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Antigonish Review
# 128
| Tony Tremblay |
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Answering the Critics:
David Adams Richards and the Paradox of Unpopularity
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To go back to the letters and diaries of the time
is to discover a very different reality from that
which we have in the mythology of literary history
or in the chit-chat of journalists."
Louis Dudek
30 October 1996
In early 1990 a young woman from Ontario, newly minted with a PhD
in Canadian literature from UBC, sets up a tape recorder in front of David
Adams Richards. She might be in his kitchen in Saint John; they might
be sitting in her office in Fredericton. She is a young academic from
away; he is New Brunswick's best known writer of his generation, a talent
as fierce as Buckler, MacLeod, and Nowlan. A talent uncompromising. (The
key point to understand is that the interview takes place in New Brunswick
- in his place. If anyone has legitimacy here, it should be he.)
After the requisite questions and probes, all of which he is rehearsed
in answering, she asks the real question, the question she has
waited three hours to ask, the question that burns at the black heart
of the sixteen-page interview. She asks: "What do you say to critics
- most of whom can't believe that you beat out Atwood - who suggest that
in 1988 a Governor General's Award was due to a Maritime writer?"
And there it is: in a word, contempt , a well-learned colonial,
class, and academic contempt for the regions and their artists - for anything
not of the centre, anything not ordained by the new intellectualism. In
that question resides our deepest cultural secret: an insecurity so debilitating
that contempt and betrayal are natural attitudes. David Adams Richards'
story is paradigmatic, the reception of his art bearing witness to exactly
that contempt. It is a story that tells us much about ourselves as a people,
and, therefore, it is a story worth telling.
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In addition to possessing what critic John Moss continues to call "the
most unique voice in Canadian literature of his generation," David
Adams Richards has another, less envious, distinction to go along with
the critical acclaim he has achieved: he is arguably the most berated
author in the country today. That paradox alone, that mix of praise and
damnation, admits him to the status of serious artist, for "serious"
art is never popular culture. On the contrary. Serious art, as Wyndham
Lewis said, vigorously contests the popular. Serious art is to popular
culture what morality is to political correctness.
The twentieth century has been particularly hard on its serious artists.
As proof of this, consider the fate of James Joyce, whose Dubliners
, described by Joyce as chapters in the moral history of his community,
was burned in the streets - all 1000 copies. Consider, as well, the banishment
of the Slavic moralists (Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Fyodor Dostoevsky),
and the fatwa only recently lifted from the head of Salman Rushdie.
Our own greatest writer of the previous generation, Margaret Laurence,
was forced into similar exile (forced to adopt the repose of her southern
contemporary, J.D. Salinger), remaining silent and hidden for the last
twelve years of her life after what Budge Wilson considered the unfettered
abuse she suffered at the hands (and feet) of critics for The Diviners
. When Laurence died in 1987, our country's largest newspaper placed her
obituary well after the sports scores and local political news. She was
eulogized in editorials as the writer whose book was banned from Lakefield
and Peterborough Highs' Grade 13 classrooms for its sexual indiscretions
and bad language.
David Adams Richards endures a similar fate today, exacerbated by where
he's from, who he is, and what he chooses to celebrate - which is to say,
nothing that is currently important in the national consciousness. He
is a Maritimer, unafraid to write, on its own terms , about the
culture he knows. He is a moralist, bringing a Chekhovian ethic to his
treatment of character and place. And he is a humanist, recording the
minutiae of human interaction with a care no longer valued by the critical
establishment. A Maritimer, a moralist, and a humanist - all "bad"
words in what one of his own characters calls "the prominent lexicon
of progressive thought" ( Wounded 171). Were he an ideologue
writing to save spruce trees on New Brunswick's Christmas Mountains, perhaps
he would be less maligned. As it is, he is deemed incorrect in his choice
of the working-class human condition as subject matter, which is what
I want to take up in this article, for the current maligning of Richards'
"fringe" characters, his working class men and women, reflects
not only a decline in empathy for our fellow citizens, but, more seriously,
a decline in the quality of mercy we extend to others. And, sadly, this
decline is precipitated by the new intellectualism, more specifically
by the often-unexamined adherence to rules which govern "appropriate"
literary treatment and subject matter. While we hardly shed a tear for
the victims of the recent earthquakes in Turkey and Peru, we gush effusively
around London and Paris monuments on the third anniversary of Princess
Diana's death. Cruel men are easy to spot, said Graham Greene. They cry
in the cinema.
