Douglas Glover (Collected, So Far
Interview and reviews by MB (2000-13)
I first crossed paths with the work of Douglas Glover when I received in the mail his short story collection, 16 Categories of Desire (2000). I reviewed it for The Danforth Review, and so began my journey to be a Glover completist:
We can choose to see Glover's tales as predictive, or we can see them as a warning about the dark currents of desire. Or we can just see them as stories, good stories. Stories that feed the heart, and the mind, and fill all sorts of cracks in between.
I am pasting here below my own Glover completist collection (so far), which includes 2001 and 2012 interviews with DG I did for The Danforth Review and reviews of the following:
16 Categories of Desire (2000)
The Life and Times of Captain N. (2001, 1993)
The South Will Rise At Noon (2004, 1988)
The Enamoured Knight (2004)
The Art of Desire: The Fiction of Douglas Glover, Edited by Bruce Stone, Contributors: Bruce Stone, Louis I. MacKendrick, Claire Wilkshire, Lawrence Mathews, Phil Tabokow, Don Sparling, Philip Marchand, Stephen Henighan, Interview with Douglas Glover by Bruce Stone (2004)
Savage Love (2013)
For biographical details on Glover, see his Canadian Encyclopedia entry (of which I wrote a draft in 2010, later updated online by someone else) and his Wikipedia entry, which notes his remarkable online magazine, Numero Cinq (2010-17), and a list of contributors, including me.
See also his personal website… Also his Substack, Out & Back.
Glover won the 2003 Governor-General's Award for Fiction for his novel, Elle (2003), and was nominated for the same award in 1991 for this short story collection, A Guide to Animal Behaviour (1991).
Glover’s work includes short story collections, novels, memoir, essays, and what I’ve going to call literary instruction, which sounds drier than it is. I mean, how dull can a book about writing be when it’s called Attack of the Copula Spiders (2012)?
My own response to encountering Glover’s work was a strange (as in awe struck) recognition. I was trying to do something with my own writing and struggling to articulate what. Then I read Glover and I went, oh, that’s what I’m trying to do. Something along the lines he’d already figured out.
I didn’t write a review of Glover’s memoir/essays, Notes Home from a Prodigal Son (1999), but it had a profound affect on me, how I understood what I was trying to do, some new insights and some validation of old insights. I hope to explain more in a future Art/Life post.
For now, here’s the DG Collection (so far….
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Interview with Douglas Glover
[The Danforth Review, Summer 2001]
TDR: Your novel The Life and Times of Captain N. (Knopf, 1993) has just been released in trade paperback by Goose Lane Editions (2001). Are you self-consciously placing your work with (and/or moving your work to) smaller presses? Or does this move say something about your original publisher's support of this work? In your book of essays, Notes Home from a Prodigal Son (Oberon, 1999), you mention that your agent once warned you about the fate of your career. I wonder what the move of Captain N. from Knopf to Goose Lane says about how your work fits into the literary marketplace. Perhaps you could comment on your experience working with both large and small presses.
GLOVER: The Life and Times of Captain N. I sold myself, without an agent, to Alfred A. Knopf in New York. McClelland and Stewart later bought the Canadian rights from Knopf. And the way I sold the book went like this: Gordon Lish took a story of mine for THE QUARTERLY. I included that story in A Guide to Animal Behaviour (published by Goose Lane). At some point, I sent Lish a copy of the book to see if he could help bring that out in the U.S. He responded with his usual astonishing speed, asking me if I had a novel instead. I sent him the first fifty pages of The Life and Times of Captain N., and he bought it.
While my book was coming out, Lish's wife was dying of Lou Gehrig's disease and his son had assaulted him and he was on the outs with Knopf and its parent Random House. Soon after his wife died, Knopf fired Lish. I had no editor there; the book languished. I fell into my own period of desuetude going through a divorce and re-establishing myself afterwards. When I poked my head up again a few years later, I couldn't get a publisher or an agent interested in me. I'd become a middleaged, midlist pariah living on the wrong side of the border.
At this point old friends rallied round my bloody, tattered standard. John Metcalf at Porcupine's Quill, Karen Mulhallen at Descant, Philip Marchand, Liz Philips at Grain, and Kim Jernigan at The New Quarterly were most encouraging in a dark time. Dilshad Engineer offered to do my book of essays at Oberon Press. And Susanne Alexander took my book of stories and has now reprinted The Life and Times of Captain N. at Goose Lane Editions. I am grateful to them all. As a writer, I seem to be doing fine — books are coming out — though I notice I still don't have a career or an agent, and there is a marked scarcity of money in the environs.
TDR: I have been reading backwards through your catalogue, and it seems to me that your narratives often articulate the boundaries of different conflicts political, aesthetic, sexual, sociological, etc. simultaneously. You seem to be both seeking the appropriate terms to define a certainty and also never arriving at one. For example, in Notes from a Prodigal Son, you say about East German writer Christa Wolf: "She is saying that to be oneself, to feel oneself, to discover oneself, amongst all the conflicting messages, prescriptions and prohibitions of contemporary culture, is difficult, if not impossible, anywhere" (62). Similar sentiments repeat in The Life and Times of Captain N., which takes place in the context of the backwoods warfare of the American Revolution ("We Rebels & Tories & Whites & Indians are having a violent debate whose Subject is the Human Heart" (162). Your approach appears to be both sensible and relatively unique on the Canadian literary scene, which often frames its purpose in sociological terms (i.e., Canadian culture is necessary for national identity). Are you self-conscious about working against popular conceptions about what it means to be a Canadian writer? Is Canadian literature all it's pumped up to be?
GLOVER: The setting up of opposites as a mode of conjecture is, of course, the form of the aphorism. Kant uses a version of this in the sections of the Critique of Pure Reason called the Antinomies and the Paralogisms, where he juxtaposes apparently true but contrary propositions about the nature of reality and argues for both. Nietzsche wrote aphorisms. Adorno's gorgeous Minima Moralia is all aphorisms. The aphorism is an ancient ironic form, highly artificial, but with a bite. You can only write aphorisms in the attack mode, with a tone of arrogance. Here's one I wrote to a student who was complaining about having to learn aphorisms: There are two kinds of readers--the adventurers who glory in the breathtaking audacity and risk of a well-turned aphorism and the wienies who, lacking courage themselves, find it an affront in others. The Life and Times of Captain N. contains passages of extended aphorism called "Oskar's Book about Indians" in which oral cultures and literate cultures are opposed on a variety of verbal torsion points: e.g. history, memory, names, ritual, story-telling, books. Nietzsche called his aphorisms "Versuch" — "trials" or "experiments" — much the way Montaigne called his essays "essais". I think a person who writes from this rhetorical position is always on the outside of received opinion and traditional knowledge because nothing is taken for granted and all thought is conjectural rather than descriptive.
Whether Canadian literature is all it's pumped to be is not a question that interests me. On the other hand, there are some books written by Canadians I love.
TDR: In The Art of the Novel and elsewhere, Milan Kundera has argued that novels ought to do what only novels can do. He has argued that movies have made the 19th century-style realistic novel redundant, and claimed that most contemporary novels are a sub-genre of journalism. None of this, I think, pertains to your work, since you seem (like Kundera) to be interested in the history of ideas and their place, overt or subterranean, in forming individual identities and life-stories. For example, in Notes from a Prodigal Son, you return a number of times to the different ways readers approach literary works and how those approaches are often the cause of mis-readings. In particular, you're fond of Vladimir Nabokov's distinction between reading for aboutness and reading for artistic appreciation. Kundera might say that aboutness is what the movies are good at, and what serious novelists should somehow transcend. Could you explain Nabokov's aboutness/artistic appreciation distinction in the context of your own work particularly in terms of how you approach your writing both in the process of production and when you are attempting to explain it to readers/editors/critics?
GLOVER: I used Nabokov's distinction in an early essay though I find it a bit over-simplified and misleading. And even in that essay I built on the distinction to say that good novels deploy a wide variety of technical structures some of which promote verisimilitude (i.e. they seem to be about something) and some of which are more purely formal (structures of repetition, image patterning, subplotting, etc.) which tend not to be realistic at all. Every novel contains elements of both in a rough tension with each other. Experimental novels foreground structural elements or some playful or inverted version of them; so-called conventional or realistic novels foreground elements that promote verisimilitude. My argument is mostly against anyone who takes one or the other as being definitive — how sick I am of all those turgid, log- rolling arguments about whether novels should have ethical messages or whether they should be purely aesthetic confections. Most writers strike a balance that somehow suits their particular temperament. Why some feel called upon to climb on soap boxes and campaign for the primacy of their particular brand of novel-writing is beyond me.
My own work is tilted toward the foregrounding of repetitive structures. It's a kind of Ciceronian or embellished style, though occasionally I write something in the plain style, too, and I am always delighted. But I am also pretty sure I am writing about something when I write. The Life and Times of Captain N. is clearly about a set of ideas and a group of people during the American Revolution and some of these people really existed and even did some of the things I imagine them doing. But when you get caught up in arguments, especially critical arguments, you find yourself having to explain things to benighted individuals who want to oversimplify and make categorical statements, and you're forced to try to disabuse these people, not by responding in kind, but by being complex and ironic.
TDR: At the height of the Y2K anxiety a couple of years ago, American academic and media critic Neil Postman released a book called Building a Bridge to the 18th Century. In that book, he claimed that most of the ideas we should carry forward with us into the new millennium originated in the 18th century and that we should return our focus there before blindly rushing into the future. You had already done that years earlier in The Life and Times of Captain N., which contains quotations like: "I do not believe in God (old Europe, the King, loyalty, and authority) or reason (Locke's blank slate, history, atoms, laws, freedom, and democracy). To think that men can govern themselves is as idiotic as thinking they will forever bend the knee to someone better" (158). What was it about the 18th century that attracted you? Is Postman right to say that the conflicts of the 18th century still frame our debates today? You seem to concur with some of Postman's assumptions in Notes from a Prodigal Son, when you write, "literary feminism is the last gasp of the 18th century liberation philosophies" (37). Briefly, please explain.
GLOVER: If you look closely at the quotation you cite (which is in a character's head in a novel), it says Hendrick doesn't believe in either set of ideas, a state of mind which, to my way of thinking, is a sign of wisdom or madness though no external observer would be able to tell which. The succeeding sentences refer to the mystery of the human heart which, the text implies, is not accurately described by either set of ideas.
