Piracy, Penance, and Other Penal Codes: A Morphology of Postcolonial Revision in Three Recent Texts by Rudy Wiebe, John Steffler, and Joan Clark

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

PIRACY, PENANCE, AND OTHER PENAL CODES: A MORPHOLOGY OF POSTCOLONIAL REVISION IN THREE RECENT TEXTS BY RUDY WIEBE, JOHN STEFFLER, AND JOAN CLARK TONY TREMBLAY St. Thomas University If to imagine is to misinterpret, which makes all poems antithetical to their precursors, then to imagine after a poet is to learn his own metaphors for his acts of reading. Criticism then necessarily becomes antithetical also, a series of swerves after unique acts of creative misunderstanding. ( The Anxiety of Influence 93) B e c a u s e we never start but interrupt, suggests Bloom, any telling is a revision, just as any version of that telling is a sub-version, though the dominant ideologies that percolate through our language are vigilant with the censure they place on revision and subversion. Both are suspect and warrant suppression. To presume, however, that any interruption of narra­ tive (whether it is an aggressive interrogation of historiography or a playful probing of history) is not revisionist is to deny both the ideological base of language and the derivative nature of discourse— of language talking about itself and moving unobstructed (and unstoppable) toward self-fulfillment. Because we never start but interrupt . . . . That Canadian literature, owing in large part to Rudy Wiebe’s cultural programme of re-imagining West, is becoming consciously postcolonial is increasingly evident. Artistic representations of otherness, core/margin dif­ ferences, indigenous self-determination, and subaltern regional militancies all attest to a growing cultural awareness of what West Indian poet E.K. Brathwaite called “nation language” (15). Simply translated, nation language means the rising to the surface of a whole set of sub-cultural vernaculars. As practice, the articulation of private nation languages is often an unmask­ ing of the politics of identity and representation. But the point is that nation language cannot easily be translated, and certainly not simply borrowed, for cross-cultural purposes. The three-hundred-year history of Western imperi­ alism gives the term a much different meaning in the West than it has for those emerging cultures that are currently exploring its effectiveness as a political means of challenging colonial discourse. English Stu d ie s in C a n a d a , 23, 2, June 1997 Wedged historically and geographically between two cultural monoliths — the British and American Empires — Canada has been especially vulnerable to the favours of colonial privilege. And decry that privilege as we may in postcolonial times, many in this country have grown fat on an ideological regimen that now seems fit only for deconstruction. It is my intention in this paper, then, to examine the recent Canadian fetish for a historical nation language — what I am terming “historical revisionism” — and to present a structural morphology of a clearly paradoxical, and ideologically suspect, “first-world” postcolonialism. Just as the Orient “was almost a European invention” ( Orientalism 1), so is the re-imagining of Canadian history, explo­ ration, and colonization a similar White, Western construction, one which, in appropriating non-White postcolonial language and theory to make its case, appears to represent another kind of trespass, a new seat of power for the historically privileged. My interest is not to attempt to determine, through quantification, whether an “objective knowledge” of another culture or historical period is possible — I agree with Hayden White that it is not, that historiography is a poetic construct — but to demarcate the archaeology of cultural knowledge. Edward Said suggests, after the fashion of White, that what presents itself in Western revisionism as a looking glass is, in fact, a mirror, able only to offer the satisfying tautologies of a familiar discursive space: ‘The disciplines’ [of specialized ‘area studies’] are institutions more than they are activities ... . They regulate and normalize what they study (which in a sense they have also created) far more readily than they ana­ lyze themselves or reflect on what they do. The net result, I think, could only by a kind of tautological indulgence be described as full knowledge of another culture. (Islam 135) Working within the same cultural-studies discourse as White and Said, Cana­ dian theorist Linda Hutcheon has made similar observations about what she terms a Canadian “historiographic metafiction,” which “enacts the recog­ nition of the...