This erosion of our quality of mercy is perceived by Matthew Parris
as a global contagion, one associated particularly with a new monied middle
class that emerged with Reagan and Thatcher in the early eighties. Characteristic
of this new trend is a refashioning of mercy into sentimentality, the
carefully conceived result of which is the evasion of moral responsibility
outside all but the immediate domestic sphere. As Parris writes, the consequences
of this new trend are impossible to contain; they infiltrate attitudes
and national values:
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Far from being the springboard for a wider beneficence, a sentimental
embrace of the familiar serves to block out the unfamiliar. Grabbing
the teddy bear from the nursery cupboard and munching on chocolate,
we snuggle into what we own. The hug for a favourite grandchild,
the lump in the throat, the adored pet . . . are not the signs of
a virtuous man; they are the means by which a callous man excludes
the outside world from his mercy and his justice. He will exercise
his sympathies within domestic boundaries. Charity, beginning at
home, ends there. Sentiment of this kind becomes a kind of ceremony,
and a selfish one. Something is chosen, something manageable, something
weak, as a token of our sympathy. . . . The predilection of the
British for fluffy toys is a chilling indicator of the heartlessness
of the nation.
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(25 January 1997) |
A look at the representative critical commentary that has followed Richards
in his writing career is illustrative of how widespread are the attitudes
that Parris identifies. We will want to ask, first, Are we so morally
comfortable that we can judge others with such disdain? And secondly,
Do we have original, artistic voices enough in this country that we can
dismiss them so contemptuously? I will begin with The Globe & Mail
's pre-eminent book reviewer of our generation, William French. His review
of Richards' Governor General's Award-winning Nights Below Station
Street is titled "Searing Fidelity About Grim Losers," and
it reads:
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Richards writes about society's losers, the economically deprived
who lead ungrammatical lives of quiet desperation. They seek escape
in alcohol, dreams or death, and reading about them is depressing....
We watch in awe as they stumble through their grim lives.
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(14 May 1988) |
Almost ten years later, and in our second-largest book review daily
( The Montreal Gazette ), another reviewer uses a similar title
("If not for dysfunction, these losers wouldn't function at all")
and much the same metaphors to draw almost identical conclusions about
Hope in the Desperate Hour :
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Like much of Richards's fiction, Hope in the Desperate Hour
is set in New Brunswick's Miramichi River valley and it assembles
the usual collection of chronic losers and low-rent dreamers....
If it weren't for dysfunction, these people wouldn't function at
all.... There are so many doomed points of view drifting in and
out of the narrative it may be hard to find your way.... You may
also be tempted to ask why you should bother.
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(25 May 1996) |
If the book reviewers have been openly hostile to Richards' working-class
characters, the critics have been all but absent, the few who have taken
on Richards' work compelled to circulating the same views about his "beautiful
losers" and "marginal people" ( Maclean's 24 June
1996). Frank Davey's jargon-laden essay, "Discourse and Determinism
in Nights ," employs an elaborate theory of orality to dismiss
Richards' inarticulate characters simply because Davey doesn't know (or
doesn't care to imagine - "You may also be tempted to ask why you
should bother") what it is to be dispossessed and alienated from
oneself by the actions of others:
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[Richards' characters] participate in a series of repetitive,
separate events and activities, without a great deal of intention
or without much awareness of causal relationships among them. The
narrative constructs these characters as living without much ability
to plan, reflect on their actions, or to consult with one another,
each acting arbitrarily or impulsively. (18)
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While Davey's argument poorly conceals his contempt for Richards' people
and his desire to supplant Richards as moral arbiter of the text, its
shadow-show of theory clearly misses its own absurdity: that the philological
conceits of the literate are brought forward in service to the needs of
the oral.The irony never seems to strike Davey, whose mission is to dissect
Richards' work in order to show how uninformed and inappropriate is Richards'
treatment of the disaffected.The surety of the new intellectualism was
never better displayed.
