By Judith Fitzgerald Feb 20, 2008, 10:41 GMT
Ever get the urge to throw the book at its author?
Me, too, especially when the book exhibits all the signs of motoring under the influence of post-Hegelian romanticism intermangled with English idealism while huffing and puffing beneath the burden of neo-Marxist cultural materialism:
To wit, University of Calgary English professor Jonathan Kertzer's Worrying the Nation dawdles in the past lane, fails to remain at the scene of an argument and, most irritating of all, pretty much runs on empty put-put-puttering through ho-humdrum canon-fodder in five poorly structured and quote-flooded chapters investigating "the explanatory power of nationality as it figures in literature, in critical accounts of that literature, and in literary history . . . To study literature 'insofar as it is Canadian literature, and . . . a reflection of a national habit of mind' (Atwood, Survival) is to enter a theoretical thicket."
Undeterred, Kertzer clumsily crashes through that thicket, outlining the intertwingling of three competing discourses, "national +literary + history," enumerating various challenges to nationalist ideology (from regionalism, modernism, and cosmopolitanism to feminism, ethnicity, postmodernism, and post-colonialism) and forwarding the questionable notion that "a just public forum is now judged possible provided, first, that it is maintained 'on the basis of conscious coalition, of affinity, of political kinship' rather than 'natural identification' . . . and second, that its dialogic freedom is not regulated by some lordly, predetermined plan."
In illuminating what one is tempted to call godless indeterminism, Kertzer equivocates: "Nationalism and literature have long been eager but fractious allies. If nation building is an [sic] triumph of imagination so is nation deconstructing . . . Literature makes the nation both possible and impossible, imaginable and intolerable . . . [N]ational literatures owe their prestige to a romantic historiography that treats justice as the very principle of historical intelligibility . . . justness of justice is the adequacy of art to represent social and moral (in)adequacies."
Labouring under the logjam of Frygian taxonomy, inexplicably ignoring Marshall McLuhan's inestimable contributions to cultural scholarship and shouldering far too many extra-literary loads, Kertzer himself comes up a hair's breath short in the justice of intelligibility department, particularly in his failure to adequately define the role of the literary critic, the cultural theorist, and the social historian. To his credit, however, he candidly admits his critical position has "tacked back and forth" in opposition to whomever he happens to consider brood-worthy at a given moment.
Touted as "a critical fretting about the possibility of a national literature in Canada at a time when the very idea of the nation as a viable conceptual / literary category has been called into question," Worrying the Nation aims to establish "worrying as a scholarly form comparable to the essay, confession, anatomy, and survey. Worrying might be called a dogged engagement with the problematic. To worry at a subject is to consider it persistently in different ways, in a spirit of diffident concern. It is not the most enlightening style of criticism because it tends to be gloomy, but what it lacks in consistency it makes up for in tenacity."
"Tenacious" passages of "prolonged fretting" upon a nation-building enterprise beset by difficulties consistently dominate Worrying the Nation's middle chapters. Following rather dismal analyses of a trio of designated poetic failures — Oliver Goldsmith's The Rising Village, E.J. Pratt's Towards the Last Spike, and Dennis Lee's Civil Elegies — Kertzer steps on the gas exploring the socially viable novels of Joy Kogawa (Obasan) and Daphne Marlatt (Ana Historic) to illustrate the ways in which our literature has failed in its efforts at nation building. Paradoxically, he counter-claims, it succeeds by ascribing meaning and value to "urgent [issues] in current cultural thought, where people, ideas, and theories are all defined in terms of the communities that accord them power and legitimacy. In this view, meanings and values are produced collectively not individually. Even 'personal identity' is not singular but collective, the construction of gender, race, religion, textuality, and so on."
If notions of identity are now hotwired together under the 'hood of the collective impersonal, it is most assuredly not the fault of either the individual nor the community; rather, its widespread proliferation has allowed all sides in the ongoing disputation — from the French quasi-philosophers of the sixties through Guy Debord to Fredric Jameson and the Krokers — to acknowledge this fact as the throng's common ground: Those in power act; the remainder reacts; individuals become spectators in their own lives.
Most cultural theorists and social historians perniciously invest academic disciplines such as history and sociology with magical properties in the name of national identity; but, such strategies divert attention from both the creative act of imagination and art's intrinsic justification. Confusion arises in the clashes between romanticism's introspective individualism and modernism's self-obsessed isolation. Still, art, by definition, cannot function as a platform for propaganda, either in the name of the individual or the collective community, period. Dialectical materialism as an efficient social agency naturally degenerates into postmodern cultureless utilitarianism and, by extension, condemns art to servicing the dominant ideology of a given nation (or its various competing ideological illusions and / or realities).
Nonetheless, Kertzer motors on, maintaining "ongoing tensions will sustain the nation, as long as we feel they are worth worrying over, by providing a site where meanings can be contested" and concludes by offering up his "chief worry at and about the nation as a literary-historical category, as a principle of formal and social analysis, as a discursive function, and as a forum for sociability and poetic justice."
In "What Is a Canadian Literature?," John Metcalf argues that this country's literary tradition — our so-called canon — was generally "invented" by editors, anthologists. and "the faulty judgement of a few academics lusting after tenure." In Worrying the Nation Kertzer not only reinforces Metcalf's argument, he also proves that the postmodern demolition squadron — flanked by tanks of pseudo-historicists and quasi-cultural deconstructionists — resolutely crunches on, failing to recognise it long ago passed that stop sign receding in McLuhan's rear-view mirror.
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Canadian poet and literary critic Judith Fitzgerald's critically acclaimed Adagios Quartet's BOOK III: Electra's Benison has just been named one of The Globe and Mail's TOP 100 BOOKS (2007). The Almaguin Highlands resident is currently completing Leonard Cohen, Master of Song (Dundurn Press, Fall 2008).
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