search index
of all issues

Search This Site Enter word(s) to search for:

Writing in her 1987 study of Maritime fiction, Under Eastern Eyes, Janice Kulyk Keefer lamented that "many Canadian readers know little and care less about Maritime literature" and that "a number of Canadian critics […] have helped to consign Maritime literature to oblivion either by ignoring the corpus of literature the region has produced" or by minimizing its specific, local qualities (19). While literature from the Maritimes and Newfoundland is still lamentably neglected, since the publication of Under Eastern Eyes the Atlantic Provinces have witnessed a remarkable explosion of activity that has put East Coast writing back on the Canadian literary map. A number of writers such as Alistair MacLeod, David Adams Richards, and George Elliott Clarke have become prominent figures on the national scene, but more importantly there has been a profusion of new and accomplished writers coming out of the region.

Of this present wave of Atlantic-Canadian writers, Newfoundland novelist Wayne Johnston has garnered perhaps the most critical attention, particularly for his highly acclaimed The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998) and his most recent novel The Navigator of New York (2002). Heavily influenced by the Bildungsroman, Johnston's work has been consistently preoccupied with protagonists whose development of a sense of self and search for a place in the world revolves around unravelling some enigma involving parenthood or parental behaviour. Johnston's turn to history in his recent work, however, has given this preoccupation with provenance an allegorical and postcolonial cast. In his last three books, the penetration of these enigmas has developed into a larger allegorical concern with history, imperial relationships and the politics of nation-building. "Allegory," Stephen Slemon has argued, is "a site upon which post-colonial cultures seek to contest and subvert colonialist appropriation" (11). In exploring the ways in which the lives of his individual characters are shaped and distorted not only by family dynamics but more indirectly by the politics of empire, Johnston provides strategies for, as he himself puts it, "crawl[ing] out from under the avalanche of history" ("My Treatment").

Prior to his breakout fictional history of Newfoundland premier Joey Smallwood, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, Johnston had already distinguished himself as one of Canada's premier humorists, with a series of comic novels reflecting Tolstoy's maxim that all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. The Story of Bobby O'Malley (1985), The Divine Ryans (1990) and Human Amusements (1994) follow a remarkably similar pattern, navigating what Franco Moretti describes as "the conflict between the ideal of self-determination and the equally imperious demands of socialization" (15) in the classical Bildungsroman. Johnston's young, somewhat eccentric and perplexed protagonists, caught in socially constrictive environments, struggle to unravel the secrets of their parents' troubled relationships and to fathom the enigmatic (in two cases fatal) unhappiness and alienation of their fathers. In Johnston's first novel, Bobby O'Malley strives to make sense of his parents' mismatched marriage, the strains of which lead ultimately to Ted O'Malley's suicide; in The Divine Ryans, Draper Doyle Ryan discovers his father's death to have been a suicide prompted by a marriage of convenience intended to conceal his homosexuality; and finally, in Human Amusements, Henry Prendergast is caught between his father Peter, an unsuccessful writer, and his mother Audrey, a television celebrity whose success alienates Peter and ultimately prompts his disappearance (though Human Amusements has a more positive resolution than the other novels). In each case, the protagonist suffers the strains of family discord and social opprobrium, keenly feeling the tension between how things are and how they might have been. As Johnston himself observes, his characters lead a kind of parallel existence, fluctuating "between their reality and their hopes and dreams," particularly because their reality is marked by the need to maintain appearances and to engage in deception and pretence to do so ("Afterlife"). As a consequence, Johnston's protagonists inhabit a disorienting and destabilized reality, reflected in the prevalence with which Johnston uses the construction "it was as if" and other similes to record his characters' impressions of the world around them. The gradual uncovering of the truths these facades are constructed to conceal, however, resolves those tensions and fuels the "development toward a goal of social integration" (119) that Michael Minden sees as typical of the Bildungsroman.

