and Canadian literary status; (c) "intertexts", in the derridean sense of self-displacing discourses, that really are chapters of a work being written for mass consumption in a North American (mostly academic) market; and (d), as already mentioned, the unseen irony of postcolonialist intention subserving an actually intrusive and exploitive literary practice.

Every page of this postructuralist critique is the same, every one: the mantra of intertextuality, displaced subject, negotiated self, etc. gets repeated ad nauseum. But repetition is here not the death of the overarching patriarchal narrative that Saul's concept of 'biotext' puts into question in her reading of CanLit. Among the list of repeated (& repeatable) terms are 'process', 'polyvocality', 'recovery', 'non-linear, fragmentary narrative,' 'negotiation', 'dislocation', 'doubleness', 'subjects in process', 'relational account', 'gap', etc etc Repetition signals Saul's own clumsy handling of concept and content, aping without sensing the importance of postmodernism. And failure to appropriate a crucial derridean principle of reading so that the whole critical edifice comes crashing down to the ground, like the unsteady house of cards it really is.

In particular, repeated references to 'site' (the celebrated mise en abîme) as a failure of author Ondaatje to recover his cultural past is too smoothly glossed over, never more than a pat academic's transition to the next paragraph. Far removed from the serious work(See "Cognitive Mapping" by Fredric Jameson, for example) for which 'site' is intended in serious culture studies

The text itself thus becomes the site of an exploration of self through familial connections, origins, and place; it becomes the site of Ondaatje's complex act of cultural recovery. Throughout the book, he struggles to come to terms with a disconnected past through the acts of imagining and writing himself into a particular time and place. (35)

And on it goes from Ondaatje through Daphne Marlatt and Roy Kiyooka to Fred Wah, the same poststructuralist scaffolding, repetitive language and an 'alienation' motif bled dry from over-use. It should by rights have stopped at Atwood's Surfacing. Only the critical apparatus changes from feminism (Marlatt) to postcolonialism or the immigrant experience (Kiyooka) to Canadian identity theory (Wah), though Saul admits that Wah's "Diamond Grill is an almost impossible text to define generically". (103)

I'd be properly discouraged from reading more contemporary works on CanLit except that perhaps a younger post-millennial crowd might begin to sympathize with what Terry Eagleton's named the "illusions of postmodernism", and call for something less drearily repetitive & predictable.Perhaps already that critic, poet, as A.M. Klein says in his celebrated "Portrait", "has climbed/ another planet, the better to look/with single camera view upon this earth" ("Portrait of the Poet as Landscape" in A.M. Klein: Selected Poems.)

Perhaps s/he has and I've yet to begin at the first page.