A land without poetry

In The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), Margaret Atwood (1939-) reimagines Susanna Moodie, the nineteenth-century poet and novelist, who enters the “large darkness” that is Canada and fashions her life as a reluctant pioneer. Atwood's Moodie finds herself “a word / in a foreign language,” an apt description of someone alien in her new environment and cut off irretrievably from her old environment of England. As she confronts her new home, she meets what she sees as an uncultured landscape awaiting transformation into a cultured world.

For the real Mrs. Moodie, who arrived from England in 1832, Canada was first and foremost a land without poetry. It was not until more than thirty years later that Edward Hartley Dewart (1828–1903) would publish the first anthology of Canadian poetry, Selections from Canadian Poets (1864), designed to “rescue from oblivion some of the floating pieces of Canadian authorship worthy of preservation in a more permanent form.” Casting a wide net that included most of the recognized poets of the period, including Susanna Moodie, he proclaimed that poets should be national heroes, though they would probably go unrecognized in such a young country as Canada: “if a Milton or a Shakspere . . . was to arise among us, it is far from certain that his merit would be recognized.” Canadians, he asserted, must be aware of the vitality and the significance of the poetic mind.

A challenge to representation

In 1801, the fur trader Alexander Mackenzie (1764?-1820), the first European to see the mighty river that would be named after him and the first to cross the North American continent, published a book about his travel experiences. Surprisingly, his account begins on a rather apologetic note. Do not expect any “variety” from my narrative, he told his readers, ticking off the challenges he had encountered along the way: “Mountains and valleys, the dreary wastes, and the wide-spreading forests, the lakes and rivers succeed each other in general description.” Even a trained naturalist would have found little to write about in this inhospitable terrain, which he and his men, raw-mannered coureurs de bois, had been forced to traverse with “rapid steps,” constantly afraid of “savages” lurking in dark corners.

Canadian drama in English has always mixed forms. From the late sixteenth to the mid twentieth century this hybridity has most often involved the use of European dramaturgical structures to appropriate and contain Canadian - what was then thought of as “native” - content. More recently, previously marginalized groups have reappropriated the dramaturgical tools of the master to dismantle, or at least effect major renovations on, the master's theatrical house.

Post-contact performances

The earliest English-language theatre in what is now Canada consisted of an intermixture of neoclassical forms with neo-romantic content, professional with amateur practitioners, and English with French languages (together with occasional pidgin representations of Irish, First Nations, regional, or working-class dialects). The earliest post-contact performances took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on occasions such as the variety show of music, Morris dancing, and Maygames (“to delight the Savage people”) performed in 1583 by the crew of Sir Henry Gilbert’s ship in St. John’s harbor. However English in content, these performances were dramaturgical remixes, shaped by what were understood to be the tastes of First Nations audiences “whom we intended to winne by all faire means possible” (Haies in Plant, “Drama in English,” p. 148). The combination of colonizing intent with hybridity of form is legible throughout the history of English Canadian drama, as European forms were revitalized by what were considered to be exotic New World settings and performative rituals, even as those forms served to domesticate the threats posed by the allegedly uncivilized other.

The last quarter of the twentieth century has been a profoundly autobiographical age with the personal narrative providing an important lens both on to history and on to the contemporary world. Narratives, productions, and performances of identity have begun to permeate and transform Canadian culture in every medium. Furthermore, personal narratives no longer depend on speakers belonging to dominant social groups but emerge with pride from minority positions, cultivate the value of undervalued experiences, and risk distinctly intimate subject matter. Because the personal is also expressed as political, recent life writing contributes explicitly to changing cultures and to changing understanding of personal, communal, even national identities. In short, quite apart from the range and quality of life-writing production in Canada since the 1970s, and the rich archives that contribute to Canadian history, life writing is now recognized as preeminent among the genres in which the evolving character and concerns of the nation have been and continue to be written.