Though Human Amusements does to a degree deal with history - the history of the competition over the invention of television - in these novels the struggles of the protagonist are shaped principally by the weight of family history and social propriety. In Johnston's last three works, however, Johnston's Newfoundland protagonists are swept up in the currents of a larger public history, trying to make their way in the world while buffeted by familial conflicts and social pressures that are linked to the politics of empire and empire-building. That larger context gives Johnston's recent work a much broader scope and a decidedly post-colonial slant that makes his work quite distinct in Atlantic-Canadian literature.

The developmental structure and the central trope of solving a parental enigma that marked Johnston's comic novels also figure prominently in Johnston's first foray into the genre of the historical novel, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams. The background and rise to prominence of "the unlikely revolutionary" (as Smallwood was dubbed in Richard Gwyn's seminal biography) are very much the stuff of the Dickensian Bildungsroman, clearly a central influence in Johnston's work. The eldest son of a large lower-middle class family presided over by a garrulous alcoholic, Joey Smallwood swam against the tide of class prejudice, colonial condescension, low expectations, and his own entrepreneurial deficiencies to rise to the position of premier and to dominate Newfoundland politics for over a quarter century. The very unlikelihood of Smallwood's success and his quixotic struggle to overcome obstacles give Colony as a Bildungsroman a decidedly humorous cast. While Johnston represents not without a certain admiration Smallwood's tenacious and protracted efforts to make a name for himself in politics and to take on the role of Newfoundland's champion, he also exploits the comic potential of a protagonist whose physical characteristics, social ineptitude, and unselfconscious, dogged ambition make him an absurd figure unsuited to anything but failure.

To facilitate this comic perspective within the overall structure of the Bildungsroman, Johnston grafts a fictional romance onto the biography of Joey Smallwood, casting a woman - Sheilagh Fielding - in the cynical, enigmatic, wisecracking role played by the father figures in his previous novels. In Colony, as the unlikely political messiah Smallwood struggles to lead Newfoundland to a glorious future, he also struggles to comprehend his tortured relationship with Fielding, his main political detractor and sometimes romantic objective. Johnston's fiction relies heavily on the device of gradual disclosure of secrets, and mirroring the narrative of Smallwood's protracted rise to political power is the piecemeal revelation of the truth behind Fielding's enigmatic, ambivalent behaviour towards Smallwood: that Fielding has been hiding from Smallwood her illegitimate pregnancy by Smallwood's adolescent rival Prowse. This secret, which initiates a series of intrigues that leads to Smallwood's expulsion from school, complicates the potential romance between Smallwood and Fielding, prompting a number of misunderstandings that keep the two characters at odds until the end of the novel, when Smallwood has already completed his rise to the top and has become the domineering dictator so despised by many Newfoundlanders.

Smallwood's reunion and reconciliation with Fielding at the end of the novel is also delayed by Smallwood's life-long obsession with politics and his desire to be immortalized: "It seemed to me that unless I did something that historians thought was worth recording, it would be as if I had never lived, that all the histories in the world formed one book, not to warrant inclusion in which was to have wasted one's life" (Colony 454). As Johnston observes of the historical figures at the centre of his last two novels, they "expended a great deal of psychic and moral energy trying to live up to the persona that they needed, or believed they needed, to accomplish what they wanted to accomplish" ("Afterlife"). In Smallwood's case that effort comes at the cost of his relationship with Fielding. After the series of ill-advised economic development projects that see Newfoundland's post-war surplus evaporate, replaced by a stunning debt, "all but destroying the country" he had set out to save (530), Smallwood becomes resigned to being unable, in his own political career, "to accomplish or create something commensurate with" (552) the greatness of Newfoundland. The end of this struggle, in which he has tried "to camouflage by great accomplishments my broken heart" (552), is mirrored by the end of his struggle with Fielding, a reconciliation that comes when Smallwood is at the peak of his dictatorial powers and that tempers his alienation from the people he sought to lead to the Promised Land. Hans Bak argues that it is "wryly appropriate that, in the end, Fielding stops her 'Condensed History of Newfoundland' just before the moment when Smallwood makes his appearance on the historical stage, but that the novel itself has meanwhile shown how Smallwood fits precisely into the rogues' gallery of cheating, exploiting, pragmatically expedient, duplicitous, compromising and self-aggrandizing politicians who, in Fielding's view, have shepherded Newfoundland to the point of abandoning nationhood" (228-9). However, it could be argued instead that their reconciliation has the effect of forestalling Smallwood's addition to that gallery. While Smallwood provides an abject lesson in how absolute power corrupts absolutely, his relationship with Fielding helps him to realize how his political ambition, his drive to make his mark on history, has warped his relationships with others and thwarted both his political and romantic dreams. Johnston's splicing of Smallwood's political history with this story of unrequited love thus introduces into the structure of the historical novel the Bildungsroman's concern with individual growth and social experience "as an education which forms, and sometimes deforms, that self," and which is usually followed by "some kind of adjustment to society" (Alden 1).