My sense of the history of ideas is that ideas thread through cultures and individual minds in hugely complex and playful ways. Human beings being what they are, we try to catch onto a set of ideas here and there, hold onto a branch as we float by (to mix my metaphors). The 18th century itself didn't attract me because I thought the 18th century ideas were appealing. It attracted me because there was a moment in history when narrative and aphorism seemed to combine in a way that I could write about in a novel. Also these ideas are still operative in the culture into which I was born so in seeing how they originated I was reliving something of my own mental makeup ab ovo. Perhaps that is what Postman means, but I wouldn't say these ideas frame our present debates any more than Plato or Aristotle or Duns Scotus or Augustine frame them. The idea of a frame is reductive. It implies the existence of something beyond the picture that explains the picture. I like those writers, historians of ideas, who track the threading of an idea through history or structuralists like Foucault who find traces of old social structures in the new.
TDR: In Notes from a Prodigal Son, you write: "My apprenticeship ended with the realization that the goal of literature is not simply truth, which is bourgeois and reductive, but a vision of complexity, an endless forging of connections which opens outward into mystery" (166). Perhaps you could briefly chart the progression of your apprenticeship, including the role "Mikhail Bahktin and his ideas about discourse and the dialogic imagination" (Prodigal Son, 37) play as an ongoing literary influence in your work.
GLOVER: My life has been an apprenticeship for whatever comes next, though I do periodically think I have reached some more definitive threshold of existence only to find later that it was just another painful learning experience (a lot of these). But in the process I find certain writers and thinkers to be companionable. Bakhtin, when I read him, seemed to be saying things that made sense of what I had been trying to puzzle out about writing and my life. As he says, language is war. Most of my life I've been fighting a war against the discourse of rural Tory provincialism, the Ontario miasma of my youth, and the various discourses that seemed allied with it: all sorts of conventionalisms, including all those perky new ones that keep popping up in the little villages of academic criticism and literary journalism. So much of what I say can be viewed as a moment in a battle: I am saying this is me and I am against that. It was a relief to read Bahktin who seemed to imply that I wasn't so dumb to feel embattled, that my sense of struggle, my dissatisfaction, even boredom, with certain ways of doing things, was natural. Bakhtin didn't show me something new, but he said everything again in a succinct and elegant way.
He also tied the notion of language as a battle of discourses directly to the form of the novel. This seemed like a very useful way of thinking about form. I don't mean that I think it's the only way of thinking about novel form. But it's very useful sometimes to look at form from a different angle. Instead of talking about characters, one can sometimes usefully talk about the habitual language games a character uses. Two characters using different language games will clash over everything including just how to describe their realities. They will fight over words. And then words like "love" and "translation" might begin to have interesting parallel definitions.
TDR: Who are some contemporary writers and/or books you're hot on? Why?
GLOVER: I don't read much newly published work. I have two children, two dogs, two rats, a cat, several money-making jobs, and I read what is necessary to keep me excited. I am reading David Copperfield to my boys. We just got to the lovely, sad part where David marries Dora and then realizes she is just a "child-wife" and not the "counsellor" and companion he had dreamed of marrying. Oh, my heart. I love Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers and the novels of Hubert Aquin and Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept and Robert Kroetsch's The Studhorse Man and much of Alice Munro and Leon Rooke's stories and John Metcalf's Adult Entertainment and his new Ford stories and Karen Mulhallen's (a fellow southwestern Ontario refugee) poetry, her brave and brittle romanticism. There are a lot of new Canadian writers I come across reading for Best Canadian Stories, some individual stories I admire immensely. I admire Milan Kundera, Christa Wolf, Peter Handke, Max Frisch, and Witold Gombrowicz. Which means, I guess, that I like literature that deploys a complex of ideas and inquiries about the nature of modern life and has already taken into account a good deal of current and historical philosophical debate. I also like Jeanette Winterson and Angela Carter--my love of the baroque and bloody whimsy, I guess. Then there are a number of so-called Third World or colonial or peripheral writers I admire — Narayan, Rushdie, Carey, Ruolfo, Tutuola, Cortazar — because I feel they are coming from a socio-political and imaginative universe parallel to my own. Any list here is incomplete, dodgy at best: I have a bookcase full of what I think of as important books, maybe a hundred. They keep changing.
POST-INTERVIEW INTERVIEW
BRYSON: I thought it was interesting that you said "Most of my life I've been fighting a war against the discourse of rural Tory provincialism," but when I asked you about being self-conscious about working against popular conceptions of being a Canadian writer, you didn't tackle it from this angle. Maybe it's too simple to say the two are connected. Do you see those things as connected at all?
GLOVER: Actually, it never occurred to me to connect the two ideas because the "rural Tory provincialism" I grew up with didn't even acknowledge the existence of writers and art, or so it seems to me. In other words, it operated somewhere beneath or beyond "popular conceptions of being a Canadian writer." In the world of my youth, a writer was someone like my great-grandfather who wrote patriotic limericks for the Mail and Empire or doggerel in a French accent in the style of William Henry Drummond while he managed the family store in St. Williams. That's why Hubert Aquin rings so true with me. I forget which book of his it's in, but he has a line about this country not being able to produce any real writers at all, just notaries and sickies like himself. Canada today is lucky in that it even possesses "popular conceptions of being a Canadian writer." I don't know if the philistinism I grew up with somehow threads its way through some of these popular conceptions. That might be an interesting idea to explore. But a lot of these debates amount to journalistic or academic log-rolling and aren't very useful in the long run. The struggle I was talking about in my case is much more personal and has to do with the place and time I was born into.
BRYSON: I see I haven't asked you anything about your most recent short story collection 16 Categories of Desire (Goose Lane, 2000). The way I read it, that book seemed to be an exploration of the different connotations of the word "desire" - but most significantly an exploration of the cultural inheritance of Romanticism. In a review in The Danforth Review, I called Mary Shelley a precursor. If 16 Categories is an exploration of desire in all its connotations, what did the process reveal to you?
GLOVER: When I was touring the Soviet Union in 1988 as a guest of the Soviet Writers Union, I met an older writer named Daniel Granin, who said, through my interpreter Alexei (who otherwise made his living delivering tapes for an underground video store in Moscow), "All my life has been an effort to liberate myself from love." This struck me as an odd idea at the time, though gradually it began to obsess me. Some version of this sentence recurs in three of the stories in 16 Categories of Desire. I wrote these stories as narrative experiments on the nature of love and desire. I don't think I am done with the subject yet, but in writing that book I began to see desire as dark stream of want pouring out of the abyss of the unconscious (the empty pit at the centre of the self). I don't claim this idea as original — I know it comes to me partly from reading Schopenhauer years ago.
Putting Schopenhauer and Granin together in my own head, I imagined desire as an endlessly unsatisfied craving eating its way through life; each of us is only a particular moment of the World Desire. Most of the conventional ways we talk about ourselves and love are cheery little fairy tales or dark, romantic hero stories meant to make us feel better as we pursue this course of metaphysical gluttony. By the logic of grammatical substitution, you get all sorts of interesting equivalents and paradoxes out of this: The Unconscious is unknowable and is thus equivalent to Death, so Desire originates in Death, and Love, which is an expression of Desire, originates in Death. To fall in Love is, in one sense, to devour the loved one. I could go on, but I think you can begin to see how some of the ideas in the stories develop. (Also, as you can see, my formulations run to the gothic. Your intuition about Mary Shelley was astute. But Robert Louis Stevenson is also iconic for me: the gentle, cultured doctor trying to ride herd on the shambling beast of desire he has created out of himself.)
The book also explores some of the ways particular expressions or styles of desire are created. For example, in "Lunar Sensitivities" I was thinking about the triangulation of desire, the way we acquire certain desires by watching what other people desire. In a way, the self is created by imitating the desires of others (who are imitating others). This is the way modern advertising works; it treats us all as if we were servants of Death, and what we like to romanticize by calling it personality is really just a copy of someone else's copy of....
Is there any escape from this? I don't think Schopenhauer really thought so. Nor did Freud. But in my own small way, I am a mystic. One begins by understanding the situation (Wittgenstein's fly in the fly bottle) and one begins to imagine modes of departure. Then oddly and paradoxically the word love comes back into play because love, in some constructs, is about leaving desire behind and simply attending (paying attention to, gazing at, looking at) to the loved object. Language, which itself sometimes seems to be part of the trap of life, contains words which exist on the edge of language looking out: love, gift, prayer, goodness, beauty, courage. In this vast nostalgia for what is beyond desire, there is some glimmer of redemption.
The idea of redemption keeps coming back. In The South Will Rise at Noon, Tully Stamper is comically redeemed in a mythic re-enactment of the death and rebirth of ancient gods. Phoenix imagery runs through the book. I know I was thinking then of the idea of grace, the idea that a god, for whatever mysterious reason, could reach down and touch a man so eminently unworthy as Tully. In The Life and Times of Captain N., Hendrick says that becoming an Indian would be like entering a swarming madness, but it might redeem you. He doesn't mean "going Indian" in any stupid back-to-the-land, romance-of-the-noble-savage way; he means having the courage to go right out of your self (personality, culture) and into the other. This is a kind of perfect love; the one ethical injunction espoused in the novel is "Love difference." And in the story "My Romance" in 16 Categories of Desire, there is a moment when the protagonist and his wife, destroyed by grief over the death of their son, fuse and redeem themselves in an act of love.
BRYSON: What are you working on now?
GLOVER: I'm writing a novel based loosely on the suicide of my great-grandfather who killed himself in 1914 in St. Williams, Ontario, ostensibly because he had been accused of sleeping with someone else's wife. He kept a store in St. Williams, called himself the village bard, wrote mediocre poetry, had two teenage daughters and a dog named Gyp, and I can't for the life of me figure out why he killed himself. In the Ontario Archives, I found the letter books belonging to the lawyer who was suing my great-grandfather for Criminal Conversation (what they called it in those days). There doesn't seem to have been any credible evidence of misconduct. So I am making up what happened. Like my earlier work, it contains threads from at least a half-dozen ongoing investigations: desire, love, redemption, Canadian history, myth and folklore, the nature of language. The working title is The Speaking of the Dead, but my working titles rarely make it to the cover of the actual book.
