[In the following excerpt, Hunter discusses issues of historical, linguistic, and national representation in postcolonial Canadian literature and provides analysis of Marlatt's feminist reinterpretation of women's sexuality, historical imagination, and personal memory in her poetry and in Ana Historic.]

The three writers to whom I now turn are different because they focus on language rather than genre, although in no way exclusively. Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt and bpNichol are each concerned with a radical destabilizing of the representative media for ideology that encourages notions of a fixed identity and the private individual. At the same time they are also concerned with the construction of closeness that builds communication or communicative groups made up of interacting individuals with different grounds for action.

Devices of genre foreground the commodities of culture, particularly of national culture, only at the point where they lose their power. Indeed challenging the significance of those commodities may contribute to the loss of power. Differently, devices that throw into relief the media of representation, the process of the production of the commodity, make significance out of structure itself and watch the result. Dislocation and relocation of the production of ideology is contradictory work. It moves toward the closeness of newly held common ground at precisely the same time as it resists and alienates from the ideological grounds holding people together. The contradiction in the work also results more intimately from way it brings people into a community at the same time that it articulates difference.¹

Although the closeness focuses on the construction of new common ground while the resistance and alienation focus on the destabilizing of habitual common ground, distinguishing between the two is not easy.² Even within the construction of new common ground it is not easy to distinguish between a response to present need and an evasion of it: between the construction of a common ground which has a temporary solidity that can make possible necessary social action, and the building of a new alternative space with a coherence that permits escape from social action and the repetition of habitual patterns. Sometimes the two sets of grounds, for action and for withdrawal, are structurally the same but used differently. More often, the devices used to structure the ground or space themselves have certain ideological weight or emphasis that encourages one response rather than the other. For example the genre of utopia has carried different cultural valuations in different historical periods, ranging from intellectual discourse to fantasy to the marvellous.

Another example of the ideological weighting but also affecting the destabilizing of habitual common ground might be the use of neologism which is frequently necessary to articulate concepts or precepts that we want to distinguish from the conventional: the literary critic's shifts between meaning and significance, or subject and topic, are but two instances. However, this careful and painstaking attention to the ideological loading of a word can also become a jargon. Nearly all groups of people have corporately-agreed languages which are both generative and exclusive, generative because habitual language often has to be resisted and changed if it is to be adequate to the articulation of new experience, but becoming exclusive and alienating itself when it is used as a private code either when its articulation is so difficult to understand that it obscures or when it is used purposively to create a private group.³ The privacy of club culture language, when exacerbated into fantasy by national ideology, is one of the problems for this group of writers which is so centred on linguistic detail and frequently criticized for elite isolationism.

Authoritarian political systems exploiting a national ideology have become highly effective with the sophistication of economic control over technology, particularly the control over information technology and communications⁴ (Gifford 1980), which has allowed for extensive manipulation of the media conveying that ideology.⁵ As the state nationalisms of Germany in the 1930s or of the USSR in the 1950s or some Latin American countries in the 1960s and 70s can underline, small group megalomania or oligarchy becomes successful when it can turn its desires into populist issues acceded to and implemented by large numbers of people.⁶

There is an extensive literature on such political rhetoric that lies parallel to the literature on strategies for postcolonial domination.⁷ Essential to the success of the rhetoric is that the making of power, or the construction of the ideological assumptions, be obscured. The less complete the obscuring, the more violent must be the coercion.⁸ The more complete the obscuring, the more the strategy can be seen to start with some conventional common grounds and build them into a systematic structure of seemingly unquestionable ideological representation: Or, the more the strategy can be seen to start with a conventional public memory and build an acceptable group history. There is nothing inherent in state nationalism that should ally it with this structure, but the coincidence with economic controls of capitalism and technological controls of information management allow it to exploit the rhetoric.⁹ Those controlling power are precisely those who must be capable of the ‘doublethink’ process—knowing the ideology is constructed yet simultaneously forgetting.¹⁰ What is interesting is precisely that a group acceptance of a particular public memory or national history constructed in this way allows for the acceptance of a set of ‘self-evident’ grounds that can provide justification for group action. Justification of individual action is more difficult.