“Discovery” and ideology

In their introduction to Walter Cheadle's Journal of Trip across Canada, 1862-1863 (1931), editors A. G. Doughty and Gustave Lanctot boldly declare that “[t]his is the journal of the first transcanadian tourist.” The editors are equally categorical about The North-West Passage by Land. Being the Narrative of an Expedition from the Atlantic to the Pacific, Undertaken with the View of Exploring a Route across the Continent to British Columbia through British Territory, by One of the Northern Passes of the Rocky Mountains, an earlier publication based on the trip and co-authored by Cheadle and his fellow traveler Viscount Milton. Doughty and Lanctot write that “in the title of the book, the tourist trip of the authors is raised to the dignity of an exploration. To it is ascribed a purpose of greater importance, probably as bearing a larger public appeal” (pp. 9-10).

Imagined geographies

Canada's vast distances, natural barriers, diverse patterns of settlement, and locally specific histories have led many commentators to see regionalism as a defining feature of Canadian culture. George Woodcock articulated a widely held view when he asserted that Canadian literary traditions have always been fundamentally regional, developing differently in different parts of the country. In the preface to The Bush Garden (1971), Northrop Frye stressed the importance of regions to the creative imagination, arguing that an imagination conditioned by prairie stretching to the horizon would develop differently from one shaped by the huge mountains and trees of British Columbia or by the churning sea around Newfoundland. According to these influential literary critics, the experience of living in a vast country of strikingly different landscapes has inevitably led Canadian writers to assert a primary imaginative allegiance to specific regions rather than to the whole country.

Setting down her title

“Setting down her title” This phrase, taken from a Canadian woman's novel written in the early 1970s, addresses the double issue of women's writing and its relationship to wider feminist questions of women's literary and political entitlement. It also marks a significant starting point for this chapter, which will focus on Canadian women's fiction in English since the late 1960s, the period when Canadian writing achieved high visibility at home and abroad. At the present time Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Carol Shields, who all started publishing in the 1960s and 70s, are names that are synonymous with Canadian writing internationally. In addition, since the early 1990s a constellation of new women writers, including many from a wide range of ethnic and racial backgrounds, has enormously diversified Canada's literary image, and these women's novels and short stories feature in increasing numbers on international publishers' lists. Why should this be? What is so distinctive about these writers? And what factors have contributed to their popularity and visibility?

Transformations of oral traditions

In September 1838, Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby), an ordained Ojibway Methodist minister, presented a petition to Queen Victoria from chiefs of the Mississauga Ojibway community at Credit River, where he had lived with his mother for the first fourteen years of his life. The petition asked that the Credit River community be granted the title deeds that would ensure their lands could never be taken away. Kahkewaquonaby had written the chiefs' message in the roman alphabet, and they had signed it pictographically with their clan emblems. Attached to the document were some strings of wampum that Kahkewaquonaby read for the queen, as well as delivering his own oral supplication in support of the chiefs' request. Consisting of three forms of writing, and two kinds of oral utterance, the petition was a multimedia event, not merely a written text that could be trusted to speak for itself. Kahkewaquonaby's bodily presence, dressed in buckskin and moccasins, was necessary to authenticate and authorize the petition, to witness that it had been received, and to guide the queen's interpretation of the document in a manner most likely to ensure a favorable outcome for the Credit River Ojibway community.

Narratives of community

Although the idea of a national essence has long been recognized as a fiction, national literatures continue to be set apart in university curriculums, and the nation, a concept blithely dismissed by many literary scholars, remains an international political reality. Indeed, Benedict Anderson has termed nation the “most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time.” The connection between the story of a nation and the stories written by its citizens may be highly problematic, but connection there undeniably is. History provides frightening examples of what happens when nationalism reduces people to a totalitarian mass, but it behooves the literary critic to remember also that it is not nationalism but rather the power of transnational corporations that today threatens to homogenize global mass culture. It is not hard to see why some version of the idea of a national literature lies intransigently, albeit often silently, at the heart of many of the hotly debated theoretical issues of the day. Any effort to pin down the concept, however, is destined to be an exercise in futility, and this will not be my aim here.