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16 Categories of Desire by Douglas Glover (2000)
[Review first appeared in The Danforth Review]
One of the definitions of good writing is that it demands good criticism. Easy praise is rarely earned, nor is easy dismissal usually fully justified. Douglas Glover's latest short story collection, 16 Categories of Desire, is a case in point. Against most standards it is an excellent, highly readable, complex construction of literary craftsmanship. And yet, what value do those accolades have without being attached to a critical examination of the metaphorical patterns which repeat with seismic regularity throughout Glover's 11 stories? Surely, little (or not enough).
And so, off we go in pursuit of a deeper criticism. The word "desire" in the title is a large clue, and a good place to start. A clue about what? The author's intentions? Perhaps, though we can move to a broader plane if we follow Barthes and kill the author. What patterns repeat in the stories? Patterns of desire. More specifically, patterns of desire which conjure adjectives like "dark", "Gothic", and "destructive." Mary Shelley is only one of Glover's obvious precursors. Margaret Atwood might be another, though Atwood's lovelorn tales nearly always smack of the overt subtext of contemporary sexual politics, a current less strained in Glover, though not wholly absent.
The extent of Glover capital-R Romanticism —and the vein is deep — makes 16 Categories of Desire a collection with a potentially lasting impact. It is, for example, eminently teachable. It is veritably awash with essay questions.
Compare and contrast Glover's depiction of a released mental patient ("Bad News of the Heart") with the monster in Shelley's Frakenstein (or with Wordsworth's madmen, for that matter);
Why do Glover's characters repeatedly say things like: "My entire life has been a struggle to liberate myself from love" ("Lunar Sensitivities")?;
Compare the emotional lives of Glover's characters with the one Goethe provides for his Young Werter.
Contrast the post-French Revolution politics of early-19th century England with the disillusionment of Glover's PR hack made rich by stock market fraud ("The Indonesian Client").
In short, Glover's 16 Categories of Desire is a good book because it tells compelling stories in clear, accessible language. It is an excellent book because it contains a recognizable rhythm of metaphor, imagery, and rhetorical purpose. It relates to a tradition of writing — and a tradition of thinking and feeling — which many people have absorbed and repeat without conceiving a single iota of consent or intent (often with self-destructive consequences).
It would be naive to believe that in Glover's view of the world we are all as doomed as his protagonists. We are not. We can choose to see Glover's tales as predictive, or we can see them as a warning about the dark currents of desire. Or we can just see them as stories, good stories. Stories that feed the heart, and the mind, and fill all sorts of cracks in between.
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The Life and Times of Captain N. by Douglas Glover (2001, 1993)
[Review first appeared in The Danforth Review, 2001]
Early last fall, TDR ran an interview with Douglas Glover. This review was meant to accompany that interview. However, it didn't get written until many weeks later. Life intervened (as life does), but something else happened, too. A kind of writer's block. Something closely related to fear. Fear of what? Fear of failure, yes. Fear of forgetting, also. Fear of forgetting something important. Fear of failing to say the right thing. Fear of not "getting it right."
More than perhaps any other, this is a review I wanted to "get right". In the end, I didn't get it done. And now I can only offer notes towards the review that should have been, but never was.
In short, I think this is more than a fine book. It is one of those books that sent a shock down my spinal cord. Readers should always approach books with high expectations, even though that usually means we are disappointed. Less often we are merely satisfied. Rarer still, we can say we read a book that startled and shocked us. This is the experience I had with The Life and Times of Captain N. I believe it is a rare book in the Canadian canon — and deserves a much higher profile that it currently commands.
Writers are often asked about influences. My thought is you find your influences through diverse reading. More specifically, the linear progression commonly implied when writers are asked about influences is misleading at best, and at worse, false. Your influences are the writers you are attracted you; they are your family of origin, even though you may not find them until you are well on your way to developing your own outlook on life — and your own literary "voice".
Such was my experience when I read Glover's essay in "The Masks of I" in The New Quarterly in 1999 (reprinted that same year in Glover's nonfiction collection Notes Home from a Prodigal Son, Oberon Press). Glover said things I had been struggling to articulate for my own. He referenced other works I had found important. And he used The Life and Times of Captain N. as an example:
The following is an example of precisely this kind of Procrustean pseudo-Jamesian criticism taken from a review of my own novel The Life and Times of Captain N. (my God, Percy! — four points of view, two of them the same person only years apart, interpolated essays on history and anthropology, dream images traveling back and forth between characters — absolute bloody chaos!).
What is "Procrustean pseudo-Jamesian criticism"? According to Glover, it's the kind practice by literary critics who hold that the novel ought to reflect a singular point of view, as articulated by Percy Lubbock in 1921 in a volume called The Craft of Fiction. As Glover notes (and as Glover practices), there is another school of thought that celebrates novels with multiple points of view, as articulated by E.M. Forster in 1927 in Aspects of the Novel. Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel is a later proponent of this school, as is the work of the Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin.
In an earlier editorial in The Danforth Review I made reference to Glover's TNQ essay. At the time (March 2000), I was ticked off by a review Andrew Pyper had written about Michael Turner's The Pornographer's Poem in The Globe and Mail. To use Glover's terms, I saw Pyper as a "Procrustean pseudo-Jamesian":
For Pyper, reading experimental prose is like a "wrestling match between 'straight story' and 'pure idea'." Pyper's use of the term "narrative pleasure" is a hint about the assumptions he brings to reviewing (and his own fiction, like the recent popular novel, Lost Girls). Another hint is the false conflict he sets up between "story" and "idea". Contrary to the assumption in Pyper's argument, stories and ideas are rarely, if ever, separated. Stories have been embodying ideas for millennia. In fact, it could easily be said the stories with the deepest ideas are the ones that survive the sands of time, while "narrative pleasure" reeks of Hollywood blockbusters, special effects, manipulative music scores, and plotting rigged to trigger the heartstrings of the sentimental.
Well, whatever. All of this is a lead up to say that making a case for raising the profile of The Life and Times of Captain N. also requires the promotion of a way of reading that is outside of the mainstream. Glover makes the case firmly in "The Masks of I". I won't make it again here —only reaffirm it. The Life and Times of Captain N. does represent four points of view, but it is not "absolute bloody chaos!"
What about the story? Here's an outline: The setting is the back country of upstate New York at the end of the American Revolution. War is raging, and Glover presents a multi-sided narrative that takes inside the hearts and minds of many of the players. One of the dominant players is Oskar Nellis, a young man who writes admiring letters to George Washington, but who is kidnapped by his father and forced to fight for King George's army. Oskar lives into old age, and the narrative includes parts of his "Book on Indians." Through Oskar, readers see snapshots of the multiple conflicts of that age (and ours?).
This is the point where I wish I had more to say, but I can only point to the book. Go there; find out for yourself. If you are a reader of literary books, please do yourself a favour and read this one. It ought to be a touchstone for a new generation of Canadian readers — and writers. Share the wealth. Pass it on.
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The South Will Rise At Noon by Douglas Glover (2004, 1988)
The Enamoured Knight by Douglas Glover (2004)
The Art of Desire: The Fiction of Douglas Glover Edited by Bruce Stone, Contributors: Bruce Stone, Louis I. MacKendrick, Claire Wilkshire, Lawrence Mathews, Phil Tabokow, Don Sparling, Philip Marchand, Stephen Henighan, Douglas Glover w/ Bruce Stone (interview) (2004)
Douglas Glover won the Governor General’s Award for fiction in 2003 for Elle. About that novel, the GG jurors said: "This headlong, intense interior monologue combines humour, horror and brutality with intelligence and linguistic dexterity to forge a revised creation myth for the New World."
Elle told the story of a 16th-century French maiden thrown off a ship in the Gulf of the St. Lawrence for sexual improprieties. Abandoned for dead, she manages to survive through the winter with the aid of local Native people. The following Spring, she is picked up by the crew of a passing vessel and returned to France, where she takes up with writer, monk and physician, François Rabelais (1494-1553), author of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Along the way, in the wilds of Canada and later, she [imagines she] is transformed into a bear.
And some people say Canadian literature is all about wheat fields and small town alienation. ‘Tis not so. Some of our writers, thank ye quivering quills, have managed to escape Canlit’s tradition of esthetic Calvinism: emotional restraint, naive realism, the victim-as-survivor metaphorical universe Northrop Frye called a "garrison mentality" and Margaret Atwood made popular in Survival, her "thematic guide to Canadian literature."
Sure, Elle’s protagonist survives, but her struggle is not a quest for self-definition in opposition to the natural forces lined up against her (as per Atwood’s representation of Susanna Moodie in her 1973 poetry cycle The Journals of Susanna Moodie, for example). Rather Elle revels in the comedy of an unlikely life (Glover has based the story, in part, on historical record). Elle is among that category of Canadian novels distinguished because they are rare: Novels that stem from a tradition of novel-writing that brings together narrative and ideas in a way that shows less concern for mimesis, or any attempt to mimic so-called reality, and instead foregrounds the artifice of art. In recent decades, this tradition has been called post-modern. In fact, it is way, way pre-modern. There is also another word for it: Rabelaisian.
Qua? Let’s look at the question from a different angle. In Survival, Atwood said Moodie in Roughing It In The Bush was determined "to preserve her Wordsworthian faith" in the beauty and bounty of the natural world despite "the difficulty she has in doing so when Nature fails time and time again to come through for her" (51). Atwood wrote: "If Wordsworth was right, Canada ought to have been the Great Good Place. At first, complaining about the bogs and mosquitoes must have been like criticizing the authority of the Bible" (50). Atwood gathered evidence to support her one-sided theory: To be Canadian is to be a victim, to be a Canadian writer is to struggle against imperial esthetics that are insufficient to communicate post-colonial reality.
A closer reading of Roughing It In The Bush, however, reveals that far from complaining about mosquitoes, Moodie inscribed herself as one who learned to "defy" the mosquitoes — along with the "black flies . . . snakes, and even bears" (329) — and milk a cow despite her fear of the beast:
Yes! I felt prouder of that milk than many an author of the best thing he ever wrote. . . . I had learned a useful lesson of independence, to which in after-years I had often again to refer (183).
If Canada isn’t the "Great Good Place," neither is it a void that makes victims of all of us. All it is, is a place like any other: A complicated mix of the comic and the tragic, the ordered and the chaotic; bound together by high-strung ideals and pulled apart by the need to face reality with a pragmatic frame of mind. It is, to borrow a favourite word of Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin, "carnivalesque." Rabelais would have agreed; variety is more than the spice of life; it's reality. Promoting any particular pattern minimizes the influence of phenomena that falls outside the pattern.