Postmodern strategies for challenging such systematic and mapped control over public memory derive from the coincident emergence of structuralism, poststructuralism and deconstruction, each of which aims to indicate exactly that ‘making’ or ‘construction’ that state nationalism needs to obscure.¹¹ But the economic structure has not changed. The postmodern world is faced either with the crisis of recognizing the ‘doublethink’ process as a necessary to live within, a problematic that has drawn heavily on the psychoanalytic tradition for psychoses and split ‘identity,’¹² or with the politics of ‘small communities’ where the construction of the grounds for agreement and social action can be handled by individuals (oligarchy without the populism) but only at the expense of ignoring global and multi-national power structures¹³ and always with the imminent possibility of consensual agreement eliding into the corporate basis for new state control.¹⁴

These options within postmodernism have quite different implications for groups within first, second and third-world countries. Postcolonial parallels for writers concerned with the issues of (what used to be called) third-world countries,¹⁵ have gone a long way toward using the issues emerging from ‘split identity.’ They have provided strategies that continually assess, particularly via personal memory and the public memory of history, the appropriateness of any ground for the present needs of a country or a people.¹⁶ But the second set of issues around ‘small community’ politics have proved less amenable to shift. This set forms the basis of one of the increasingly frequent uses of the term ‘solidarity,’ but it does not deal with the problem of ‘ghettoization’ which denies the simultaneity of different voices.¹⁷ It may be that these political issues are more difficult to shift despite their drawbacks for addressing nation state problems at a time when state control is passing inexorably to multinationals, because state control is still largely in place as the dominant ideology of most first-world countries, like English Canada. Yet unlike the U.S., Canada has always lived with the presence of a more-powerful state: Britain or the United States itself.

Canadian postmodernism, as Canadian postcolonialism, has since the late 1950s been in the position of recognizing that its nation state is always subject to a greater economic power.¹⁸ The English-Canadian literature being discussed here is alienated from itself not in terms of national identity as with the locus of much third-world literature and classic post-colonial theory, but in terms of economic identity which affects not national ideology so much as its modes of representing itself in for example publishing. There can be little impetus to write ‘the great Canadian Novel,’ which would give the ‘novel’ a distinctive Canadian difference, when the genre of the novel itself and the inexorable web of commodification, publication, and distribution in which it is caught, is perceived as the problem. This recognition of the problem as allied with economic identity is an indication of the extent to which Canada sees its national culture in a global rather than national power structure.

Some postcolonial literatures have used postmodern strategies to question and assess self and history, often through the working of memory. Many are now beginning to act upon the appropriate grounds of these assessments, sometimes using them consciously to build different national identities—an essential strategy for negotiating with much of global politics which still functions, at least culturally and diplomatically, through national identities. Postmodern literature, from countries such as the United States, which has little effective history of postcolonialism although much of immigrant exploitation and imperialism, has done much to dismantle historical memory and tear down ideological structures; yet the utopian impulse of the disempowered, even the self-disempowered, still lurks behind the conspiracy theories of the self-alienated powerful:¹⁹ there is no one taking responsibility for any building that will need continual restructuring.

In contrast, this restructuring appears to be the condition of postmodernism in English-speaking Canada, to build continually structures for future and on-going undermining. This can also be seen as a condition of English-Canadian postcolonialism: it functions within the same ideology as the economically colonizing power(s), yet it has no control over that ideology except to foreground its assumptions. There is an apocryphal story about Robert Kroetsch being asked to attend a conference on the ‘western’ at which most of the participants are from the United States. He goes and gives a talk about cowboy heroes who question themselves in the quest for the impossible, about great good and immense evil and how difficult it is to recognize the two, about moral dilemma and the way men need guns or horses or women—and everyone else at the conference thinks he's being straight. …