Old World aesthetic codes in New World space

A loosely chronological overview of Canadian literary production reveals a pattern of development that is a constant in national literatures everywhere, albeit more visible in postcolonial societies, namely an initial period of imitation or emulation of metropolitan norms, then a configuration or shift towards assimilation, and finally - in a desire to forge a distinctive national culture - a reconfiguration or revaluation of that which had been considered marginal. Writers in Canada, like those in other settler societies such as Australia, New Zealand, or the United States, have had to raise questions about authenticity, namely the suitability of employing inherited or imported literary and artistic forms for a new environment and experience. Grounded in the socioeconomic, geopolitical space of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century imperial relations, the earliest prose texts, generated by explorers, travelers, and settlers, were products of a British empire in economic and political expansion, manifest in the huge tides of emigration to Australia and then to British North America that occurred between 1805 and 1835.

Life of Pi: Reception of a Canadian novel

The nominees for the 2002 Booker Prize included three Canadian books: Carol Shields's Unless, Rohinton Mistry's Family Matters, and Yann Martel's Life of Pi. The news was welcomed in Canada with great satisfaction, but because none of the authors was born in the country, media at home and abroad launched an intense investigation of how to determine the “Canadianness” of a writer. Depending on the nationality of the commentator, these reflections ranged from the congratulatory and envious to the suspicious and defiant. The South China Morning Post described Mistry as “born in Mumbai but liv[ing] in Canada” and Martel as a “Spanish-born writer living in Canada,” although it did identify the American-born Shields as Canadian. Responding in the Toronto Globe and Mail, Charles Foran insisted that national labels must yield to creative identities because “their presence is the country” and “Choose Canada, and you are Canadian.” American and British papers alike ascribed these and other writers' remarkable success to the Canadian government's active deployment of literature as part of its Foreign Affairs portfolio and they praised its protectionist attitude towards the publishing industry.

From the outset of her career as a cultural nationalist in the late 1890s, Lady Gregory pursued and encouraged both pragmatic and visionary modes of nation-building. The work of restoring 'dignity' to Ireland required practicality as well as idealism, she argued in early essays, with 'adaptable, sagacious' real-world talents needing to be combined with otherworldly, transformative dreams if the country were to achieve both economic and imaginative self-determination. As a writer, activist and patron she consequently sought a balance between the 'real' and the 'ideal' in Ireland – counterpointing her promotion of Irish folklore and legend, for instance, by campaigning against British overtaxation, and encouraging the cause of agricultural organization amid her first flush of enthusiasm for Yeats's writings (Diaries, 147, 135-7). Her involvement in the Irish theatre movement epitomised this distinctive mix of pragmatism and idealism. Both her achievements as a playwright and her decades-long financial and directorial guardianship of the Abbey Theatre would be motivated by her conception of the theatre as a forum in which the practical and the visionary might be combined to effect lasting political, social and imaginative change.

Her participation in the theatre movement began, symptomatically, because of her practical skills. Though she had ‘never been at all interested in theatres’ before meeting Yeats, and at first collaborated with him only as a folklorist, she was captivated by and eager to help him realize his longharboured hopes for a poetic and romantic school of drama that might counter the rise of Ibsenite realism and the dominance of ‘commercial’ considerations in the theatre. During a conversation in summer 1897, when Yeats told her of Edward Martyn’s plays being declined by London managers, she responded by saying that ‘it was a pity we had no Irish theatre where such plays could be given’.

'Ideology' is not simply, though a thesaurus equates them, 'thought'; it can also refer to unconscious assumptions that place a boundary beyond which thought cannot go. The most influential definitions of the concept are those of Karl Marx: 'The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production,' and, more particularly, 'The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.' Such ideas 'rule' because it is only through them that a person can imagine a relationship to 'transpersonal realities such as the social structure or the collective logic of History'. Both the dominant and subordinate classes live within a historical thought-world, which holds all the thought the masters have and all the mastered get. 'False consciousness' is thus unconscious of all that is false in its picture of the world. The landlord class cannot see the tenant truly and the tenants can’t either; similarly for workers and employers and all other echoes of the master/slave relationship. Ideology is given glamour by the best minds that schools can educate, publishers can publish or money can buy. Seeking instruction or entertainment, people become willing partners in their own subjection. It is a sorry state of affairs as Marx describes it, this prison-house of ideology.