Marie Vautier has observed that Canadian historiographical novels reflect an abiding but ambivalent concern with nation building (25), and perhaps the most important dimension of Colony is the way in which the fortunes of the protagonists are shaped by the legacy of a history of colonialism. By introducing the self-reflexive and parodic strategies of historiographical metafiction into the structure of the Bildungsroman, Johnston turns Colony into a postcolonial allegory that questions Canada's and especially Britain's treatment of Newfoundland. A central part of Smallwood's political education is his growing understanding of the exploitative ambivalence of England's attitude towards Newfoundland, especially the mother country's historical support of a merchant elite whose accumulation of wealth came at the expense of the vast majority - uneducated, isolated, impoverished - of Newfoundlanders. Furthermore, it is particularly Smallwood who evokes the idea that it is "the very grandeur of Newfoundland geography which inspires anti-colonial delusions of nationhood," as Bak astutely points out (222). While Smallwood is portrayed as increasingly leaving behind his political apprenticeship in socialism, his advocacy of the initially unpopular cause of confederation with Canada develops as a pragmatic means of breaking away from England without foundering on the rocks of an unsupportable independence. His consciousness of England's historical responsibility for this hard choice and his occasional comic resistance to colonial condescension give his character a certain postcolonial resonance.

The primary source of Colony's postcolonial reading of Newfoundland history, however, is Sheilagh Fielding. While Fielding, in her role as caustic journalist, provides a subversive, ironic account of Smallwood's political career, in her Condensed History of Newfoundland she also turns upside down segments from D.W. Prowse's monumental A History of Newfoundland to facetiously dramatize the history of colonial exploitation and Britain's resistance to political autonomy for Newfoundland. Fielding's parodic history represents a brilliant solution to the challenge Johnston encountered in writing the novel of how to "include in the book the mass of knowledge a reader would need about the history of Newfoundland in order to understand and appreciate the context in which the narrative of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams unfolds" (Johnston, "My Treatment"), presenting that context in a hilariously tongue-in-cheek and compellingly postcolonial light. Facetiously siding with the English Protestant fishing merchants and celebrating England's advocacy of their cause and resistance to permanent settlement, Fielding implicitly dramatizes the history of colonial neglect and self-interest that contributed to Newfoundland's impoverishment and the subsequent forfeiting of its sovereignty. Furthermore, as Bak observes, Fielding's parodic historiography exposes the untrustworthiness of history: "the writing of history itself is seen as a con-game between duplicitous and blatantly falsifying documentalists, original versions waging war against amended, bowlderized, suppressed or otherwise fictionalized or apocryphal accounts" (231).