A final example will suffice. Three years ago, Maclean's ran
a story on Richards in an elongated "Books" section of their
magazine. There were four stories in total, the first about a book on
the Eaton family ("Timothy Eaton sowed the seeds of destruction"),
the second about three books on Trudeau ("Loved or reviled, Trudeau
still fascinates"), and the fourth about a book on Mulroney ("The
airbus affair, from Mulroney's point of view").The story about Richards
was in third place, wedged revealingly between Trudeau and Mulroney. The
takeover of serious literature by celebrity was never better revealed,
nor was the compartmentalizing of mercy and compassion, for what Richards
says in that Maclean's story is diminished by the context within
which the media forces him to say it: "'Our family was friends with
the local MP,' [Richards] recalls, 'but we also knew the prostitutes who
waited for the ships to come in, just four blocks from us. . . . The last
thing I ever wanted to do was to turn my back on the suffering of those
people I saw as a child. ...In a way, my work is for them'" (26 October
98).
Such is the commentary that informs the "official" judgement
of Richards' work (these reviews and assessments come from our country's
largest mainstream media - Maclean's, The Montreal Gazette, and
The Globe and Mail - and one of our most respected literary critics,
Frank Davey). The common denominator in the pieces above is not so much
an attack against Richards as against his people, their poverty, their
helplessness, their violence, and their chronic bad luck. Social theorists
would observe the "functionalist" bias in these treatments,
the belief that systemic or structural conditions are nowhere present
in the conditions of these characters. Rather, they suffer by their own
accord, by being slothful or carelessly conniving. Most revealing, however,
in the various functionalist dismissals of Richards' characters is that
those dismissals are almost always at arm's length, expressed without
feeling or an understanding of the greater implications of the morality
they are espousing, which is certainly not to suggest that criticism should
abandon its toughness, but that appraisals of art that discredit humanity
on the basis of received truth should be suspect. We are left only to
conclude, then, that the new intellectualism's enlightened "zero
tolerance," employed with didactic zeal by these same mainstream
media that appear intent on maligning Richards' characters, is ill-equipped
or unwilling to live by its own dicta. Again, the comment "You may
also be tempted to ask why you should bother," is a very revealing
one indeed.
But blaming central Canada for the woes of its regions is too hackneyed.
I am not identifying a centralist conspiracy, but a new habit of mind,
an attitude that conspires against all Canadians, regardless of
where they live. I am referring to the way in which art is now served
by our media and cultural outlets; I am referring specifically to art's
subservience to those outlets, most of which ascribe to an ideological
consensus that is centralist and neo-colonial by virtue of its proximity
to the intellectual engine-room of our national consciousness. In short,
we employ hundreds of people in this country whose job it is to tell us
how to think, what opinions to hold, and what issues we should be discussing.
Theirs is the new intellectualism, the authority of which is concentrated,
unchallenged, elitist, and, worst of all, believed , both by the
few who offer it up as dogma and by the many who take it in as faith.
And while the demands of this new creed are felt everywhere around us
- so much that we live in fear that what we say will be censored or sanitized
or misconstrued - the real implications of our surrender to this new-age
consensus are rarely examined. Rather, it is assumed that all moralities
converge to the collective good.
Knowing well the intolerances of the new intellectualism, Richards himself
has written about just this ideological consensus in an essay called "The
Turtle, The Handbook, and the Dark Night Air." His conclusion - adopt
the formula or suffer the consequences - marks an important turning point
for our culture's assessment of its art:
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... it is all a package of social concern and neighbourly
wisdom, now, like crystals of instant soup. The trick is to pretend
it's your wisdom, as you step up to the podium to read. If you do
this well enough, you'll win the Pulitzer Prize. Carry this handbook
guide written out for you:
A single mother suffers
Men do not understand women
A drunken father is brutal
Fights in police cars are bad
Ignorance and violence are male
The age of intellectual comfort has come.