Throughout the twentieth century the Literary Revival provided a template for subsequent writers and theatre practitioners for decolonizing Ireland on the stage. The political idealism of the prerevolutionary plays of the Revival's founders could be judged only by the realities of postrevolutionary guerrilla and civil warfare. And almost as a continual act of unconscious amnesia, Abbey Theatre audiences, fed on a diet of 'jog-trot nationalism' and 'comfortable images of their own Irishness', decried all attempts to break away from naturalism as the dominant theatrical form. So entwined has political nationalism been with theatrical practice that Irish theatre has struggled to find deviant voices, or to find a form beyond heightened political and poetic rhetoric. Contemporary writers complain of the expectation laid on them to uphold the tradition of writing the nation. But while writers in Northern Ireland have not been afraid to reflect the everyday realities of armed struggle, in the Republic of Ireland writing on contemporary political realities has rarely been a major part of the theatrical landscape. The Abbey, by far the single greatest producer of new Irish plays, has always felt its ‘national’ tag as a filter for the issues of those produced. This part of its national project has been to expand the ‘canon’ in the mould of its founders, as well as to revive the early canon in a spirit of deference and national triumph.

Revivals are safe programming choices in times of economic hardship and thus O’Casey’s early Dublin plays came to be the mainstay of Irish theatre throughout the twentieth century while the poetic-allegoric work of Yeats and Lady Gregory fell out of favour and the repertory.

Since the mid-1990s Dublin's Abbey and Peacock Theatres, known formally as the National Theatre Society Limited (NTS) and since 1997 marketed under the title 'The National Theatre', have received approximately £2.5 million per year in state funding. Although occasional debates are held concerning the appropriateness of dedicating this amount of public monies to the NTS in relation to the funding of other Irish theatres, or in relation to other arts activities in the Republic of Ireland, more fundamental issues - such as the question of whether or not the state should support a national theatre in the first place, and the political implications of such support - are generally neglected. Accordingly, this chapter sets out to examine the history of the national theatre movement in terms of its relationship to the state before and after independence, and will consider especially the implications of state support for the role of the national theatre as a forum for social and political critique. My argument is that the determining power of the state is the Abbey Theatre's most important and revealing context, and that this also helps to explain certain dominant trends in twentieth-century Irish playwriting.

Clearly, a national theatre may fulfil many different political and cultural functions, but its primary purpose is to operate as a prestige site for the performance of a society’s representative dramatic narratives. Such an operation is useful to the authority of the state in so far as these narratives are designed to engender in their audience an atmosphere of unity and national agreement.

In Ireland place always matters. Unsurprisingly, place also matters in the plays of Brian Friel, widely regarded as the island's most successful contemporary playwright, both artistically and commercially. His best-known plays are set in or near Ballybeg (Baile Beag, literally 'small town'), an imaginary Donegal town with a significance in Irish literature comparable to the significance of William Faulkner's Yoknapawtapha in American literature. Plays not actually set there usually take place near by. His work maps the northwest corner of Ireland, an area of small towns and rural landscapes, sliced by the border partitioning the island. The plays also map the course of Irish concerns during the late twentieth century. Additionally they map internal, psychic realities of love, family, failure, and the struggle between faith and doubt. Friel picks up the challenge set by the hedge-schoolmaster, Hugh, in Translations (1980): 'We must learn where we live.'

Born in Co. Tyrone (Northern Ireland) in 1929, Friel moved with his family to nearby Derry in 1939. Following his graduation from St Columb’s College in Derry (also the alma mater of Nobel Laureates John Hume and Seamus Heaney), Friel attended St Patrick’s College, Maynooth (in the Irish Republic) and then took teacher-training courses in Belfast. For ten years he taught in Derry. In 1967 he moved six miles from Derry, to Muff, Co. Donegal (in the Republic), and in 1982 he moved further into the Republic, to Greencastle. Throughout the 1980s he was actively involved with the Derry-based Field Day Theatre Company.