Thus, while Colony provides a ribald account of Smallwood's quixotic political career, it also underscores, like other contemporary Canadian historical novels, the legacy of colonial repression and disregard that shapes and distorts Smallwood's efforts to guide Newfoundland into the future. That legacy, moreover, also shapes and distorts his relationships with others - most notably Fielding. Smallwood repeatedly and unsuccessfully attempts to shut her out of his life, associating her with a past he seeks to shed: "I hoped I would at last be free of Fielding and the nagging tug of the past, my pointless preoccupation with things as they were not and never could have been" (452). Smallwood must carry with him the weight of the past just as must Fielding, whose romantic and professional fortunes have been shaped and restricted by the class structure and gender assumptions that Newfoundland's colonial history has cultivated and reinforced. Thus in Colony, Johnston modifies the Bildungsroman in order to fry some pretty big historical fish - not just the controversial, polarizing Smallwood but also the whole pre-confederation history of Newfoundland - emphasizing the crushing weight of history but also the crippling effects of trying to repress the past.

The influence of the Bildungsroman on Johnston's work, interestingly enough, is perhaps most evident in Baltimore's Mansion (1999), a memoir revolving around the effect on Johnston's family of the divisive 1948 referendum on confederation with Canada and particularly on the relationship between Johnston, his father Arthur, and his father's father, Charlie. Johnston's work is so thoroughly populated with father figures who are enigmatic in their behaviour and/or the source of much parodic humour that it's hard not to read his oeuvre without wondering about Johnston's relationship with his own father, and indeed Baltimore's Mansion explains much about the recurring patterns of Johnston's fiction. The portrait of Arthur Johnston in Mansion not only fingers him as the model for the eccentric, witty, and quixotic paternal figures who dominate Johnston's novels but also does much to explain the repeated pattern of solving family enigmas.

Mansion again relies heavily - indeed, obsessively - on the device of progressive disclosure of family secrets. Throughout the narrative, Johnston plays the part of protagonist, struggling to forge a sense of identity and social belonging by discovering the source of the rift between Arthur and his own father at the time of the referendum. After learning of the rift while eavesdropping on a conversation during a family reunion during the 1966 Come Home Year celebrations, Johnston at varying intervals over the next twenty years prods his father about the nature of the disagreement, which Johnston increasingly suspects has to do with the vote itself. As is usually the case with Johnston's fictional parents, Arthur's answers are partial and oblique, but gradually point to the conclusion that Charlie was a "closet Confederate" - one of those "who had outwardly opposed Confederation […] but in the secrecy of the ballot box had voted for it" (58) - in other words, the species for whom Arthur, a diehard supporter of independence, had expressed the utmost contempt.

In its obsession with Newfoundland's past and with the outcome of the referendum, Baltimore's Mansion provides an analogue to The Colony of Unrequited Dreams as a non-fictional meditation on what was and what might have been for Newfoundland, and Arthur is the central focus of Johnston's reflections on its "ghost history" (Mansion 241). In Colony, Fielding laments that "We have joined a nation that we do not know, a nation that does not know us" and that the "river of what might have been still runs and there will never come a time when we do not hear it" (560). Mansion very much sounds the same elegiac notes. In Mansion, Johnston describes a similar sense of loss and anomie in those of his father's generation who had supported independence: "Defeat came as an intervention. They had lost something they had merely hoped would last but something they had had no reason to think they would ever lose" (186). Arthur's bitterness is grounded in a sense of thwarted destiny, a refusal to accept the decision of the referendum: "his was the animating myth of many Newfoundlanders, the myth that the true king was always in exile or in rags while some pretender held the throne" (178). Parodically deploying tropes from Arthurian legend, Johnston depicts his father as the standard-bearer of the losing cause of independence: "He seemed to me no less a leader than his namesake, King Arthur, or Parnell or Cashin, all the more impressive for being, as each of them had been, the patron of a lost, just cause" (56). Nursing his bitterness long after others have resigned themselves to being part of Canada, Arthur still sees himself "as a man without a country" (176) by the 1970s. At the same time, however, in an ironic twist of fate, Arthur has ended up working for the federal fisheries, a role in which he comes to represent, to the kind of fisherman he and his forebears used to be, the very federal authority he has resisted since before the vote on Confederation.