MEMORY, HISTORY, AND APPROPRIATENESS

The work of Daphne Marlatt takes the risk of difference all the time, as well as the risk of closeness. Marlatt's poetry, like Nichol's and Kroetsch's, often alienates readers because it undermines the assumptions of representation. However, the strategies the writing offers in return are there to re-build both memory and history. One of Marlatt's widely read early works, Steveston (1974), with photographs by Robert Minden, is a structure that allows the reader to build a number of different histories: most urgently of Japanese immigrants to the West Coast of Canada and their treatment during and after World War II, as well as of the life-cycle of the salmon, of environmental issues, of local fishing and fishery practices, of the geography, and more residually of the Aboriginal peoples, and of women. Each topic, and there are many others, becomes a ground for each other, and which history the reader reads depends much upon their personal memory. The histories that are made are an account/ their own story of the reader's memory. The writer tells us in the final naming poem “Steveston, B.C.,” that the writing is “the story of a town, these are the people, whose history locates inside of dream” (89). The body of the text is a dreamtime articulated, from which, or rather within which, the reader's own dreamtime can find articulations that negotiate personal and public memory.

Steveston explicitly asks the reader to “imagine” a town, and implicitly asks for a reconstruction of a particular political history; but increasingly, Marlatt's writing asks the reader to exercise personal memory explicitly for political history: whether it be of a colonial past and immigrant present, of a family, or of women. Unlike Nichol whose politics are of humanist community, taking/making the best of common grounds arrived at by associative release responding to immediate need: moments of grace in which significance is recognized, but like Atwood, Marlatt has no moments of recognized “grace.” It seems there is nothing given, only assumptions and salvage from “the wreckage of language so freighted with phallocentric values it must be subverted and re-shaped.”²⁰ In one sense Nichol can count on retrieving some alienation by the wide recognition among readers of his humanist values. Marlatt risks doubly alienating the reader who is not only asked to question articulation and re-presentation for ideology, but is asked to build another structure.

In Marlatt's lesbian and feminist writing, the reader has to work out a basis for what is “appropriate” to necessity that is different to the pervasive humanist cast of Western society. In contrast to Nichol who does not want toleration, assimilation and effacement, but many different voices, Marlatt is working tenaciously for the possibility of one of those voices. Different voices cannot be given space, they have to make space find place, along with the current owners, which means they have, however crudely, first to name themselves, articulate self through memory and make public space by negotiating and fighting for a history. As Atwood recognizes, contemporary feminisms can trap people in their own ideologies precisely because the rhetorical structure of the dominant ideology of the nation-state which they can mimic is so quickly and effectively consoling—a dangerous gift for those already excluded from so much. But ideology is also like fact; there is usually an historical event to which it was appropriate, to the needs of which it responded: Recovering those needs and assessing their present appropriateness is a large part of making a place for the self in social and political life. This difficult relocation after radical dislocation of the common grounds for action is something at which Marlatt is particularly skilled.

Among the more difficult assumptions to dislocate let alone relocate is, as Kroetsch shows us, sexuality. Women's sexuality/ies, caught so often in fairly arid versions of heterosexual repetition that deny it articulation, has rarely been written about—at least not to the extent of writing concerned with men's understanding of what that sexuality may be. One of the effects of feminism in the West has been to encourage women of all classes and colour to try to articulate their sexuality. In Touch to My Tongue Marlatt carefully brings together a concern with the way poetry works on the edge between “the already spoken and the unspeakable” (48), between consciousness and dream, and the parallel position of women carried by a language that is structured syntactically and generically to outline a way of life that is not theirs yet which they “inhabit” or which inhabits them.

Touch to My Tongue overtly works with lexis and syntax in its writing of a woman's sexuality. Marlatt suggests that woman's body is “postlexical” in that “certain words” take us back to “originally-related meaning,” a “living body of verbal relations” that the writer must put together and in doing so put together a world. Analogous to Nichol's graphic and alphabetic association that releases words into punning free-fall until some appropriately significant sense is reached, the writer here uses etymology to release a history of words until a version appropriate to her woman's life is found. This is not based on anything so naive as a claim to “original meaning” and authority, but is a strategy for exploring how words carry us on and how far we go along with that or resist or change it. In the end we have to rebuild a world; we do not find it as a given. Since we cannot rebuild without a lexical base, then at least we may choose grounds that carry significance for women. Nevertheless, the resilience of the writing's lexical field is primarily located elsewhere, not in the etymological but in contemporary connotative fields in unusual juxtapositions such as “wild flesh opens wet” (23) with “nest, amative and nurturing,” or in phonemic coherence playing against syllabic disruption for example “still the edge of summer gone in the grounding rain” (22).