C'est Canada: A little bit of everything, as humourist Will Ferguson re-affirmed recently: "What I find most interesting about this country is its sheer variety" he told The National Post (October 20, 2004). In his works like Why I Hate Canadians Ferguson has probed this nation's popular mythologies. If Canada was build by giants, lumberjacks, courier de bois, railway men, arctic explorers, etc., who carved a country out of a wilderness (and, yes, pushed aside multiple First Nations in the process), why do Canadians at the turn of the 21st century tend to Canadians look back on their past and see midgets and victims? Why does Canadian history emphasize the country’s unimportance in virtually every area except international hockey?
Trolling the ‘Net of this subject, I found someone tackling similar questions: Our former Governor General, Romeo LeBlanc. Here’s an excerpt from a speech he gave while in office in 1996:
We all see Canada as a model of openness, tolerance, and generosity, a country of perseverance and progress. You have heard similar words before. Some would say they are clichés about our national character.
But there is a rival cliché. People used to talk of Canada as inward-looking, timid, anonymous.
Margaret Atwood found in our literature, French and English, a "sombre and negative" tone, and a preoccupation with mere survival. Northrop Frye, and I quote the Canadian Encyclopedia, saw in our literature "a 'garrison mentality' of beleaguered settlers who huddled against the glowering, all-consuming nothingness of the wilderness." I am sure he was not speaking of Toronto.
So we may ask -- what is our true nature? Generous and open, or a garrison mentality hiding from the world?
What is our true nature? Conflicted surely. As the soul of every nation can’t help but be.
An example from recent history. Some media commentators called George Bush’s November 2004 re-election "a decisive victory," but the popular vote split 51 per cent for Bush and 49 per cent for John Kerry. Even in Texas, 40 per cent of the electorate voted against the conservative, home-town hero. The headline of a recent column in The Globe and Mail by William Thorsell said it plainly: "America is a country still at war with itself" (October 25, 2004), though Andrew Coyne pointed out in The National Post on the day after the election that talk of a "divided nation" may be overblown. Isn’t that what elections are all about? Yes, but more importantly, that’s what the soul-life of a nation is all about. It’s our conflicts that unite us; the challenge to find common strategies to solve common problems that bond us; the impossibility of ever resolving all conflicts into a still point of unity that keeps our common story moving forward.
Which brings me (finally) to the book at hand: The South Will Rise at Noon, Douglas Glover’s 2004 novel that was also his 1988 novel (it has been re-released in a quality paperback edition by Goose Lane Editions).
As the title suggests, The South Will Rise at Noon is a novel about the American Civil War. Goose Lane’s marketing copy calls the novel:
. . . the first full-length embodiment of Douglas Glover’s famous historical imagination. Here, the past is a crazy pentimento that the present never completely conceals. Disarmingly intimate and energetic, The South Will Rise at Noon is wild and sad, hilarious and cautionary, farcical and strangely moving.
The first two sentences of the novel are:
Looking back, I should have realized something was up as soon as I opened the bedroom door and found my wife asleep on top of the sheets with a strange man curled up like a foetus beside her. Right away I could see she was naked.
Glover’s publisher summarizes the rest of the plot thus:
Tully Stamper, just out of jail, stumbles home to Gomez Gap, Florida, and into bed with his sleeping ex-wife and her new husband, Otto Osterwalder. Otto, a flamboyant movie director, has cast the townspeople in his melodramatic re-enactment of a Civil War skirmish, the Battle of Gomez Gap. Tully, a failed painter, a bankrupt, a liar, a drunk, and a flagrantly deadbeat dad, is also a modern-day knight errant who tries to win back his loved ones in the midst of the supposedly imitation battle.
The phrase "a modern-day knight errant" is an obvious reference to Cevantes’ hero, the mild lunatic of Don Quixote. Cerventes' life (1547-1615) overlapped briefly with the life of Rabelais (1494-1553). The former was Spanish, the latter French; however, their work has come down to us through the centuries mixed in spirit. If Elle is Glover's Rabelais novel, The South Will Rise At Noon is his Cerventes novel. Though if these broad generalizations mean anything at all, they only suggest that Glover draws inspiration from the broad tradition of the Renaissance humanists. Both Elle and The South Will Rise At Noon question how "story" (history) is constructed -- as does Glover's other novel, The Life And Times of Captain N., which takes place at the time of the American Revolution and incorporates the perspectives of the Loyalists, the Revolutionaries, and the First Nations in a swirling tour de force.
If Goose Lane is right — that The South Will Rise At Noon is "the first full-length embodiment of Douglas Glover’s famous historical imagination" — then we can expect to find across Glover's oeuvre patterns that were initially laid down in that 1988 novel. As I noted above, yes, those patterns are there.
To dig deeper, though, we must ask ourselves what that phrase means: What is Glover's "historical imagination"? What is he up to in these three novels?
The Enamoured Knight
by Douglas Glover
Oberon Press, 2004
"If you want to read the book, you have to read the book."
— Douglas Glover
The above quotation comes from Douglas Glover’s book-length essay, The Enamoured Knight (Oberon Press, 2004), on Cervantes’ great novel, Don Quixote. In his essay, Glover assails simple-minded critics who read the novel as an extended allegory that recommends reality over illusion, fact over fiction, the quotidian over flights of fancy. While Glover does say that Cervantes’ work is that strange thing, a book against books, he is clear that it is not another thing, a work of the imagination against the imagination.
In The Enamoured Knight, Glover returns again and again to critics who look into Don Quixote and see a world of either/or and argues theirs is a view too simple to be credible. To some, Quixote, the mad knight, represents the danger of the dream world, while his trusty friend Sancho represents the sane simplicity of the solid (real) everyday world of facts and mortgages. Glover shows the irony of that position: "If you want to read the book, you have to read the book." The words (facts) between the first page and last page of Don Quixote reveal a far more complicated world than the sentimental critics would have us believe.
Two recent reviews will help with the illustration.
First, the January 2005 issue of Quill & Quire included a review by Sarah Ellis of Tales of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, retold by Barbara Nichol. (That’s right, retold by Barbara Nichol.) Ms. Ellis wrote in her review that she
kept Nichol in abeyance for a week or so while [she] immersed [herself] in the original, a first-time read for [her]. As [she] meandered along with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, [she] asked [herself] what was potentially appealing to children about this narrative.
Ellis finds two items potentially appealing to children:
"the Winnie-the-Pooh factor. Don Quixote is a knight of very little brain and in this story the reader is always smarter than the hero"; and
"humour. Like a comedy smorgasbord, this story has slapstick, satire, puns, farce, guys dressed up as damsels, scatological jokes, and a particular form of post-modern Monty Pythonesque absurdity."
Mitigating against Don Quixote’s appeal to children Ellis counts "its length, confusing digressions, and the fact that many of the incidents don’t make any logical or emotional sense. [Her] most common reaction while reading was ‘Huh?’"
Well, well. Too bad so sad for Ms. Ellis that Glover’s The Enamoured Knight came too late. Though to be fair to Ellis, she does end her review advising readers "to consult the big fat original and have as good time as [she] did." Ellis also manages to identify in the big fat original "post-modern Monty Pythonesque absurdity" (a redundancy, surely). What she doesn’t get is that the "confusing digressions" are part of the scheme. As Glover points out, Cervantes has the narrator in Part II, which was published a decade after Part I, comment on the fact that readers complained about the digressions in the first published volume. (In other words, the digressions are ultimately part of the joke, but you need to read the novel as a whole before you can be in on it.)
Don Quixote is a book that comments on the fact that it is a book — and the fact that it is actually two books in one (Parts I & II). But the narrator also comments that the story has been recovered from other texts. The story is a story about telling stories. Of course, the most basic reduction of the plot line is that Quixote believes he is a knight acting out the plot line of a Romance novel. He is deluded into believing he is the hero of a book. But he is the hero of a book! Just not the book he thinks he’s the hero in! From this point forward, Glover points out, things become more complicated – and any attempt to reduce the novel to a simple plot can only be less than satisfactory.
Reader beware: "If you want to read the book, you have to read the book."
The Enamoured Knight includes, among other things, one of the best summaries of the history of the novel you'll read anywhere. An excerpt has been included on The Danforth Review.
Another excerpt is on The Globe and Mail website.
The second review I want to highlight here is The Globe and Mail’s review of The Enamoured Knight by Darryl Whetter (January 15, 2005). Whetter lauds Glover’s book-length essay, but ends his review with what he considers the essay’s paradox:
If, as Glover and company suggest, Don Quixote is indeed the progenitor of the novel, and if, as Glover assiduously points out, it is a novel more concerned with writing self-consciously about a fictional world than directly portraying that world, why has the vast majority of subsequent thinking about the novel preferred the latter to the former? If the novel didn’t begin with a "realistic" rendering of the world, why is it expected to do so now?
In actual fact — one is tempted to say "as Whetter would have seen if he had read the book" — Glover explicitly points out:
the novel followed several historical trajectories at once. While one kind of novel followed the path of conventional realism, what we might call an alternative tradition of self-consciousness, complexity, experiment, elaboration and playfulness has flourished simultaneously, though perhaps with leaner commercial success (88).
In my reading of The Enamoured Knight, I found Glover careful not to claim Don Quixote as the "first novel." I don’t believe this is the question that interests Glover. In an interview I did with him in 2001, I said I thought he was like Milan Kundera, in that he was "interested in the history of ideas." It was my attempt to ask him about "traditional" versus "experimental" novels. In response, he said:
My argument is mostly against anyone who takes one or the other as being definitive — how sick I am of all those turgid, log-rolling arguments about whether novels should have ethical messages or whether they should be purely aesthetic confections. Most writers strike a balance that somehow suits their particular temperament. Why some feel called upon to climb on soap boxes and campaign for the primacy of their particular brand of novel-writing is beyond me.
I believe The Enamoured Knight is consistent with the above quotation, and that Whetter has mis-read Glover’s book-essay on Cervantes’ novel. It’s not a matter of preferring one over the other. It’s about recognizing the novel-writing universe for the complexities that exist within it. If you want to understand the solar system, you gotta get out there and take photographs up close of Saturn’s moons. "If you want to read the book, you have to read the book."