Thus Arthur's life provides an allegory of the conflicted fate of Newfoundland: he reluctantly comes to accept the inevitability of a modernization and political subordination that effectively represents closing the door on an independent Newfoundland that is no more. As Arthur finally concedes at the end of the book, as he prepares to relocate to Alberta in the 1980s, "hoping that space would do what time had not" (229), the secret of the rift between himself and Charlie is no longer important, because the course of history is irreversible. Thus, Johnston writes, "There is no point, in his case, trying to remember, or in mine to imagine, how things used to be. No path leads back from here to there" (239). Arthur's departure, and Wayne's as well, marks a repetition of Lord Baltimore's archetypal abandonment of his improbable mansion in the 1620s, "the first casting-off, the first abandonment, the first admission of defeat" (260) in the face of the challenges of survival in Newfoundland.

However, while Arthur's quixotic struggle is the central focus of Mansion, equally important is the liberation that the resolution to this family enigma, and the acceptance of the verdict of history that it implies, provides for Johnston in his new life as a writer. As Johnston reflects upon returning to help his parents move, his own "abandonment" of Newfoundland has afforded him the distance on which his imagination can feed; he considers how "I have chosen the one profession that makes it impossible for me to live here. That I can only write about this place when I regard it from a distance. That my writing feeds off a homesickness that I need and that I hope is benign and will never go away, though I know there has to be a limit" (235-6). Like his father, he is consumed by an obsession with an imaginary Newfoundland: "I could tell him that I know as well as he does how it feels to crave what you can never have" (236). Thus Johnston is a literal exile, his situation paralleling his father's metaphoric exile. That literal exile, though, is portrayed as a much more constructive and positive ambivalence, giving Mansion an ending typical of the Bildungsroman, which characteristically concludes with the protagonist coming into maturity and finally finding his or her station in life. Though Mansion, in chronicling the history of this enigmatic rift in the Johnston family, rehearses much of the same history as Colony, however, its personal orientation mutes the postcolonial resonance of the text. At the same time, it nonetheless dramatizes the impact of the larger currents of history on the lives of individuals and the consequences of England's ambivalent commitment to Newfoundland.

In his latest novel, The Navigator of New York, Johnston once again adapts the Bildungsroman for the purpose of interrogating history. If The Colony of Unrequited Dreams marked a departure in Johnston's fiction by exploring Newfoundland's colonial domination by England, Navigator constitutes a further expansion of its range, extending its scope to the new empire, America. Johnston bravely plunges into the hypothermia-inducing waters of the controversy over whether Robert Peary or Frederick Cook was the first to reach the North Pole, inventing a fictional intrigue between the two American explorers, at the heart of which is Cook's illegitimate son, and Johnston's protagonist, Devlin Stead.

Once again, gradual disclosure is the novel's central device. Cook, in a kind of reluctant burlesque, piece by piece (or version by version) unveils to Devlin the tortured history behind his parentage and the deaths of his mother Amelia and erstwhile father Francis Stead, first in a series of remarkable letters Devlin receives while living with his aunt and uncle in St. John's and later after he travels to Brooklyn to reclaim his true father. What Devlin discovers from Cook's successive confessions is that his fortunes and his mother's have been thoroughly shaped and distorted by the ambitions of, and rivalry between, Cook and Peary. As in Johnston's previous fiction, the protagonist finds himself burdened by the past and the pressure of social expectations, growing up at the epicentre of a historical struggle and having to define himself while shouldering the weight of a history of which he is largely unaware. In Navigator, however, those forces, in the form of Cook and Peary, are associated with different facets of the emerging American empire. As a result, Devlin's coming of age takes on a great deal of allegorical significance. Marginal Newfoundland in the form of Devlin and Amelia Stead is sucked into the vortex of American ambition and progress, as Johnston shifts the focus of his fiction to explore America at the dawn of its imperial power.