It's all true, though you might not know any of it well, or why
it is. But there is a check list in the handbook for all of these
things now. It has all been prepared for you. Others too have had
the same list prepared for them. (73)
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My point, beyond the illustration of contempt that the new do-it-yourself
intellectualism engenders, is that the movement toward consensus of this
new intellectualism is a dangerous cultural hegemony, one that manifests
itself in our country's (mis)judgement of its art - not to mention the
dissolution of some of its humanity. It is a misjudgement, writes Fred
Cogswell, rooted in cold, objective analysis, the dismissive theorizing
of populist or academic critics and interviewers who stand away from what
they are assessing, and who accept no stake in the humane practice of
creation, artistic or critical:
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It is not surprising, therefore, that [the new critics'] foremost
thought process is analysis. The goal of analysis is understanding,
and action is relegated to a secondary function. 'To understand
all is to forgive all' becomes a comforting doctrine since it requires
no action other than an ongoing process that feeds on itself and
no doubt can be led to justify anything. Hence, the rift between
the 'civilized' thought of the modern world and the unspeakable
barbarity of its conduct. (36)
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As someone who has been involved as an editor with small magazines for
most of an academic career, I continue to be alarmed by the privilege
many critics accord themselves in passing judgement on another's work.
The majority of these critics have never written a poem, nor a story,
nor suffered through the tribulations of a novel, nor do most inhabit
the same social strata as those characters they feel so competent in judging.
Yet lack of experience doesn't seem to deter them, especially when their
"lacks" are buoyed by the more powerful cultural capital of
the new intellectualism. Most have forgotten, it seems, what a recent
columnist in The New York Times Book Review demands: "...
isn't it the critic's job to give the reader a sense of the book, of its
characters and their milieu, of what it's about?... if we are serious
about our jobs [shouldn't we] approach each novel with the energy and
resolve to figure out what has most fully engaged the writer, and centre
the review on that?" (27).
The allowances of the self-appointed privilege to do just the opposite
of what the writer from the NYBR demands fascinate and disturb
me, for those allowances stem from the same populist attitudes and contempt
that are dismissive of a writer such as Richards, who, because he deals
with a full-dimensioned, working-class human condition, is, to cite another
Maclean's reviewer, "not popular" (24 June 1996). We
can only conclude, then, that art has no greater value or permanence but
for the gratification of these new-age McCarthyites, each of whom, by
virtue of the exercise of his own interpretation of the new morality,
exists to censor the artist, measuring the artist against what the critic
himself only poorly understands. This privilege, of course, quite apart
from its current manifestation that Parris identifies, is the legacy of
post-structuralism and the sixties, both of which movements killed off
the author in nihilistic contempt for subjectivity. In the case of Richards,
the contempt is transparently political, and consistently anti-human:
his accomplishments, awards, and honours are rarely mentioned. His craft,
the form of his art, the moralism of his vision, and his deep respect
and abiding love for his characters are never discussed. Rather, critical
opinions of the trite "thumbs-up/thumbs-down" kind are freely
shared, as a superior would share attitudes with a developing subordinate.
The result, to extend the persuasion to its unstated end, is the translation
of the critic's attitudes into proper expression, proper
tone, and proper subject matter: in short, " proper
art," popular (meaning "correct") and free of the darker
residues of the working-class human condition. And therein lies the paradox,
for serious art is not sanitized, not cheerful, not
middle class, and, most certainly, not popular. In vigorously contesting
both the popular and the hegemonic, serious art is moral and just, and,
as Canadian poet Louis Dudek writes, never without risk:
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What freedom is there in being counted among the cattle? The first
right I want is to be a man. It takes a little courage. The plain
truth, I say, not a few comfortable formulas that conceal your own
special lies...
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( Europe 126) |
At this point, an important question begs asking: if the "popular"
(that is, proper treatment and subject matter) is an amalgam of
ideological suggestion (which, of course, it is), then whose interests
are these critics representing? In that grey area where ideology and the
exercise of suggestion intersect is the point at which art - that is,
genuine art, the art of writers such as Laurence and Richards, Joyce and
Rushdie -steps in. Who is left in our country but the serious artist to
interrogate "the prominent lexicon of progressive thought"?
