Rhetoric(s) of Self-Definition in the Early Long Poem

C.D. Mazoff, Anxious Allegiances: Legitimizing Identity in the Early Canadian Long Poem, McGill-Queen’s, 1998. Pp. x, 174. $49.95.


 

Given that Canada’s most popular, arguably most important, Modern poet, E.J. Pratt, worked almost exclusively in the long poem, it is at least a curiosity of our literary history that extensive and intensive critical attention was not paid to the nineteenth-century long poem until the last few decades of the twentieth century. It has become chapter and verse of this recent, more broadly theorizing critical approach, to see in the anti-narrative, anti-historical, wholly aestheticizing Modern attitude the causes of this oversight. These prejudices formed part of the colonial mentality of such as A.J.M. Smith and F.R. Scott, who were apparently embarrassed by their compatriots’ continuing need to narrate poetically the variously accommodating stories of here, and to do so in a form at the other end of the spectrum from Poundean imagism. In a review format, it must suffice to mention only the "rejected preface" episode, wherein Smith and Scott wanted to use Pratt’s hard-earned cultural capital to sell their 1936 New Provinces anthology to Depression-wary publishers and readers but didn’t particularly want Pratt’s poetry or poetics. It wasn’t long poems per se that were the problem (of course not, as witness Pound’s, Eliot’s, and Dudek’s serial lyrics), it was long narrative poems that seemed to be making nothing new in language and thought (Frye dismissed nineteenth-century long poems as "versified rhetoric"), only laboriously piling rhymed couplet on couplet like bricking the walls of a garrison, or the institutions of a rising village. Postmodernist poets and theorists continued the programme of self-involved blindness to earlier virtue, like the family’s youngest who narcissistically see in their siblings fumbling attempts towards this present perfection. But at least this most recent misprisioning of literary history has had to be brayed forth in contest with the more historicizing, broadly based cultural criticism that began in the 1960s and ’70s to see in the long poems of nineteenth-century poet-predecessors (who might also qualify as James Reaney’s "dear bad poets") work that was valuable in its own terms, inspiring in some instances, poetically and culturally self-validating in all.

Dorothy Livesay, urged perhaps by residual socialist-realist impulses, was first to observe in the 1960s that the documentary-whose strategies and aesthetics nineteenth-century long poems pre-eminently display-answers to something of an enduring Canadian fetish for the facts. She, with help from Reaney, initiated the continuing interest in such endlessly fascinating long poems as Crawford’s Malcolm’s Katie. Poet Stephen Scobie, himself author of a highly accomplished long narrative poem, continued Livesay’s critical work in this direction. Another signal event was Michael Gnarowski’s publication of Three Early Poems from Lower Canada (1969), a book which spurred interest in such works as Oliver Goldsmith’s The Rising Village (as shown by a series of articles in Canadian Poetry in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s). Subsequently there have been a number of monographs and conferences devoted to the study of the Canadian long poem: the Long Liners conference at York in 1980 (subsequently published as a special issue of Open Letter), Smaro Kamboureli’s On the Edge of Genre: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem (1991), a Canadian long poem conference at the University of Ottawa in 1996 and the volume of its proceedings, Bolder Flights: Essays on the Canadian Long Poem (1998), edited by Frank Tierney and Angela Robbeson, and now the book under review, C.D. Mazoff’s Anxious Allegiances: Legitimizing Identity in the Early Canadian Long Poem (1998). Taken together, these studies constitute a promising indication of roused and sensibly continuing interest in the history of the Canadian long poem, of narrative poems whose unpacking is at least as fascinating as that of any other literary form or genre.

But as readers of Canadian Poetry know, it was not until David Bentley’s book-length study of the nineteenth-century long poem (and his numerous articles that preceded it), Mimic Fires: Accounts of Early Long Poems on Canada (1994), that there appeared a study to match Roy Harvey Pearce’s landmark survey of the American long poem, The Continuity of American Poetry (1961). Bentley brought to the study of the nineteenth-century Canadian long poem an encyclopedic knowledge of English poetry, standards of scholarship, editing and publishing that are unmatched for excellence and efficiency in Canada (and seldom approached elsewhere), an eclectic capacity for theoretical approaches, and a poet’s intelligence and sensitivity to verbal, technical, and formal nuance. So it is no slight to say that one of the best things about C.D. Mazoff’s Anxious Allegiances is that it recognizes Bentley’s achievement in this area, and that Mazoff does so both in his reliance on Bentley’s work and in the somewhat off-putting fact that his every third reference seems to be to Bentley. No question, though: it is commendable in a critic to enter an area so dominated by the daunting intelligence and scholarship of another. But Mazoff’s work must then suffer the question he knew would be asked: Does Anxious Allegiances add anything to our appreciation of the early Canadian long poem that is not available already in Bentley’s work? The answer is: Yes, some, but not a lot, and maybe not enough to justify a book.