It is in the syntax that the joy of this work comes through most immediately, particularly when it combines with sound. Nearly every phrase arrests conventional grammatical reading: A sample: “we went to what houses stars at the sea's edge,” “a kiwi at four a.m. among the sheets green slice of cold going down easy on the tongue,” or “it's all there, love, we part each other coming to, geyser, sparking pool, hidden in and under separate skin we make for each other through” (30). This is not to say that the phrases resist sense, but that the reader can make a number of senses out of them.

The readings translate into aspects of (women's) sexuality precisely at the point where the reader is released into a number of possibilities. Marlatt's writing does dislocate conventional grammar and semantics, but it does not leave the reader in a world of arbitrary pluralisms. The writing is self-consciously building a narrative about sexuality. It enacts etymological chains to infuse contemporary vocabulary with different connotations by stressing obscured sounds or clusters of letters: “bleak colour of your iris gone blue, that blue of a clear sky, belo, bright, Beltane, ‘bright- / fire’” which moves into “bleikr, / shining white, radiant healing in bright colours, blanda, to mingle and blend: / the blaze of light we are, spiralling” (31), and brings “blue” and “blend” together with “bright” radiance at the same time as “spiral,” that intimate mingling of separate strands, in a lexical cluster that referentially connects with meeting a lover.

The writing places in a sequence series of clauses and phrases that have no apparent grammatical or logical relation, yet they are carefully punctuated, entitled, blocks of words, chosen to follow one another. The copy-editor's curse of ‘eye-skip’ occurs frequently as the reader's eye seeks to order the sense and finds itself re-reading the same line or jumping ahead to find the track. Often this search is marked out by the interchange of voices between “i” and “you,” the two lovers whose presence calls out a cultural expectation of narrative. Yet in a section such as “down the season's avenue” these voices are enfolded. Ostensibly telling about a plane landing and bringing two people together, the grammar undermines any logical definition for the one in the plane or the other on land: “we” approach the pivot of night and day; “you” climb what tree over the sea to gaze east”; “i” see “light lean along a curved plain”: from a plane? gazing at the horizon for a plane?; then “i” “try the trees for company”; and when the plane comes in “you will be standing there”: on the ground? at the door of the plane?; to the by now profoundly complicated logic of “i'm coming home”: which folds the “i” and the “you” into each other.

RE-MEMBERING THE BODY

While I as a woman read Touch to My Tongue as a work of enabling example for female sexuality, it is interesting that many men who read it read it as enabling of their own sexuality. The writing does not address the narrow version of sexuality on offer from conventional gender relations, nor does it then move to melancholic contemplation or romantic designs of alternative essences/identities. What it does is deal with what it's got along the edge of the spoken/unspoken. It's working at the shoreline of the body and language, or becoming aware of the body, where memory works. This image is openly politicized in Marlatt's novel Ana Historic (1988), where she takes a substantial area of French and Québecoise feminist theory about “writing the body” as a social and political necessity for women if they are to move away from oppositional action and from the tearing splits of doublethink identity which inform much postmodern paranoia.

What Ana Historic tells is a story about the way that personal memory makes public memory, the way the building of self can shape and/or build history. Unlike any of the other writers discussed here, who find history variously as huge, external, dominating, split, overwhelming or embarrassing, Marlatt takes on history as a task, something to change the way we might change house or even our sexuality, or even because we might change these other things. And what is particularly interesting is the way that newly written versions of the past must always appear fictional, and always demand the imaginative reconstruction of memory.

