Muriel Spark as Metafictionist

I just discovered that Brock Clarke's excellent article on Muriel Spark in this month's issue of The Believer is available online, and so hastened here to direct you to it.

I'm a huge admirer of Muriel Spark's work in general and of her first novel, The Comforters, in particular. And I've long thought that Spark's innovation as a metafictionist has been unjustly overlooked. Imagine my pleasure then to stumble upon Clarke's article and find him lauding that very aspect of Spark's work with a particular focus on The Comforters as well as the novel which followed it, Memento Mori.

Click here to read Clarke's article. I hope that it will pique your interest in The Comforters if you haven't already read it.

(Note: The image above is a portrait of Muriel Spark painted by Alexander (Sandy) Moffat in 1984 which is owned by the National Gallery of Scotland. For more information on it, click here.)

Questioning a Contradictory Review

In today's Toronto Star, there is a review that strikes me as rather contradictory by James Grainger of Lee Gowan's new novel Confession. The setting of the novel apparently moves back and forth between Toronto and the fictional town of Broken Head, Saskatchewan. On the one hand, Grainger criticizes the Toronto segments for reproducing stereotypes of urban Canada:

The Toronto scenes read like writing exercises for an Urban Alienation 101 course. Canada's biggest city is unwelcoming, smelly, a monoculture of empty consumerism and disconnected crowds – in other words, yet another in a long line of dismissive portraits of urban life brought to you courtesy of the Seriously Literary Canadian Novel.

But on the other, Grainger questions Gowan's portrayal of Saskatchewan for, at least in part, not sufficiently meshing with the stereotypes that he and fellow eastern Canadians hold of it:

The problem here is the novel's reliance on transplanted Southern Gothic literary conventions, none of which really takes root in the dry, cold countryside of Saskatchewan, where most of the novel takes place. Perhaps the Prairies are too freighted, at least for us Easterners, with associations of stoic farmers, grim Presbyterianism and the perpetual grind of hard work to stand in for the crime- and Jesus-haunted literary traditions of the American Pentecostal South.

Surely those associations of "stoic farmers, grim Presbyterianism and the perpetual grind of hard work" add up to no less dismissive a portrait of rural life and are just as much a product of the "Seriously Literary Canadian Novel" with which Grainger takes issue in the other passage that I quoted above? An odd move then to criticize the book for departing from them.

Myself, I'm intrigued by the prospect of a prairie gothic turn. With a foot firmly planted in both Saskatchewan (my childhood home) and Toronto (my current home), and as an admirer of Lee Gowan's previous work, I'm looking forward to reading Confession and arriving at my own assessment of his portrayals of both realms and, of course, of the novel as a whole.

A Modest Poetry Challenge

April is National Poetry Month in Canada and the U.S. and in honour of the occasion I’m proposing a modest poetry challenge. I don’t need a challenge to get me reading poetry. I read lots of it on a regular basis. But I don’t post about it very often. I feel confident of my capacity to distinguish between good, bad, and mediocre poems and to allot my reading time and book buying dollars accordingly. But I find myself at a bit of a loss when it comes to articulating precisely how and why I arrive at these judgments. I feel as if I don’t have an adequate critical vocabulary or a broad enough frame of reference when it comes to writing about poetry.

On the one hand, knowing my own limits and showing a bit of humility doesn’t seem like such a bad thing. But on the other, I recognize that poetry gets precious little review ink, and it seems almost irresponsible not to do my bit to spread the word about poetry that I think is worth reading. On the latter ground, I’ve decided it’s time to shelve my writing about poetry inferiority complex (no doubt related to my writing poetry inferiority complex) once and for all.

I know that some of you are avid readers of and articulate writers about poetry; indeed, some of you are accomplished poets. But in the grand scheme, while I see quite a lot of posting of poems on blogs, I don’t see a lot of posting about poetry, at least not in comparison to the plethora of posts that regularly appear about fiction and non-fiction titles. This leads me to believe that some of you may share my hesitancy to write about poetry and welcome a challenge aimed at moving beyond it. So, on to the challenge.

The challenge is simply to post about poetry at least once in the month of April. The post could be a review of a collection of poetry, a broader meditation on the work of a favourite poet, or a detailed analysis of a single poem. Simply posting a poem doesn't count unless you go on to say something about that poem. The idea is to dare to be critical (as in analytical, not necessarily negative) and venture an opinion.

No one need commit to this challenge in advance. Just let me know, via e-mail or the comments section below this post, when you make a poetry post and provide me with a link, and I’ll do a grand roundup at the end of the month. There will, of course, be prizes! Everyone who makes a poetry post will be eligible for an end-of-month book draw. If you make multiple poetry posts, your name will go into the draw drum multiple times thereby increasing your chances. I haven’t yet settled on precisely what the prizes will be, but I have in mind a number of fine contemporary Canadian poetry collections that would make a welcome addition to any library. So, go forth and read poetry and then share your impressions of what you've read with the rest of us!