Added to this reviewer’s regret (because I had looked forward to a fresh reading of the Canadian ong poem) is the fact that Anxious Allegiances appears to suffer from poor editing (not only the typos, errors and ghosts, such as writing The Deserted Village when the The Rising Village is intended, and referring in a note to "the present paper") but also in the coherence of the argument itself, which proceeds in a fashion that reads at times like jump-cuts; often, just when a discussion is getting most interesting, the reader is turned to something new in a lacuna-like, joltingly non-sequiturial manner. At such times, I could not shake the feeling that Anxious Allegiances may once have been a great thesis now badly ‘doctored’, as editors describe their acts of intervention.  I suspect that poor editing, or no editing, or an editor who didn’t or couldn’t encourage Mazoff to go further in his analysis, has done this writer-critic and subject a disservice. And one final note on production/format: the book is full of unnecessary footnotes (even the epigraphs are identified only by footnote), where the parenthetical system of referencing would have been much less distracting in such a thoroughly documented study.

None of the above is to say that Anxious Allegiances has no virtues, or that it is not worth reading. It has, it is. At the very least, Mazoff does some commendable recuperative work, introducing into consideration a number of long poems, along with his analyses of them, that had mostly been forgotten, ignored, or slighted. It is important to list them and their dates of publication, which I do here chronologically: Jacob Bailey, The Adventures of Jack Ramble the Methodist Preacher (c. 1787), George Manners, The Conflagration: A Poem about New Brunswick (1825), Andrew Shiels, The Witch of the Westcot; A Tale of Nova-Scotia, in Three Cantos (1831), Peter Fisher, The Lay of the Wilderness (1833), Arthur Slader [Sladen], The Conflagrations: Comprising Two Poems (1837), William A. Stephens, Hamilton (1840), James Knox Liston, Niagara Falls: A Poem, in Three Cantos (1843), Cassie Fairbanks, The Lone House. A Poem. Partly Founded on Fact (1859). And, note, these ‘lesser’ works are accorded some attention while the focus remains primarily on what have become the canonical early Canadian long poems: Thomas Cary’s Abram’s Plains (1789), J. Mackay’s Quebec Hill; Or, Canadian Scenery. A Poem. In Two Parts (1797), Cornwall Bayley’s Canada: A Descriptive Poem (1806), Adam Hood Burwell’s Talbot Road: A Poem (1818), George Longmore’s The Charivari; or Canadian Poetics: A Tale, After the Manner of Beppo (1824), Levi Adams’ Jean Baptiste: A Poetic Olio, in II Cantos (1825), Oliver Goldsmith’s The Rising Village (1825, which first edition Mazoff prefers, for unconvincing reasons, to the revised 1834 edition), John Richardson’s Tecumseh; or, the Warrior of the West: A Poem, in Four Cantos, with Notes (1828), Adam Kidd’s The Huron Chief (1830), Standish O’Grady’s The Emigrant (1841), Charles Sangster’s The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay (1856), William Kirby’s The U.E.: a Tale of Upper Canada in XII Cantos (1859), Alexander McLachlan’s The Emigrant (1861), Joseph Howe’s Acadia (1874), and Crawford’s Malcolm’s Katie (1884) and Hugh and Ion (n.d.; Mazoff speculates that the last was written simultaneously with Malcolm’s Katie). Of course, not all the major works receive equal attention (the text proper is only 127 pages), and none, after Bentley, is accorded sufficient analysis; but this very catalogue of recovered and canonical long poems nonetheless says something favourable about the extent of Mazoff’s interests and ambition, if not of his achievement, in Anxious Allegiances.