If Smallwood engages in an ambivalent struggle with England as imperial authority, Devlin experiences an even more intensely conflicted relationship with its imperial successor. Pace Wilfrid Laurier, the twentieth century was not Canada's but America's, and The Navigator of New York portrays America in the process of voraciously taking possession. As Devlin moves to America and becomes Cook's protégé, he is initially awed by the juggernaut of progress that turn-of-the-century Manhattan represents. However, particularly courtesy of the observations of the sceptical and world-weary Cook, Devlin comes to recognize the duality and duplicity of American innovation. That ambivalence is most notably reflected in the contrast between the sympathetic Cook and his rival Peary, who very much embodies the arrogant imperiousness of the forward movement that characterizes both progress and exploration (it's hard here not to think of Damon Ira Chance, the megalomaniacal, frontier-obsessed film-maker of Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy). As Devlin discovers, Peary and Cook have conspired in the murder of Francis Stead - Cook principally to protect Devlin from Stead's retribution and Peary to protect his reputation, threatened by Stead's possession of compromising letters. While Cook is motivated by remorse and concern for others as well as revenge and self-regard, Peary is depicted as ruthlessly and egotistically duplicitous, concerned only with protecting his name and "forestalling" others in his quest for a place in the history books as the discoverer of the Pole. Thus the two men embody the ambivalence of the social and technological advancement of the new America, which is portrayed as an erroneous association of forward movement with vitality and improvement, masking a Darwinian fear of being upstaged or abandoned. As Cook reflects in a letter to Devlin, what animates American progress and exploration is a fear of "being left behind" (Navigator 138), rather than the pursuit of a clear and admirable ideal: "What it is that we pursue or might one day flee in panic from, other than nebulous 'progress,' I cannot say" (139).

Johnston explores the intersection between history and nation-building not only through Cook and Peary's competition for notoriety but also through Devlin's struggle with his own identity and past. Johnston's portrait of Peary suggests that he is motivated by a fear of being obliterated, effaced by time: "He imagines people who have never heard of him reading that, in his day, he was considered the man most likely to make it to the pole" (242). Devlin's attempts to shed his family's history lead to similar conclusions about the American myth of perpetual renewal. In St. John's, because of his mother's putative suicide and his father's eccentric career and enigmatic demise, Devlin is singled out and socially ostracized. People - including even his trusted aunt Daphne - constantly scrutinize his behaviour for signs of inherited eccentricity. This suffocating social attention reaches a peak after Devlin is marooned overnight on Signal Hill, the site of his mother's death, not while morbidly contemplating the past (as everybody presumes), but while excitedly contemplating a future of exploration with his real father, Frederick Cook.

Consciously evoking the myth of America as the immigrant's tabula rasa, Devlin hopes, by moving to New York, to put his career as "the Stead boy" behind him, to rise from the ashes of his Newfoundland background. Though unnerved upon his arrival by Manhattan's constant reconfiguration of itself, Devlin subsequently sees in the protean metropolis a model for his own reinvention: "The ongoing erasure of the past, the prospect of an unknown, unfixed future, appealed to me" (315). Cook, however, sounds a cautionary note that captures the allegorical quality of Navigator as a meditation on the ambivalent appeal of the new empire:

America, he said, was a country that, although young, paid tribute to its own heroes, not the long-dead ones of a mother country its citizens had never seen. Self-orphaned from an empire whose opinion of it did not matter to those few who knew what that opinion was. Tabula rasa. America had wiped the slate clean and begun again. Never before had a nation grown to greatness as fast as this one had.

"It is wonderful," said Dr. Cook. "Or terrible. I cannot decide."
(330)

Indeed, Devlin discovers the impossibility of "wiping the slate clean." Despite the promise of an "unfixed future," the past weighs as heavily on the present as ever, and he continues to suffer, like all of Johnston's protagonists, from the pressures of social conventions that require the sustaining of false appearances. If anything, those pressures are intensified in America, where the concern with social reputation is overlaid by the pressures of ambition, the achievement of which is reliant on the preservation of that reputation. This constrained liberation, as it were, points to the seductive illusion of the American Dream, the myth that all can attain what, in actuality, only a very select few will. As Cook himself points out, Americans are caught in a paradoxical, simultaneous belief in America as "a country of limitless opportunity for all" (285) and in the immutable force of hierarchical social standing, and Devlin finds himself hanging between these two poles.