Robert Lecker on the Responsibilities of Criticism

Robert Lecker on the responsibilities of criticism:

I began to see that there were responsibilities attached to criticism. If you were going to be really honest, you would have to show how the reading process could throw you off track, take you away from what you were supposed to be focusing on, run you around and around until you saw all the routes you could take that you weren't taking, all the things you should know that you didn't. You could keep all those inadequacies and detours out of the reading, or you could take the risk that maybe a few other people might be interested in the problems posed by reading, and not just the reading itself. For it was the problems that made the process interesting and valid as an aesthetic pursuit.

From Robert Lecker, Dr. Delicious: Memoirs of a Life in CanLit (2006).

Characters in Fiction

James Wood on characters in fiction:

Perhaps because I am not sure what a character is, I find especially moving those postmodern novels, such as Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin, Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or José Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, in which we are confronted with characters at once real and unreal. In these novels, the authors ask us to reflect on the fictionality of the heroes and heroines who give the books their titles. And in a fine paradox, it is precisely such reflection that stirs in the reader a desire to make these fictional characters "real", to say, in effect, to the authors: "I know that they are only fictional - you keep on telling me this. But I can only know them by treating them as real." That is how Pnin works, for instance. An unreliable narrator insists that Professor Pnin is "a character" in two senses of the word: a type (clownish, eccentric émigré), and a fictional character, the narrator's fantasy. Yet precisely because we resent the narrator's condescension towards his fond and foolish possession, we insist that behind the "type" there must be a real Pnin, who is worth "knowing" in all his fullness and complexity. And the novel is constructed in such a way as to excite that desire in us for a real Professor Pnin, a "true fiction" with which to oppose the false fictions of the overbearing and sinister narrator.

Click here to read the rest of Wood's very thought-provoking article. It doesn't say so anywhere on the article, but it seems likely that this is an excerpt from Wood's forthcoming book How Fiction Works (to be released next week in Britain but, alas, not until the summer in North America). If so, I'm even keener than I already was to read it.

The photo with which I've headed this post is an entry from my grade six "Language Arts" notebook. I unearthed it in my parents' basement not long ago and thought I ought to hang on to it as it seems to me to represent the beginning of my formal literary education. Of course, the true beginning dates back some years earlier to when I learned to read or earlier still to when my parents began to read to me. In any event, Mr. Wood doesn't think much of E.M. Forster's distinction between flat characters and round characters so perhaps it wasn't the best beginning. But then, where else would you start? Incidentally, is it common practice to offer up insights from Forster's Aspects of the Novel in sixth grade, or was my sixth grade teacher ahead of the pack? I always liked Mrs. Hawkins.

The Enduring Appeal of Robert Burns (on the Occasion of his 249th Birthday)

In a marvellous essay on Robert Burns in last week's Guardian, Andrew O'Hagan wrote:

… for all the epic Romanticism of Burns's life, his humanity and poverty, his passion and his genius, it is the sheer melodic truthfulness of the poetry that carries through the years. He feels and sounds like one of us, a modern person skidding constantly along the borders of the real and the imagined.

I couldn't have put it so well myself, but I whole-heartedly agree. To celebrate Robert Burns's birthday, which is today, I'm reproducing two of my favourite Burns poems below:


To A Mouse, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With The Plough

Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murd'ring pattle!

I'm truly sorry man's dominion,
Has broken nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!

I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
'S a sma' request;
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
An' never miss't!

Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's winds ensuin,
Baith snell an' keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste,
An' weary winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell-
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.

That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
Has cost thee mony a weary nibble!
Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the winter's sleety dribble,
An' cranreuch cauld!

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o' mice an 'men
Gang aft agley,
An'lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still thou art blest, compar'd wi' me
The present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e'e.
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!


Lines Written on a Banknote

Wae worth thy power, thou cursed leaf!
Fell source o' a' my woe and grief!
For lack o' thee I've lost my lass!
For lack o' thee I scrimp my glass!
I see the children of affliction
Unaided, through thy curst restriction:
I've seen the oppressor's cruel smile
Amid his hapless victim's spoil;
And for thy potence vainly wished,
To crush the villain in the dust:
For lack o' thee, I leave this much-lov'd shore,
Never, perhaps, to greet old Scotland more.

For more poems and songs by Robert Burns, visit this online archive which features a handy built-in glossary to assist the reader in deciphering the Scots words.

And don't forget to raise a glass to the Scottish bard tonight in honour of his birthday, whether your taste runs to "guid auld Scotch drink" or something less potent.