The best parts of the book are the Introduction, the historical introduction to the discussion of the long poem in ‘Acadie’, and the dating of and historical contextualizing of Crawford’s Malcolm’s Katie. But the value of the introduction, where Mazoff gives his purpose and asserts the worth of rhetorical analysis, is unfortunately devalued by the chapters that follow. What does the title, Anxious Allegiances, mean? That Canada’s nineteenth-century settler culture was "anxious" because always seeking legitimization vis-a-vis the Imperial centre. As many peoples have done inhumanely from Athenians to Nazis and from First Nations themselves to the former Yugoslavians, early ‘Canadian’ settlers sought legitimization by creating scapegoat others: French, Natives, Yankees, depending on whether they were developing their identities in Lower, Atlantic, or Upper Canada respectively. Thus Mazoff, here quoting Stanley Deetz, argues that rhetorical analysis "functions as a critique of ideology." Thus too: "an analysis of the rhetorical strategies found in the early Canadian long poem offers us, among other things, an opportunity to understand why and how early Canadian poets adopted and adapted certain poetic forms and not others in their attempts to convey their social and political concerns and resolve the quintessential Canadian conundrum, ‘Where is here?’" In executing such a study, Mazoff will proceed "to observe changes in the rhetoric(s) of self-definition, both regional and national, and to trace the developing dialogue between the various regions in British North America as they move toward a growing awareness of shared identity." To carry out this rhetorical analysis, Mazoff must introduce a cart-load of specialist terms, some of them established vocabulary among rhetoricians, some of his own making: "the rhetorics of honesty, privilege, empire, depravity, benevolence, filiopietism, and courtship and seduction," etc. These tools operated by this method of analysis will lead to "an increasing focus on the deconstruction of the [rhetorical] strategies themselves in the later part [of the book and] enable us to deal with the full implications of the rhetorical manoeuvres."

Well and good, one is tempted to say facetiously, if only the book that follows fulfills this somewhat bombastic promise.  But the ensuing study is mostly disappointing.  Readers familiar with the critical history of Mazoff’s subject might be tempted to recall what Bentley does with Cary’s Abram’s Plains and to compare that with what Mazoff’s new approach reveals: "An analysis of Cary’s rhetorical strategies, the orientation of his rhetoric, and his choice of subject matter clearly shows that he shared the ideology of the colonial élite and the rising middle class in early nineteenth-century Lower Canada." Or consider what Mazoff purports to reveal about the inexhaustibly evocative Malcolm’s Katie: "I will argue that Crawford’s use of the ‘commercial framework’ is so central to the poem that it brings into question whether Malcolm’s Katie’s is a poem that celebrates Canada’s pioneers and nation-building or a criticism of them." Quite apart from the questionable grammar of that sentence (and there is much bad writing in Anxious Allegiances), is there any Canadianist in the country who hasn’t been teaching the nation-building aspect of the poem this way for years? Furthermore, ‘insights’ such as these on Cary’s and Crawford’s long poems aren’t just old news to those of us who have read Bentley, they cannot really be insightful to anyone who has read the poems themselves with even moderate attentiveness.

In other instances, such as his analysis of Kidd’s The Huron Chief, Mazoff almost manages to impoverish a rich reading of another highly entertaining work.  Speaking of the poem’s centre of interest, the figure of the native, he concludes: "the sympathy toward the Indian in the poem is not only a fictional construct but also a strategic device: a covering rhetoric and substitute motive for the poet’s deeper intentions of self-legitimation and revenge, through which he had hoped to gain the reader’s sympathy for himself." I must confess to being baffled and irritated by this bloodless response to one of my favourite nineteenth-century long poems.  Mazoff does to Kidd what whites had long been doing to Indians: sees him motivated exclusively by vengeance (against Bishop Mountain, who is actually the figure of some punning fun in the poem). Forget the biographical fallacy and the blunt deconstructive rhetorical analysis, this kind of criticism amounts to little more than amateur psychologizing.  And not Kidd alone for The Huron Chief but O’Grady too must be subjected to irrelevant speculation regarding his motives for writing The Emigrant: "this leads to yet another realm of speculation as to O’Grady’s motives, for which there is, as noted above, ‘no satisfying answer.’ Two possible answers, however, do come to mind: either the man was a coward or, even worse, a liar." O’Grady is seen to be exercising "the rhetoric of ‘sour grapes’." The fact of mid-century Ireland’s "deplorable social and political conditions" is not seen by Mazoff as a fact at all, but rather as something O’Grady "would have us believe caused him to seek his fortune elsewhere." Mazoff’s own rhetoric of doubt, ridicule, and foppish affront ("either the man was a coward…"), particularly as regards these two Irish-Canadian poets, leads me to wonder, justified by the goose-gander principle of fair play, if perhaps when a boy Mazoff wasn’t abused by priests. No satisfying answer indeed.