Devlin's release comes in the wake of his father's admission that their discovery of the pole has been faked, as the ruthless campaign on the part of Peary and his supporters to discredit Cook gathers steam. In his final letter to Devlin, which marks their parting of ways, Cook justifies his decision to sever ties by suggesting that Amelia might have given in to her death out of a sense of despair for which he, having abandoned her to protect their respective reputations, was responsible. Cook suggests, in other words, that he had denied her the possibility of happiness and that he doesn't want to do the same for Devlin by tying him to his (Cook's) disgrace and also to his continuing, bitter opposition to Peary: "What I have begun with Peary must be played out to the end, but not at the cost of your happiness. I fear that, were we to continue our association, you would change for the worse in ways that nothing could repair" (481). Pierre Berton describes the historical Cook as "courteous, gentle, and apparently open" (586) but cautions against seeing him as the anti-establishment hero of the Pole controversy, because of his inconsistencies and incompetence in defending himself (622), and Johnston's Cook reflects a similar unreliability; nonetheless, his concern for Devlin distinguishes his behaviour from the compromising, Machiavellian self-regard of Peary.

Thanks to Cook's sacrificial breaking of their association and Devlin's meeting of his future wife Kristine, at the end of Navigator Devlin reaches an accommodation with the past and with his place in the world. He recognizes the truth of what he has seen in Kristine's eyes when they first met, "that, though I had been wronged, I should regard the past as past, there being no remedy for it but to keep it from determining my future" (292). While he resolves to retreat from the controversy, he nonetheless accepts the inevitability of his notoriety, but refuses to be defined or circumscribed by it:

I would prove myself, and though my part in all of it might never be forgotten altogether, it would fade and I would be allowed to make my way as Devlin Stead, who had had something to do with 'that Cook and Peary business.' It was something to hope for anyway. It was not as if I had a choice. The fame and infamy would follow me no matter where I went (470).

Devlin's retreat from the clash of ambition and reputation of "the Cook and Peary business" accords with Moretti's argument that the emphasis in the Bildungsroman is on "static integration," on finding a "place in the world" rather than historical disruption and dynamic conflict: "in the classical Bildungsroman the significance of history does not lie in the 'future of the species,' but must be revealed within the more narrow confines of a circumscribed and relatively common individual life" (35); thus, "one of the tasks of the Bildungsroman will be to show how pleasing life can be in what Goethe called 'the small world'" (36).

Navigator thus extends Johnston's historiographical adaptation of the Bildungsroman to a sceptical allegory of an emerging American imperialism. Johnston suggests that the American spirit of progress and renewal is double-edged - reflective of an admirable energy and capability but also of a continuing, pernicious obsession with social standing and of a desperate and ultimately futile denial of history. Berton observes that one thing the historical Cook and Peary had in common was "a desire to win at any cost, fair or foul. In this obsession, they were the harbingers of the new century - the American century - in which winning is everything and it matters not how you play the game" (614). Johnston's representation of the conflict not only similarly emphasizes the ruthlessness of exploration and progress, but also emphasizes the way in which that forward movement carries with it, rather than leaves behind, the crippling effects of social conformity. Throughout their competition to reach the Pole, Cook and Peary consistently preserve false appearances to sustain their reputations and appease their backers. Peary especially excels at the posturing, self-aggrandizement, and falsification of achievements that this effort requires. Exploration in Navigator thus becomes a kind of simulacrum, an expert manipulation of appearances, which has characterized Devlin's entire history and has finally thoroughly exhausted him. As a result, Devlin ultimately finds his place in life not by making a mark on history but by bowing out of this competitive pantomime.