The book offers a structured counterpoint between history and personal memory as Annie Richards/Torrent attempts to write an account of Ana Richards, a woman who came to Canada in the nineteenth century, and who appears in a few newspaper references and short journal. As Annie writes, her account is interrupted by memories of her mother Ina, by more recent memories of her broken marriage to “Richard” and by an on-going conversation with a friend called Zoe. The account of Ana Richards's life provides a topical ground for the issues that crowd into the present, and the resolutions of memory around Annie's mother and ex-husband relocate into the account and define a way of finding self that enables Annie to move into a relationship with Zoe.

The public memory of history is an account of the past to which a group of people have assented. In a world where the written word has increasingly become the store place for such accounts, writing becomes the key to new versions of the past. However, the written word as history is there to resist change and often for good reason: if we eradicated the history of slavery we would, among many other things, lose an example of the process of repression and resistance from which we can learn bases for action needed in our contemporary lives. We may, however, want to change the stance of the account. If a history is written that obscures or omits events in the past, such as the complete loss of domestic history, then again we have to change the stance of existing history. Written history can be changed by group writing, from collaborative community ventures, to the institutional accounts of science, to government programs such as the Canada Council which aims to write Canada into a broader cultural history. But the way in which we encourage individual writers, the whole profession of authorship, and the structure of the printing and publishing business means that writing by individuals is often the most effective way of changing historical accounts. Thus the interaction between individual personal memory and public memory becomes necessary.

Ana Historic opens with a series of interrupted accounts from personal memories of the narrator's childhood and relationship with her mother, to excerpts from reports on logging in the nineteenth century and newspaper articles from early British Columbian history, to fictional attempts to reconstruct Mrs Richards' life. History is cast as factual, useful, the story of “dominance mastery,” “the real story the city fathers tell of the only important events in the world” (28). In contrast, as Munro reminds us, story is something mothers tell children until they grow up and learn about lies, stories are the “inauthentic” (30) versions of the past, so often a woman's past. This conglomeration of fiction, history, personal and public memory is then passed through a lens (37-42) in which the narrator/writer gives Mrs Richards her own name, so that she does not have only “the name of a dead man.” The name is literally given in that the narrator Annie gives the character the name Ana, which is the same in sound but becomes different in the written version, for Ana will allow Annie to become a different person.

The transposition of Annie's name, through “Ina” the name of her mother, to “Ana,” builds a set of links into history for the contemporary woman, at the same time as it discovers the past to be empty of that history and recognizes a need to fill it with story. The following segment of writing (43ff) is largely concerned with the relationship between history and story. The reader finds a few sentences presumably from Ana Richards' journal (about which the archivists are suspicious [30]) which contain crossings-out and erasures. The narrator asks “what is she editing out and for whom?” (46). To the question “why write at all?”, she answers “because there is ‘into—’ what? frightening preposition. into the unspoken urge of a body insisting itself in the words” (46). Writing is a “disappearing act” for the self that allows “she, unspoken and real in the world” to run ahead and “embrace it. // she is writing her desire to be, in the present tense, retrieved from silence” (46-47).

Helping this nineteenth-century woman to be written is a way of retrieving her from silence. Yet the narrator overlays this story-making onto her memories of her mother Ina whom she tried, as a child encouraged to seek male approval from her father, to erase (50-51). Through Ana, the narrator “re-members” Ina, puts “things back together again, the things that have been split off, set aside” (51); and in this way also “re-members” herself, retrieves herself from silence. It is important that the narrator, trained by her husband Richard the conventional historian, writes Ana's history by gathering “facts,” and that one of these “facts” is the account of personal memory written by Ana herself. Writing the self is writing history; and writing history is writing the self. For Marlatt personal and public memory are the same, and must be given equal value to avoid the “impasse: impossible to exit. dead end. when the walls close down. the public/private wall” (23) that isolates the individual, here her mother Ina, into privacy; and which also underwrites the delusory stability of contemporary western ideology.