As was suggested, Mazoff is informative and his study rewarding when he turns to the history of the long poem in Atlantic Canada, especially so in his presentation of the complex history of the Loyalists in that area. Consequently he performs analyses and reaches conclusions that are compelling and provocative of new readings, as well as justifying his opinions: "Given these historical conditions, it is difficult to refrain from passing judgment on the portrayal of the Indians as forest-dwelling savages, not only in [Fisher’s] The Lay of the Wilderness, but also in [Goldsmith’s] The Rising Village and Joseph Howe’s Acadia, where the depiction of the Indian differed enormously from the actual state of affairs." And, again, though Bentley has shown the ways in which the territorial appropriations of nineteenth-century settlers relied on legal premises for land tenure that derived, however self-servingly, from principles articulated by John Locke, Mazoff’s analysis contributes something particularly new to our understanding of what happens self-legitimizingly in the rhetorical realm after the powerful rob the weaker: "All of these rhetorical strategies have the same ends: to justify possession of a land that is already possessed and to make the original possessors appear as interlopers." That has an Orwellian ring to it, a directness and engagement for which Mazoff should have striven everywhere.

However, despite the overall value of his treatment of the Maritime long poem, Mazoff sometimes misreads in order to make his own deconstructive ideological point. He does so when he claims that Goldsmith’s entrepreneurial bent is proven by the fact that he "begins his description of the rising village itself with the Tavern, a place of business, [which] is a further indication of his priorities, which are confirmed as he moves on to describe a pedlar in terms that would be more suited to a missionary."  This is misreading in the old-fashioned Procrustean sense, because Goldsmith actually is at pains to describe the tavern as primarily a social site, a place providing some relief for the sympathetically portrayed lonely pioneers, and his tone in the passage is indulgently playful.  Similarly, Mazoff’s own biases sometimes tend to over-determine the contemporary relevance of his readings, as when he grafts contemporary attitudes onto his subject or transports his subject into the present, committing a sort of anachronistic fallacy: "For those familiar with the history of Canada’s Aboriginal peoples, it is becoming daily more obvious that our nation continues to manifest both approaches [rewriting native history or ignoring it]-for instance with the problem of residential schools, where rights, language and history were ignored, and the debates over the Great Whale project and Native land claims in general, where some attempt at recognition is at work, although the Native is still perceived as being in the way and as intransigent." I can respond only with a most uncritical: Whoa there. Relevance is relevance, but what are we talking about here, nineteenth-century long poems or why Warrior/terrorist ‘Lasagna’ should have head-butted the young soldier at the Oka barricades? But I suppose that’s just my rhetorics of depravity showing. Nonetheless, I might add that this kind of rhetorics of hurtle is both exceptional and typical of Anxious Allegiances: such unhistorical observations happen only a few times, while generally the argument itself is, as was said, replete with non-sequiturs.

Similarly, Mazoff interprets a questionably emphasized passage (emphasis his) from Kirby’s The U.E to establish "a degree of ambivalence about urban expansion"; suspects "that Kirby was unconsciously aware that something was amiss," and is clearly, to this reviewer, mistaking his own ecologically-minded ambivalence for "Kirby’s ambivalence." And Mazoff’s generally interesting deconstructive reading of Malcolm’s Katie makes the mistake Blake and Shelley made in reading Milton; which is to say, despite the poet’s deployment of energies, Crawford is not of Alfred’s party.  And it is not really "Crawford [who] depicts the clearing of the forest as a battle to the death," but a metaphoric war related from simple Max’s point of view, because Crawford’s vision is seasonal-cyclical, not apocalyptic. Nor in nineteenth-century Canada, where legend holds that a squirrel could travel from Windsor to Halifax without ever touching ground, would chopping down trees, which is what Max is about, be construed by the poet as "the destruction of Nature."

With these substantial qualifications in mind, then, it remains true that Mazoff’s subject, his thesis, his treatment of the Loyalist heritage and the long poem in ‘Acadie’, and some of his deconstructive rhetorical analyses are rewarding aspects of Anxious Allegiances. As well, his study is impressive for the categorizing way it distinguishes among the rhetorical strategies and tendencies of the long poem in Lower, Upper, and Atlantic Canada: that is new and useful. What remains unfortunate is that his rhetorical analysis sometimes leads him into realms of neo-Freudian/Lacanian psychobabble analyzing writers who purportedly represent a people’s identity crises by means of numerous rhetorical strategies that reveal as they conceal anxieties. The conclusion suffers especially in this regard.

 

Gerald Lynch