In Notes Home from a Prodigal Son, Glover has an essay ("Masks of I") that outlines two opposing theories of the novel: one championed by Percy Lubbock in The Craft of Fiction (1921) and one outlined by E.M. Forster in Aspect of the Novel (1927). Glover shows the opposites do not need to negate each other. Novels are about making up things. In the make-believe world, we can co-exist quite unremarkably. As John Lennon said, "All you need is love."
As for Whetter's second question: "If the novel didn’t begin with a 'realistic' rendering of the world, why is it expected to do so now?" The answer to this is quite simple. The question is a red herring. The novel is expected to do many different kinds of things by many different kinds of readers. See quotations from Sarah Ellis's review above. Some readers are interested in how novels chart the history of ideas; others are more interested in the "Winnie-the-Pooh factor." This is also unremarkable.
Another quotation, this one from John Barth:
Traditionalist excellence is no doubt preferable to innovative mediocrity (but there's not much to be said for conservative mediocrity; and there's a great deal to be said for inspired innovation).
Finally on this quotation: "If you want to read the book, you have to read the book." What I think Glover is getting at is, read the book for what it is; don't try to impose one sets of expectations on a book that the book itself cannot sustain. Put another way: Dear Reader: Respect the author. Let the author take you on a journey. Surrender. Listen. Read with both calm and fury. . . .
And consider this! Consider the challenge I have set for myself: To answer the question, "What is Glover up to in these novels?"
I have read the novels, but have I read the novels?
Dear Reader: This is for you to decide.
The Art of Desire: The Fiction of Douglas Glover
Edited by Bruce Stone, Contributors: Bruce Stone, Louis I. MacKendrick, Claire Wilkshire, Lawrence Mathews, Phil Tabokow, Don Sparling, Philip Marchand, Stephen Henighan, Douglas Glover w/ Bruce Stone (interview)
Oberon Press, 2004
The blurb on the back cover tells you what you need to know:
The essays collected here are meant to help readers navigate the complexities of Glover's literary terrain. Taken together, they deal with the total oeuvre, suggesting something of the scope of Glover's work and the range of his vision, which is limited only by the imaginative capacity of his audience. In Glover, readers are uplifted by being introduced to other possibilities of being, transcending the common, the ordinary and the familiar.
In his essay, "The Problem of the Artist in 16 Categories of Desire," Philip Marchand, books columnist for the Toronto Star, writes:
Glover, along with Margaret Atwood and Mordecai Richler, has been part of a threesome of English Canadian writers who have a very strong comic and satiric bent, and have spent a lot of time meditating on Canada. ... Glover's meditations ranked highest on the scale of intellectual sophistication (130-131).
High praise indeed: Glover more intellectually sophisticated than Atwood and Richler. Hopefully I've articulated some of Glover's complexity in comments and quotations in the first two sections of this essay. For a quick illustration of Glover's dexterity of mind, I quote from the interview with the author that concludes The Art of Desire:
GLOVER: ... Language, it seems to me, is this wonderfully elaborated symbolic system for modelling reality which doesn't work. That's the pathos of logos (172).
"The pathos of logos." The tragedy of logic, might be one way to translate that. Glover elaborates:
GLOVER: Think about this. Books, like sentences and words, chop reality into bits. They offer a fantasy of closure. A good book ought to do away with that particular lie and abolish the end. So in Elle, for example, I enclose the book in another story. The second story — the one-eyed man, the children and their sand statues, the stolen boy — implies that beyond the book there is something going on that is inexplicable, morally alien and strangely recursive. The outer story is bigger than the inner story (172).
"The outer story is bigger than the inner story." If you want to read the book, you need to read many books, might be one way to translate that. No story is ever complete, might be another paraphrase.
Northrop Frye begins The Educated Imagination (1963) with a series of questions: "What good is the study of literature?" "What difference does the study of literature make in our social or political or religious attitude?" Then he begins to answer these questions, saying "The kind of problem that literature raises is not the kind of problem that you ever 'solve.'" All of this occurs on the first page. What I remember from The Educated Imagination is Frye's assertion that the order you read books will affect how you read them. That is, for example, if you read Orwell's 1984 before you read Martin Amis's Money, then you will understand the allusion Amis is making when he refers to "Room 101." But it's not just that, as a reader, you will understand individual points of story or metaphor — it's that the more you read, the more you ought to see the connections between all stories. "Intertextuality" is the lit crit word for this. Of course, Frye went on to argue that the Bible was The Great Code — but we don't need to follow him there to see the common sense of his earlier position. Which I bring up because, it seems to me, having a sense of intertextuality is essential to grappling with what's happening in Glover's novels.
Incidentally, I can't swear that Frye actually does say what I've suggested in The Educated Imagination. I flipped through my copy (read 15 years ago) and couldn't find that passage underlined. What I did find in my ancient scrawl was a quotation from Aristotle I'd written inside the front cover: "What is impossible but can be believed should be preferred to what is possible but unconvincing." I have no idea where that quotation comes from.
The Art of Desire: The Fiction of Douglas Glover: A quick overview:
172 pages
Editor Bruce Stone "first encountered Douglas Glover's fiction at a public reading given by the Vermont College faculty, a regular component of the residency sessions for that institution's MFA program" (7).
The Art of Desire consists of six essays, a short interview with Glover, and two introductory surveys of Glover's work.
The first survey is titled "A Writer's Guide to Douglas Glover's Fiction" and is written by Bruce Stone (pages 11-67).
The second survey is titled "The Fictions of Douglas Glover: A Preliminary Survey" and is written by Louis K. MacKendrick (pages 68-81).
The six essays explore different aspects of Glover's fiction. Briefly, the topics are
"voice," complexity of; Glover's innovative use of;
"meaningfulness" in Glover's fiction;
"ironic reconsiderations of Canadian/American stereotypes" in Glover's fiction;
"historical fiction" and how that term may or may not apply to The Life and Times of Captain N.;
"the problem of the artist" in Glover's fiction; and
the influence of Don Quixote on Glover's fiction.
For the purpose of example, here's the beginning of "La Corriveau," the first story of 16 Categories of Desire, Glover's 2000 short story collection:
I wake up the next morning in my little rented tourist flat on rue des Ramparts with a really terrible headache and a strange dead man in bed next to me.
First, let me tell you that nothing like this has ever happened to me before.
In bed with a dead man — never.
Often they may have seemed dead. You know — limp, moribund, unimaginative, sleepy or just drunk to the point of oblivion. But until now I have avoided actual morbidity in my lovers (11).
This fragment, perhaps, is enough to suggest how the core of Glover's fiction revolves around the essay topics listed above. Okay, let's set aside "ironic reconsiderations of Canadian/American stereotypes" and "historical fiction" for now. Those two topics aside, we are left with a compelling fragment of a woman's voice. Here is what Claire Wilkshire, author of the essay on "voice" has to say about that topic:
Reading strategies that favour voice reveal aspects of fiction that might otherwise remain obscure: the ways in which direct and indirect speech function both in characterization and in constructing the oppositions that create narrative tension; the complexity of the relations among figures (for example, the author, implied author, narrator and characters) and the points at which they overlap or separate; and the broad range of languages that combine to form that strange and variegated thing that is called narrative voice (82).
In her essay, Wilkshire examines Glover's story "Red" and suggests "to pay attention to voice is to expose the opposite characteristics that create character, the tensions and contradictions between utterances, to uncover the multiple voices at work within a narrative voice" (90). If you want to listen to the voice, you need to listen to the voices. Think, for example, about Hamlet, perhaps literature's most famous internally conflicted character. His representation of himself to others is inconsistent. He becomes the centre of concern in the Royal court. What's up with Hamlet? Perhaps, even now, it's impossible to say. What we can say is, the Prince of Denmark is working through his issues. The play dramatizes his anxieties. Within the play, meaning is highly unsettled. So it is in Glover's fiction, and the way Glover constructs character through voice is one way to examine his approach to fiction. In the fragment from "La Corriveau" the voice says "this has ever happened to me before." The shock of the unexpected situation repeats in Glover's fiction. In Elle, the main character is thrust off a 16th century French vessel and deserted in the Canadian wilderness. Kafka is often cited as a postmodern precursor because of the predominance of "dislocation" in his fiction. Glover's work explores similar themes — but I hesitate to link him too closely to the author of The Castle. Each is distinctive, also.
"Meaningfulness" and "the problems of the artist" are two other topics from the essays in The Art of Desire. They are closely related. Generally speaking, the problem of the artist is "how to make meaning" or "how to communicate something meaningful." But what is "meaning"? And if one understands meaning to be problematic, as Glover clearly does ("the pathos of logos"), then one's conception of art can only be problematic also. Though must ask, problematic for whom? the artist/writer? the audience/reader? all of the above?
In the "problem of the artist" essay, Philip Marchand looks specifically at the collection 16 Categories of Desire. He suggests:
the book's most salient theme [is] the figure of the failed artist -- a figure who showed up, in one form or another, in most of the stories. On re-reading the book ... I realized how much this failed artist motif was intertwined, in the stories, with Glover's characteristic meditations on Canada, and specifically on the relationship between English-speaking Canada and French-speaking Canada (130).
Here we might note that the themes of two of the other essays were "Canadian/American stereotypes" and "historical fiction." And also that the fragment from "La Corriveau" is spoken by an anglophone narrator in Quebec City. The title of that story is also, obviously, French, while the author is not. Again, we find ourselves talking about instability, the crossing of boundaries, and we are not far from discussing how language constructs realities which conflict in an innumerable variety of potentially dramatic combinations.
Indeed, Lawrence Mathews, in the "meaningfulness" essay, notes a 1991 interview of Glover:
Glover's conscious abandonment of "moral fiction" ... is neatly illustrated by Melissa Hardy's attempt to get him to talk about the significance of the fact that in many of his stories men leave women, or are about to leave women. Glover replies by saying that his primary concern is not thematic in this sense at all: "...it's simply a kind of game-playing -- you have conflict, and you don't have conflict in the man and woman agree on everything... when I put men and women on the page, I am thinking of strategies for generating plots rather than symbols." This sort of attitude leads Hardy to comment, later in the interview, "I think if someone were to adopt a critical stance to what you're saying, I suppose he would say, if Douglas Glover is just playing games, he's not writing from the heart, he lacks sincerity." Glover replies: "It depends what you mean by sincerity, I guess. If you mean, Does Douglas Glover sincerely believes in the factual truth of his stories? Is he sincerely advocating some political or ideological line? then I'm not sincere. But if you mean, Is Glover sincerely trying to make the most beautiful piece of writing he can?, then I'm sincere" (93-94).