Given that the most immediate way of writing Ana's history would simply reduplicate the structure of dominance that has kept it silent and, in placing it on the same basis as conventional history, would leave it failing by comparison, the segment “Ana's fascination” (75ff) moves on to explore women and language, opening with “the silence of trees / the silence of women // if they could speak / an unconditional language / what would they say” (75). Annie tells of her “patient assistance” to her husband's work and the difference in her own writing which he calls “scribbling.” Rather than his history, she wants to write her own story, but “the truth is our stories are hidden from us by fear” (79), the mother's fear of what she might find if she tried to articulate “all the ways we don't fit into a man's world” (79): Particularly what body she might find if she ceased to “trade” in the economy of male sexuality and the hysteric, split, self-defeating version of her body that it offers. As Zoe says in answer to this part of the story “‘you haven't even begun to think about what it would be if it could be what you want’” (90).

The analysis of what female sexuality lacks is acute, but is still caught inside the fear of what the narrator might find if she moved on: the lurking terrifying figure of something that is not Frankenstein, yet monstrous, inherited from Freud's fantasies.²¹ Interrupting the story of Ana and re-membering of Ina, Annie tells the personal memories of her adolescent joy in another woman's body against the pressures of ideological gender definitions (90ff). These are mapped onto the “fork between two roads so long ago” that offered two different sexualities, and the conclusion of the segment leads her to the possibility that Ana and another woman, Birdie, could fascinate each other. This is something she “had not imagined—this // as history unwritten” (109). In response, Annie tries to return “to the solid / ground of fact” (111). She recounts probable conversations among the women Ana knew, centring on the birth of a boy child. Inexorably, within the historical context of colonialism, the metaphors of woman as “goods” or commodity, woman as “ship” to carry men's objects of desire, infuse the text. This allows the carefully written placing of her mother within an emerging postcolonial world, and of contemporary women as objects of trade in the male economy of sexuality, all to overlap each other in the central event of the birth. That the baby is male means that from the first he is different from all these women. At birth he is given into surroundings where he is “at home from the beginning” (127). Ana and Ina and Annie as immigrants and as women are not born into their home, nor into the country of their own bodies, but into someone else's. Just so, the postcolonial nation state is born into a global world.

Zoe repositions this birth as something important for Ana not because of the birth of the baby but because of the intimacy and labour of the woman: “out and in. out and in.’ (125): The unwritten history of the gift of that labour of the body. The narrator has come to the “a-historic,” the writing of the yet unwritten woman's body and the difficulty of that. Annie speaks of trying to give birth to her immediate reader who is Ina her mother, and at the same time she knows that Zoe thinks of her as “stuck in the unspoken, unenacted—half born,” stuck in “past history” (132). But past history “never is”—past, that is. The only way to deal with the history we have is to write another, and initially she tries to write it a-historically. What Annie now writes for Ana is the possibility of a sexuality focused on another woman, and as if the character has walked past her, the narrator says “you've moved beyond what i can tell of you” (139). Annie then realizes that this is as if conventional history has “won,” the ideological has succeeded in making it impossible for the writer's personal memory to imagine another way, and she asks if perhaps we can “live in history and imagination” (139): “but once history's onstage, histrionic as usual (all those wars, all those historic judgements), the a-historic hasn't a speaking part. What's imagination next to the weight of the (f)actual?” (139).

This impossibility of imagination about another sexuality is Annie's own impasse, her own private/public wall just like Ina's. It is in the concluding pages of the text, where Annie talks about Ina's electric shock therapy, that she follows the terrible destructiveness acted out on people who cannot with/under/stand the doublethink of identity. To ‘cure’ her mother of the paranoia brought on by the suffocating privacy of the isolated family, and the taken-for-granted unwritten story of that domestic labour that commodifies the person into a replaceable object, she is given electric shock therapy. The treatment “overloaded the circuits so you couldn't bear to remember. re-member,” and “it wasn't just your memory they took. they took your imagination, your will to create things differently” (149). The narrator says that if she denies the anahistoric or the possibility of imagining differently for herself, then history will win. Unlike the a-historic, the anahistoric is risky, fearful and difficult, but the alternative is Ina, or Ana's marriage to Ben Springer, or Annie's own suffocating marriage to Richard.