The persistence of the pattern of the Bildungsroman and the centrality of unearthing the secrets of parenthood in Wayne Johnston's turn to historical fiction and family memoir gives his work a remarkable sense of unity and, moreover, suggests his preoccupation with defining oneself against the legacy of the past. The developmental struggles of the protagonists of all of Johnston's work dramatize the suffocating pressures of social convention and the perils of maintaining false appearances for social consumption. In his recent works, that struggle is shaped by historical figures and forces that represent extensions of imperial authority, whose activities profoundly shape the fortunes of Johnston's Newfoundland protagonists. Adapting the rough outlines of the Bildungsroman, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, Baltimore's Mansion, and The Navigator of New York allegorically dramatize inhabitants of the margin buckling, but refusing to collapse, under the weight of a history shaped in the centres of imperial power. In the process Johnston makes an important contribution to the burgeoning corpus of Canadian historical fiction and helps to demonstrate that there is much more to Atlantic-Canadian literature, as Wolfgang Hochbruck puts it, "than just the cradle CanLit outgrew to move westward" (10).

__________________
Works Cited

Alden, Patricia. Social Mobility in the English Bildungsroman: Gissing, Hardy, Bennett and Lawrence. Stud. in Mod. Lit. 58. Ann Arbor: UMI

Research, 1986.
Bak, Hans. "Writing Newfoundland, Writing Canada: Wayne Johnston's The Colony of Unrequited Dreams." The Rhetoric of Canadian Writing.

Ed. Conny Steenman-Marcuse. Studies in Comp. Lit. 38. Amsterdam:

Rodopi, 2002. 217-36.

Berton, Pierre. The Arctic Grail: The Quest for the Arctic Passage and the North Pole, 1818-1909. New York: Viking, 1988.

Gwyn, Richard. Smallwood: The Unlikely Revolutionary. Toronto:
McClelland,1968.

Hochbruck, Wolfgang. "Centre and Margin: Literature from the Maritimes."

Down East: Critical Essays on Contemporary Maritime Canadian

Literature. Ed. Wolfgang Hochbruck and James O. Taylor. Reflections
7. Trier: Verlag Trier, 9-21.

Johnston, Wayne. "An Afterlife Endlessly Revised." Unpublished interview with Herb Wyile. 11 December, 2003.
-. Baltimore's Mansion. Toronto: Knopf Canada, 1999.
-. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams. Toronto: Knopf Canada, 1998.
-. The Divine Ryans. Toronto: McClelland, 1990.
-. Human Amusements. Toronto: McClelland, 1994.
-. "My Treatment of History in The Colony of Unrequited Dreams."

boldtype: an online literary magazine 6.12 (2003). Accessed May 21, 2003.

-. The Navigator of New York. Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2002.

-. The Story of Bobby O'Malley. Ottawa: Oberon, 1985.

Keefer, Janice Kulyk. Under Eastern Eyes: A Critical Reading of Maritime

Fiction. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1985.

Minden, Michael. "Bildungsroman." Encyclopedia of the Novel. Vol. 1. Chicago:

Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998. 118-23.

Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso, 1987.

Slemon, Stephen. "Monuments of Empire: Allegory/Counter-Discourse/Post-Colonial Writing." Kunapipi 9.3 (1987): 1-16.

Vautier, Marie. New World Myth: Postmodernism and Postcolonialism in Canadian Fiction. Montreal: McGill-Queen's, 1998.

Herb Wyile Dept. of English Acadia University Wolfville, N.S. B4P 2R6 e-mail: herb.wyile@acadiau.ca Phone: 902-585-1255 Fax: 902-585-1070

Herb Wyile is an associate professor in the department of English at Acadia University and has published widely in contemporary Canadian literature. He is the author of Speculative Fictions: Contemporary Canadian Novelists and the Writing of History (2002) and is one of the editors of two journal special issues, Past Matters: History and Canadian Fiction (2002) and A Sense of Place: Re-evaluating Regionalism in Canadian and American Writing (1998).