The pathos of logos. Glover's fictions do not represent reality because reality cannot be represented. Language is a system of arbitrary signs. Stories are language patterns that repeat through time. Literature = beauty.
The fragment from "La Corriveau" is clearly not "realistic." The voice is comic, the situation exaggerated, the verisimilitude stretched beyond credibility. It is, thus, clearly a fiction — and a compelling fiction. Who doesn't want to know: What happens next? The situation is set; the voice clear, direct; the writer has his readers on edge; he has created dramatic tension; we're off to the races.
One critical note: if you want to "navigate the complexities of Glover's literary terrain," to my mind, first read Glover's essay collection Notes Home From A Prodigal Son. Then read The Art of Desire. Notes Home... presents Glover on Glover. The Art... presents others on Glover. And if you only read one thing, read (as I noted above) read Glover's essay in Notes Home... "Masks of I" — which outlines two opposing theories of the novel: one championed by Percy Lubbock in The Craft of Fiction (1921) and one outlined by E.M. Forster in Aspect of the Novel (1927). Glover shows not only that opposites do not need to negate each other and that novels are about making up things. He also says a lot about his own approach to fiction -- and his influences: notably Mikhail Bakhtin and Milan Kundera. Other influences noted in Notes Home... are East German writer Christa Wolf and Quebecois writer Hubert Aquin, suicide victim in 1977 and winner of the CBC's "Canada Reads" program in 2001 for his novel Next Episode.
In Notes Home... Glover says about Wolf's work:
She is saying that to be oneself, to feel oneself, to discover oneself, amongst all the conflicting messages, prescriptions and prohibitions of contemporary culture, is difficult, if not impossible, anywhere (62).
One could easily say something similar about Glover's fictions.
*
And it is here, once again, that we turn ourselves to the questions: What is Glover up to in his novels? What is Glover's "famous historical imagination"?
*
First, the territory under discussion, the novels:
The South Will Rise At Noon (1988)
In which a movie production invades a small Florida town to recreate a U.S. Civil War battle. Narrated by "a failed painter, a bankrupt, a liar, and a tippler of corn juice" (back cover, Goose Lane edition, 2004). The novel begins with the narrator recently out of jail bursting in on his naked ex-wife and her new husband: "Lust took me by the throat the instant I caught sight of those familiar tan lines" (3).
The Life and Times of Captain N. (1993)
Takes place at the time of the American Revolution in the Niagara Frontier. Partly based on real events. Henrick Nellis "a redeemer of whites abducted by Indians ... kidnaps his own son, Oskar, for King George's army. ... Oscar, haunted by dreams, ... tells this ambivalent tale of war and redemption" (back cover, Goose Lane edition, 2001).
Elle (2003)
Partly based on a true story. Chronicles "the ordeals and adventures of a young French woman marooned on the desolate Isle of Demons during Jacques Cartier's ill-fated third and last attempt to colonize Canada" (cover flap, 2003). The Island of Demons is Canada. The narrator, a teenage girl, is transformed into a bear. Or maybe not.
Now is the appropriate time to go back to the two essays in The Art of Desire that directly address historical elements in Glover's fiction. First, Phil Tabakow looks at "Canadian/American stereotypes" in Glover's story "Swain Corliss, Hero of Malcolm's Mill (now Oakland, Ontario), November 6, 1814." Then Don Sparling considers how the term "historical fiction" is commonly understood and how it may or may not relate to The Life and Times of Captain N..
Tabakow:
Douglas Glover's apparently tongue-in-cheek postmodernist short story from his 1989 collection A Guide to Animal Behaviour about a skirmish in Ontario between American frontiersmen and Canadian irregulars during The War of 1812 deconstructs with a surprising blend of deadpan humour and poetic imagery the enduring myth of the Violent American and the Peaceable Canadian (109).
Sparling:
Glover uses the American Revolution as a kind of paradigm for when "the modern view of history" begins, with the separation of the individual from the past and community (history) and the present and the surrounding world (nature). This kind of history is discussed by Oskar, who sees it as "a hypothesis about past events, cast in terms of cause and effect, based on evidence and stretching back further and further in time." In contrast, there are the myths and legends of the Indians, which "explain the world as if it had formed just yesterday. They are organized like dreams and, in retelling, become the collective dreams of a people." Oskar goes on: "By writing history down, we try to extend the explanation of the present deep into the past. But the savage, in his dreams, seeks to extend the present laterally, as it were, across the axis of time" (128).
Sparling concludes: "This extending the present laterally, across the axis of time, seems to me to be a major part of Glover's understanding of how contemporary historical fiction should work" (128).
Indeed, this concept of time on two axes is key to grappling towards an understanding of Glover's "historical imagination." As is an understanding of the differences between written and oral cultures, and the narratives of the powerful and the dispossessed.
Two of Glover's novels are set in the past (The Life and Times of Captain N. and Elle), but they are deeply concerned with concepts and "issues" that are starkly contemporary, while the other under discussion here, The South Will Rise At Noon, uses the conceit of a film set to pull the past into the present, or at least the 1980s, the present when the book was published.
Of course, any "historical fiction" could be said to work on two axes, since the reader always reads the book in the present and the action is always set in the past. But what Sparling is articulating about Glover's fiction is much more than the difference in time between the reader and the narrative action.
For example, when Tabakow says Glover uses "a surprising blend of deadpan humour and poetic imagery [to deconstruct] the enduring myth of the Violent American and the Peaceable Canadian," he's saying (wink, nudge) that Glover is writing against the Canadian Nationalist Impulse (CNI) that encrypts all Canadians at birth with the knee-jerk reaction: Canada, good; USA, bad. The CNI has been broadly credited with being a positive life force, especially post-1967, though it has waned since the Free Trade Election (1988), and flared in spikes now and again, most notably perhaps in the broad consensus against the U.S.-led War in Iraq II. CNI as a literary influence was cooled considerably since the 1970s, but there remains remarkably little Canlit that "complicates" the mythology of the nation's mother-milk. Glover's fictions, if they do nothing else, complicate inherited narratives. His stated influences (Aquin, Wolf) are dissidents, and Glover is perhaps Canada's leading dissident writer. While Atwood rails against the US Empire (an astonishingly easy target), Glover better than anyone holds up the mirror to our national camp tales. He is the mirror-holder, Canadian nationalism the smoke. Glover questions. He "deconstructs." He tells us "language ... is this wonderfully elaborated symbolic system for modelling reality which doesn't work."
Is this getting too complicated?
In The Last Honest Man: Mordecai Richler (An Oral Biography) ["by" Michael Posner], Richler is quoted saying, "The novelist's primary moral responsibility is to be the loser's advocate" (41). Richler surely believed that during the early stage of his career, when he was a loyal socialist, or at least well-schooled in Marxist influence (see The Acrobats). Marxism defines society as a narrative of class struggle. President Bush could have been an adherent when he said, "You're with us or you're against us." The Cold War was a Marxist construct, one the world is rapidly recreating. (Okay, bi-polar politics go back before Marx — but the point here is simple: one can see the world as "us" and "them", or one can see a world awash in ambiguity, measured by tools that don't seem to reflect the "reality" we experience or behave in the ways we expect.) Plato spoke of philosophy as a means to truth; Aristotle spoke of rhetoric as the available means of persuasion. Is there eternal truth? Or is there only the passing sands of time? Certainty versus uncertainty. The "moral responsibility" of the novelist versus "the pathos of logos."
Or as Glover wrote in Notes Home from a Prodigal Son:
My apprenticeship ended with the realization that the goal of literature is not simply truth, which is bourgeois and reductive, but a vision of complexity, an endless forging of connections which opens outward into mystery (166).
Glover follows Nabokov in rejecting the moral responsibility of art. But that doesn't mean he is on the side of the owners against the workers. He rejects the bi-polar nature of the proposition. As he told Melissa Hardy, his approach to his writing is to "sincerely try[] to make the most beautiful piece of writing he can." His approach, within Canadian letters, has caused confusion. Is he one of us or not? Is he picking fights or not? Specifically, Glover is not picking fights. He is respectful of different aesthetic approaches — he also challenges his readers to move beyond the over-simplification of categories most commonly accept as fact (e.g. Canadian nationalism is an unalloyed good). He is speaking from a high vantage point, articulating a historical perspective of the novel too seldom heard in Canadian literary discussions. As quoted above, here is Glover again on the history of the novel:
the novel followed several historical trajectories at once. While one kind of novel followed the path of conventional realism, what we might call an alternative tradition of self-consciousness, complexity, experiment, elaboration and playfulness has flourished simultaneously, though perhaps with leaner commercial success (The Enamoured Knight, 88).
Glover's book-length essay on Don Quixote makes clear not just his interest in, but his knowledge about, complicated narrative techniques, devices, patterns — and his engagement in the eternal struggle between the quotidian and the way people use language to create both the functional and dysfunctional mythologies that enable and disable their lives. Cervantes great protagonist might be history's greatest and best example. Though Glover's characters are superb contemporary Canlit examples, too.
What is Glover's "famous historical imagination"? Our histories are our stories, our stories are us, our stories make no sense, and neither do we. At least, our stories don't make sense in the ways we normally think that they make sense. (How does one "make sense"? Take a large pot, fill with water .... double, double, toil and trouble ....). (Is Glover our Shakespeare? No, that's someone else's essay. ...).
What is Glover's "famous historical imagination"? To my mind, it is most alive in The Life and Times of Captain N. , which convinced me that if Glover is not our Shakespeare, he is at least our Faulkner.
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An interlude, as we sputter towards the conclusion (from my 2001 interview with Glover):
TDR: I have been reading backwards through your catalogue, and it seems to me that your narratives often articulate the boundaries of different conflicts political, aesthetic, sexual, sociological, etc. simultaneously. You seem to be both seeking the appropriate terms to define a certainty and also never arriving at one. For example, in Notes from a Prodigal Son, you say about East German writer Christa Wolf: "She is saying that to be oneself, to feel oneself, to discover oneself, amongst all the conflicting messages, prescriptions and prohibitions of contemporary culture, is difficult, if not impossible, anywhere" (62). Similar sentiments repeat in The Life and Times of Captain N., which takes place in the context of the backwoods warfare of the American Revolution ("We Rebels & Tories & Whites & Indians are having a violent debate whose Subject is the Human Heart" (162). Your approach appears to be both sensible and relatively unique on the Canadian literary scene, which often frames its purpose in sociological terms (i.e., Canadian culture is necessary for national identity). Are you self-conscious about working against popular conceptions about what it means to be a Canadian writer? Is Canadian literature all it's pumped up to be?