Who is left but the serious artist to counter the unquestioned merits
of "public" (never mind advertiser-driven) broadcasting, whether
of the print/electronic or cultural varieties? And, finally, who is left
in our country but the serious artist to suffer the indignities of an
elite group of small-minded critics with mass audiences who are naively
unperturbed by the exercise of taste that is not even their own? Is it
not the serious artist's role to expose the conventions by which we live,
the conventions, paradoxically, that make that artist susceptible to just
the attack and discredit I've identified?
Dudek wrote the following in assessing his own experience as an artist
working in an "entertainment culture":
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. . . the great periods of art must have a moral
quality in the life that supports craftsmen: there must be some
integrity in the rulers, or seriousness in their beliefs, that helps
to make [art] durable; there must be a developed taste and love
of art in great patrons; and there must be discrimination and intelligence
among readers and buyers of books if there is to be any culture
worth the name. (In fact, most people in the present condition of
entertainment culture spend their days trying to 'fake sincerity'
... and consumers accept this state of affairs without protest,
because they have been made incapable of choice.)
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( CAAS 129) |
I cannot dismiss the disparity that now exists between artists and critics,
nor can I dismiss the collusion of our major media and cultural outlets
in the largely centralist programme of laureatship, in which some artists
are silently put forward as better representatives than others of some
anonymously ordained (and ideologically correct) pan-Canadianism. But
I have not given up yet, knowing that the play of duplicity and renewal,
of the politics/truth struggle, is a part of every culture, manifesting
itself as both the fate of the serious artist and the privilege
, yes the privilege (easy for me to say), of un popularity. What
hope remains for us without such artists? What hope, in this a desperate
hour, without the likes of David Adams Richards, Maritimer, moralist,
and humanist that he is?
In telling the story of Pablo Neruda, Chile's greatest modern poet,
Antonio Skármeta recounts Neruda's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize:
"I was the most obscure poet and my poetry was regional, painful,
and pluvial. But I always believed in mankind. I never lost hope. As a
result, I have arrived here today with my poetry and my flag" (92).
Indeed, the centre cannot hold; indeed, as Richards writes, "God
calls on man not to be comfortable but to be great" ( Hope
146).
Works Cited
- Bemrose, John.
"Beautiful Losers." Maclean's
. 24 June 1996: 54.
"Lives of the Sinners." Maclean's
. 26 October 1998: 88, 90.
- Cogswell, Fred.
"Academics and Mavericks." Pottersfield
Portfolio. 19.1 (Fall 1998): 36-37.
- Davey, Frank.
"Discourse and Determinism in Nights Below
Station Street".Open Letter. 7.6 (Fall 1989): 17-26.
- Dudek, Louis.
Europe . 1954. Erin, Ontario: The Porcupine's
Quill, 1991.
"Louis Dudek 1918 -
." Contemporary Authors: Autobiography Series . 14 Detroit:
Gale Research, 1991. 121-40.
- French, William.
"Searing Fidelity About Grim Losers." The
Globe and Mail . 14 May 1988.
- Moss, John.
A Reader's Guide to the Canadian Novel . 2nd
Edn. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987.
- Parris, Matthew.
"Straining the Quality of Mercy." The
Telegraph-Journal . 25 January 1997.
- Prose, Francine.
"Giveaways" in The New York Times Book
Review . n.d. 27.
- Richards, David Adams.
For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down . Toronto:
McClelland and Stewart, 1993.
Hope in the Desperate Hour . Toronto: McClelland
and Stewart, 1996.
"The Turtle, The Handbook, and the Dark Night
Air." The Nashwaak Review . 3 (Winter 1996): 67-75.
- Skármeta, Antonio.
Il Postino . 1985. Trans. Katherine Silver.
New York: Miramax, 1993.
- Yanofsky, Joel.
"If not for dysfunction, these losers wouldn't
function at all." The Montreal Gazette . 25 May 1996.
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