GLOVER: The setting up of opposites as a mode of conjecture is, of course, the form of the aphorism. Kant uses a version of this in the sections of the Critique of Pure Reason called the Antinomies and the Paralogisms, where he juxtaposes apparently true but contrary propositions about the nature of reality and argues for both. Nietszche wrote aphorisms. Adorno's gorgeous Minima Moralia is all aphorisms. The aphorism is an ancient ironic form, highly artificial, but with a bite. You can only write aphorisms in the attack mode, with a tone of arrogance. Here's one I wrote to a student who was complaining about having to learn aphorisms: There are two kinds of readers — the adventurers who glory in the breathtaking audacity and risk of a well-turned aphorism and the wienies who, lacking courage themselves, find it an affront in others. The Life and Times of Captain N. contains passages of extended aphorism called "Oskar's Book about Indians" in which oral cultures and literate cultures are opposed on a variety of verbal torsion points: e.g. history, memory, names, ritual, story-telling, books. Nietzsche called his aphorisms "Versuch" — "trials" or "experiments" — much the way Montaigne called his essays "essais". I think a person who writes from this rhetorical position is always on the outside of received opinion and traditional knowledge because nothing is taken for granted and all thought is conjectural rather than descriptive.
Whether Canadian literature is all it's pumped to be is not a question that interests me. On the other hand, there are some books written by Canadians I love.
Ah, yes. What was I trying to get at there? A long preamble, followed by two quick questions. The second question got a short quick answer. The first question got an answer that is dense, though interesting, and, on the surface at least, beside the point. What was the point? The study of Canadian literature has tended to focus on definition ("what is Canadian literature?") and it has tended to canonize books that assist with the definition of Canada ("what does it mean to be Canadian?"). Glover's fiction, at times, seems to be intensely interested in these questions — Elle's narrator, for example, makes off-hand comments about the troubles of Canada, comments rife with complex humour — but, at the same time, Glover's narratives often (always?) resist reductive or definitive readings. "That's the pathos of logos." Glover's narratives are, to borrow his own words, positioned "outside of received opinion and traditional knowledge because nothing is taken for granted and all thought is conjectural rather than descriptive."
If Canada is the world's most post-modern country, a con-federation (a country conned into believing it's federated) — a country that not only embraces multiculturalism, but is made up of multi-nations — (and it is) — then Glover's fiction, more than the fictions of anyone else to date, entrances us with beauty, opens us into mystery, shows us that we can be our stories and take them apart, too. But we must take them apart, if we are to keep them alive, if they are to keep us alive.
The book is called The Art of Desire for a reason. Desire is the affirmative response to life. It is also the cause of heartbreak and misery — and the core of stories. Desire sets up expectation, narratives fulfill or deny that expectation. In The Enamoured Knight, Glover wrote powerfully about the role of desire in Don Quixote and other novels. Desire provides the narrative stickiness in Glover's work that verisimilitude, perhaps, might provide in the work of other writers. In a world where, as Glover says of Christina Wolf's fiction, "to be oneself, to feel oneself, to discover oneself, amongst all the conflicting messages, prescriptions and prohibitions of contemporary culture, is difficult, if not impossible" — is a world where language does not work — desire is perhaps the universal glue. It is the still point around which all else turns.
Glover on desire:
It's occurred to me that human nature is paradoxical in relation to difference and identity. We all want to stay home and be comfortable and yet we're also drawn to love, exploration and translation. We go back and forth, or some of us are more one way than the other. Change can be awfully irritating. ... And if you're not ready for it, you curl up and die. ... Sometimes redemption is just an intrusion. ... And sometimes, when you crack out of yourself and really see the other, you become a better person (The Art of Desire, 172).
Glover defines redemption as "being brought back, pulled out of, rescued -- it gets you out of one place and into a different place. Difference is the operative word. Redemption means changing yourself" (169). It means, I think he's saying, to be made interesting. Staying within oneself, never challenging oneself with the stories of others; this is not interesting; this is heat-death; this is "the end of history;" this is ideological purity and the NHL lockout and all things wrong with the world. Desire forces us out of ourselves, to confront others, to live, be made interesting, redeemed. This is the core of Glover's famous historical imagination. The past is never past, said Faulkner. Glover goes one better. Not only is the past in the present, but the present is in the past. The confrontation between the two is to the redemption of each. Hallelujah!
More Glover (from the story "16 Categories of Desire" from book of same title):
Mama, I say one time, why it so hard to get a man to do you? Seem like it ought to be a simple thing. Say come here fella and bathe me in your jets of sperm. Mama pretend she don't hear me. And I ain't found a man yet man enough to respond to that particular request. I miss Sister Mary Buntline, who would be laughing now. She say her snatch was a miracle, the eighth effing wonder of the world and a proof of God. I say, Mama, Sister Mary Buntline some kind of saint. And Mama sniff and say Sister Mary Buntline end up married to an ex-priest named Leonard Malfy and three rat-face apostate children running a AIDS clinic in Seattle. Boys, I say, that sure sound bad all right. Sound like Hell on earth. It sound like pure-d evil all right. Jesus. Married with kids and a job. What sane decent woman would want that?
This passage is not only terrific prose, it shows how Glover uses desire to set up expectations in the reader, then confound those expectations in interesting ways. At the beginning of the third section of this essay, I quoted Glover — "The outer story is bigger than the inner story" — and suggested intertextuality was key to understanding his approach to fiction. In the end, I didn't say much about that, specifically, but I want to reinforce that point here: "What sane decent woman would want that?" Why is this funny? Because we've heard echoes of it before. If we are readers, we hear echoes of all stories in all other stories. As readers, we are open to the mystery that fiction invites us to participate in. In The Enamoured Knight, Glover showed how stories fit within stories in Don Quixote. The process of story-making, in Glover's fictions, in all fictions, has no end. If you want to read the novels, read the novels. Read all of the novels. All novels. Turn off the computer. Read.
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Have I read the novels? Really, I'm not quite sure. Maybe I'll go back. Start again. ...
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TDR INTERVIEW (2012)
The following interview with DG was published on The Danforth Review, March 12, 2012, and focused on DG’s Attack of the Copula Spiders: And Other Essays on Writing (2012).
I must start with, what's up with the title?
The title of the book is also the title of one of the essays which is about writing sentences, especially paying attention to verbs.
I found a while ago that if I could circle all the instances of the verb to be on a page of student writing and connect them up in a spider diagram (copula spiders), then I could teach the student something concrete about improving the prose by showing him how to rewrite some of those sentences using active, interesting verbs.
I quote from some of letters to students (acerbic, comic). I think I actually manage to make writing sentences sound exciting.
Can you please provide a summary of the book's content?
The book is a sequence of essays beginning with two pieces on novel and short story structure. These are followed by a couple of essays on sentences that gradually lead to larger issues of form (its complexity, formality, artificiality).
Then I segue into a series of essays that are meant to show readers how to read good writers for technique and structure. "How to Read a Mark Anthony Jarman Short Story" or "The Mind of Alice Munro." Also novels by Leon Rooke, Thomas Bernhard, Cees Nooteboom, Juan Rulfo, and more.
I close with a couple of essays about novels in a larger, more philosophical context. One explores the relationship between novels and history and truth, the other talks about endings and what I call the comforting lie of art (which the best writers try to reveal).
The second essay in the book is called "How to Write a Short Story: Notes on Structure and an Exercise." Besides discussing plot, image patterning, thematic passages and time control, I also give an exercise that offers a stripped-down short story paradigm. It often seems to help student writers get their bearings inside the mysteries of the craft.
Does the book outline your personal approach to reading, re-reading, or whatever we now call the act of criticism or engagement with literary production?
On a certain level this book is about the act of reading. Really what I am pushing is a critical aesthetic that is a bit like New Criticism and a bit like Formalist criticism but to my mind as a writer just seems reasonable and immeasurably expands comprehension. You read the book or story and pay some attention to how it's put together and, beyond the illusion of story, you suddenly engage with the text on a whole other, rather exciting, level of rhythm and meaning. You begin to SEE connections that hitherto you vaguely passed over supplying your own dreamy connotations (as you're taught to do in high school). We're at a moment in our culture when differences in the ability to read and comprehend a text are crucial.
And I can't remember the moment when I invented the phrase copula spiders, only vaguely remember circling over and over again all the to be verbs and then NOTICING that I could really make a diagram out of this and the diagram could look like a spider (with far more legs than it should have). The real issue, the shocking point, is that when you teach writing you are basically teaching the same student over and over again. It doesn't matter whether the student is writing nonfiction or fiction or that the student thinks the burning piece of paper in your hand is the next War and Peace because he has put his heart into it and it comes out of his own original personal thoughts and is DIFFERENT (he believes) from anything ever written before (or in the future). The shocking thing is the uniformity of mediocrity. The shocking thing is that intelligent adults can't think of another verb to use (actually most students jog along with a verb repertoire of about five: to be, to look, to sit, to stand, to see--absolutely the most popular verb choices).
The crucial connector here is to realize that part of the reason proto-writers don't notice they are doing this is because they don't know how to read. Eighty percent of what I do every semester is teach students how to read like writers, that is, with attention to structure and the intensities of well-written prose. So the two aspects of my book are necessarily joined: you can't teach people to write simply by telling them what they are doing wrong; you have to show them where it is done right, that is, you have to show them how to read.
What have you been up to recently? What are some short stories (either singles or collections) that you've particularly enjoyed recently?
Last week I was in New York at the Center for Fiction to give a reading and a craft class. The craft class was on novel writing, based on my essay "How to Write a Novel" in Attack of the Copula Spiders. It's on Youtube.
Also at the Center for Fiction, I gave a little 5-minute reading, micro-stories. That's on Youtube as well.
Right now I am working mostly on a novel. The stories I am reading are mostly re-readings. Isaac Babel, Mark Anthony Jarman, Chekhov (I just went through "The Duel").
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Savage Love by Douglas Glover (2013)
[First appeared in Music & Literature, October 22, 2013]
Instability recurs throughout Douglas Glover’s new short story collection, Savage Love. As the title suggests, love (or at least desire) is the dominant theme, but it is a love so unstable, so rife with conflict, so twisted against itself, that it shakes the confidence of its moorings. This is not love patient and kind, nor slow to anger; it is not a love that leads to calm plains of the soul; it is not the kind of love that will help you achieve satori, young bodhisattva. It is the kind of love that Toni Morrison once described as “one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy at the same time that he shot her just to keep the feeling going.” In this book, Glover takes us far, far out into a vast sea of imaginative possibilities, shadows, violence, and twisted logic. There is a persistent questioning of the real consistent with his post-modern precursors, but there is also a disappearance into myth and mystery, which isn’t a denial of the world in a swirl of signifiers, but an embracing of its ultimate instability. It is a world that is knowable in fragments; it’s just that the fragments keep falling apart. Glover has always embraced the absurd, but he’s more grounded in facts than Kafka — witness the unlikely and extremely intriguing title of an earlier short story, “Dog Attempts to Drown Man in Saskatoon.” Glover’s catalogue of opening sentences would nearly make a book on its own. He is a master at setting up the awkward and the curious, often romantic, situation that demands explication. The frisson of desired transcendence lost in repeated failure veers seemingly inevitably toward catastrophe. Carol Shields used to say that Alice Munro’s stories don’t end, they swerve into mystery. Glover’s stories enter mystery early and never leave. Readers are drawn along for the journey on slipstreams of luminescent prose.
Glover’s previous short story collection, 16 Categories of Desire, built into its title the author’s persistent interest in explicating desire as narrative strategy. The push and pull of what we want from each other, and the inevitable conflict (and often humour) that results is a repeating characteristic of Glover’s work. The title also makes obvious the diversity of experiences linked to that emotion. Here’s a line from the title story of that earlier collection: “She say the Lord invented the orgasm so people would make babies but it one of those inventions that got away from Him.” And here we have another persistent Gloverism: the sense of being out of control and existing in a world of the inexplicable and the chaotic. The stories in Savage Love continue in this vein. The stories growl off the page, as if read in the voice of an octogenarian Delta Blues master or one of the more recent Bob Dylan protagonists. As in many Dylan songs, these are stories “after the flood.” These are not stories of millennial angst, fearful of a coming apocalypse. Glover is a writer aware that chaos has long been loose in the world. In Savage Love, Glover takes us where Shakespeare takes us in “The Tempest,” into our imaginations, all the better to understand “we are such stuff / as dreams are made on.” The imagination holds clues to meaning, if only fleetingly.
In the second story, “Crown of Thorns,” we are told about Tobin, eight, who fell in love with his babysitter, an emotional attachment that affects the course of his life. Define his life, in fact. Such an insensible thing, an unplanned thing, could only make sense, become beautiful, in a Douglas Glover story. When he is eight, the babysitter is dismissed after Tobin’s mother catches the boy’s father erotically entwined with the paid caregiver. Tobin imagines the girl is killed, and so begins years of therapy and trauma response. The boy’s hurt is exaggerated beyond the point of being ridiculous, but then again, is it? The disturbance of our attachments can lead to absurd consequences; on that point the story is clear. On the other hand, while it may strain credulity, the logic of the story must make sense to us as readers, if only on an intuitive level, or else we would dismiss it as not worth reading and crazy. Glover’s artistic achievement here is to push us into the grey zone where “told reality” is both more weird and more meaningful than common sense allows. The real is not real; it is a story; but only through story can we know the real. Glover’s stories both affirm our experience (we all had childhood attachments) and undermine them, make them unstable, force our memories to slant into uncertainty. Could a childhood crush on a babysitter turn into a lifelong obsession? We can’t discount it, such is the oddness of life, but the exaggeration entertains, too.
A writer (and teacher) long concerned with the intricacies of form, Glover gave a nod to his writing technique in his essay, “How to Write a Short Story:
In every story . . . Form creates a structure that seems necessary and logical. The imaginative variation and development of material in the gaps opened up by form make the story seem alive and unplanned. Art is a strange and paradoxical thing. Out of these apparently opposed and antithetical elements, it creates beauty, meaning and the illusion of living characters.
Glover’s well-proven rhetorical complexity is best read, in other words, not for “aboutness” but, as a painting, with an engaged awareness of the medium in motion. Story demands forward movement, but language need not lead to clarity or certainty. In fact, remaining in ambiguity can only lead to more story, and it is the writer’s talent and obligation to make what is fabricated and manipulated “seem alive and unplanned.” In Savage Love, Glover gives us the odd and the awkward, the violent and the hopeless. Dark humour is woven deeply into all of it. He has stretched his oeuvre to a new plateau where it demands comparison to McCarthy, Barry Hannah, Donald Barthelme, William Faulkner. He challenges readers to enter winding caves of mystery, not in search of answers, but in search of experience, and he challenges writers to question what a story can be, as only the best scribes can. He reminds us that asking is better than knowing, and that asking never ends.
Savage Love begins with a brief Prelude, which is followed by 21 stories divided into three sections: Fugues, Intermezzo Microstories, and The Comedies. The Prelude introduces what follows. In a page-and-a-half of imagistic prose, the narrator describes moonlight, dancers, “the liquid amber gum tree” and tells us “the throw of language is deceptive. It’s much better for describing things that don’t exist than for pinning down reality.” Glover provides all the hints we need here about what is to follow. The real is both real and not real. It is presented to us as language, and language isn’t to be trusted, but it is also the medium of knowledge, and to proceed we must navigate this instable relationship. The first of Glover’s Fugues, “Tristiana,” is the longest story in the collection. A major work, it cultivates chaos for forty-odd pages. It contains more than a nod to Blood Meridian and is clearly demotic. It begins, “1869, Lost River Range, Idaho Territory,” and it recounts one man’s journey of murder and mayhem, beginning with his farm animals, then his wife, then his dog because “the snow surprised him” and “against the winter he had scrupled not to lay in a sufficiency.” He survives the snow and then forages into wilderness and discovers a girl, “just breasted,” legs frozen into the ice. He digs her out, hacks off her diseased feet, carves her new ones. Across land they go, and he murders virtually everyone they meet. Out of these apparently opposed and antithetical elements, the story creates beauty, meaning and the illusion of living characters.
Glover also engages in the notable Canadian literary pastime of historical fiction. Glover’s novel, The Life and Times of Captain N., which takes place at the time of the American Revolution, attempts to recast the founding myths of two nations, and also injects readers deep into the worldview of the contemporaneous Aboriginal peoples. Glover has long been presenting the instability of history and myth, or the instability of the myth of history. The inability of desire to overcome or bind together the gaps, though also the inevitability that people will keep attempting that strategy because it seems to work for a while, and just feels so darned good. Here, the fourth story (“The Sun Lord and the Royal Child”) and the fifth story (“A Flame, a Burst of Light”) take readers through ambiguous and ambitious historical narrative muck. The narrator of “The Sun Lord and the Royal Child” lives (present day) on a southern Ontario farm, land that was once fertile hunting and communal territory for the Iroquois. He is friends with an archaeologist who made his fame on telling stories about the Aboriginal past of the region, particularly about a dead baby and a dynastic succession. The narrator has also been romancing the archaeologist’s wife. Superficially the story about an unstable man, loose with his affections and under considerable existential threat, the story also argues that the narrative of the land is as wobbly as he is. Farmed for generations of descendants of United Empire Loyalists, Royalists who fled Republican America following the Revolution to stay loyal to the British Crown and sensible Presbyterianism, the geography holds mysteries the eighteenth-century geopolitical power play swept cleanly aside. As a historian, Glover is a dissident. He refuses to provide tales of nationalistic uplift. In this instance, the attempt to grapple with the past is reduced to near farce. The archaeologist, who is presented as clearly competent, confronts his error and what had once seemed like enlightenment becomes another small town mix-up.
In “A Flame, a Burst of Light,” we are back in the swampy nineteenth century among soldiers and ultra-violence. We are among bloodied Upper Canadian irregulars engaged to the death with invading Americans. Glover took us there before in “Swain Corliss, Hero of Malcolm’s Mills (now Oakland, Ontario), November 6, 1814” (from A Guide to Animal Behaviour). The newer story is darker, but it retains at its core a note of thumping absurdity. War may be hell, but in Glover’s version there’s a mysterious woman among the dead and dying — and what can a woman mean among all this masculine destruction except the possibility of something else; sex; love; domestic comfort—but then she disappears and no one knows what happens to her. There is no resolution, only reconciliation with the depraved. And it is the depth of the engagement with depravity that astonishes in this collection. Perhaps also its relentless repetition. Articulating chaos has always been part of Glover’s work, but the stories here delight in a darker manner than we’ve seen before. The teenage girl protagonist of Glover’s Governor-General-Award–winning novel, Elle, begins the book sweaty with sex and then dashes into the St. Lawrence River, off a boat, circa 1542, chasing a dog and a tennis ball. Lost in the Canadian wilderness for a year, she not only survives the winter, she shape shifts into a bear, beats back the black flies and makes friends with strangers from a culture she couldn’t have even begun to contemplate, before returning to France. In the stories in Savage Love, there are no such rescues. The narrative mazes here are often terror traps and the telling of the tale a perpetual tightening of the screw.
Glover wrote a book-length essay on Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and the notion of the book being a book about books is second nature to him. So, yes, some of these stories are stories about stories. The first Comedie, for example, “The Lost Language of Ng,” is an anthropological thriller about a mysterious Aboriginal people, or more specifically about the last know speaker of a mysterious Aboriginal language. That is, it warbles with a vibration that can only induce giggles. Another “book world” and “real world” story is “A Paranormal Romance,” which has echoes of Woody Allen’s “The Kugelmass Episode,” wherein the narrator gets injected into Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, with the intent on romancing the title character. Glover’s story is shorter, but the blurring of “book world” and “real world” is clear. In Glover’s fiction, comedy includes mass murder and no wedding feasts. Here is the ending of “Uncle Boris Up in a Tree”: “And, truth be told, except for the catering assistant found with a pitchfork in her throat behind the barn after the reception, everyone lives happily ever after. For a while.” That’s about as good as we might reasonably expect in our early-twenty-first-century world of weakened expectations. Love will not release you from despair. It’s more likely to draw you into intricate absurdities from which you will never escape. Glover has been hitting these related notes throughout his career. Savage Love takes us down these paths to deeper and darker mysteries. These stories resonate along complex frequencies that reward our best reading efforts.