While the stories of Ana and Ina end here, Annie's life continues and she goes to visit Zoe, whom she trusts and fears for the unknown of lesbian sexuality she may find. In the brief two or three pages at the end of the book, she finds a group of friends and at the same time a terror, not the Frankenstein fear of her youth, but “the trembling that takes you out of yourself” (152) in this other sexuality that is “the reach of your desire, reading us into the page ahead” (153). This different sexuality is not something that comes from the words, although the writing enables Annie to realize that it may be there as Ana “walks past” her. It is not a matter of releasing language into free fall and waiting for a moment of recognition or of grace. The different path is one made possible through interaction with other people which is not wholly or even primarily linguistic. The urgency of words comes from the need to articulate this other possible sexuality, partly for the pleasure that that gives in itself but mainly because articulating that sexuality, writing it, is the primary means for resisting both its obliteration and its abuse. More positively, not only is the articulation necessary to help other people who are trying to imagine/move toward another sexuality, but also simply by writing in contradiction to ideological stability the writing enacts the possibility of any alternative—sexual, national, racial, economic.

History can only be written out of what people can imagine. But imagination has to be hammered out of interaction with other people and the way that language can re-member that interaction. If your interaction with people cannot be or is not, articulated, then you are not re-membered by history, you have literally nobody/no body literally, you can be objectified and commodified. Writing the body is for Marlatt not a writing out of ‘lack’ or ‘loss’ that leads to aggressive or repressive strategies as Lacan, stuck with concepts of stable representations and fixed ideology, would have it. Writing the body is the individual re-membering a self into history and simultaneously writing a history. The absence of gendered labour, of domestic labour, of sexual labour from “history,” allows that labour to be commodified. Re-membering becomes parallel with re-producing that labour as necessary action.

But this action of imagination, that changes self and history, needs a different kind of relationship between body, memory and writing, than “historical account” conventionally gives, because it asks the writer and the reader to walk on past where they now are, breathe into the page ahead. The feminine plural Ana-historic, is the way this particular book sets up that relationship. Parallel stories of women at different times are focused through the lens of what the writer can imagine now. Marlatt's ability to enable the reader to read on past the page is attested to in the “Salvage” section of Salvage (1991) which reworks/reclaims/re-members parts of Steveston (1973) through a feminist reading. Steveston is a work that two decades of readers have read back into the women's lives which it seems so clearly to indicate but not emphatically speak of. Reading “Salvage” is like recognizing a reading that the writer has only just written, a reading that comes before the writing although out of another writing that made it possible.

There is nothing esoteric in this. Marlatt is simply suggesting that fundamental change, no matter how necessary, is terrifying to the individual until it is realized in daily life, in language of day-to-day interaction that can be agreed upon and taken as common ground for discussion and action. No matter how much help the written, or any other medium, can give to an individual or a group, change away from ideology is fearsomely difficult because it seems to challenge the notion of any re-membered self or society. It seems to challenge it particularly because in the state ideologies of western nations, stable or even fixed identities for individual subjects and state nationalisms are an a priori, an assumption.—even though well hidden in hyperliberal bourgeois isolation.

That is, to state the obvious, where modernism and postmodernism derive their impetus: to challenge the commodification of the person. For postcolonial countries ever aware of the dead-end of opposition to powerful economic units, and often torn apart by the pressures of accepting and rejecting the dominant ideologies of the colonizer past or present, the possibility of walking on past that colonizing occurs when the representative stability of ideology becomes less important than people coming together in the labour of a group.

The Canadian writers here all explore memory and history, in an attempt to connect individuals with their societies and structure those societies into a geographically defined ‘national’ culture. These writers are committed to the importance of writing as a medium within which these connections and negotiations take place. They offer a variety of genre and language strategies not only to criticize, oppose, and challenge the stable set of representations on which ideology of the nation state depends, but to resist, change, restructure, and build new ground for the articulation of different voices that redefine the modes of personal and public/political action.

Notes

1. Feminist theorists working from a background of race and gender, in particular, have contributed a substantial vocabulary for this difference-closeness discussion; see bell hooks, “Sisterhood,” Feminist Review 24 (1986) and Bettina Aptheker, Tapestries of Life: women's work, women's consciousness, and the meanings of daily experience (1989).

2. This difficulty of structural distinction is also found in the overlap between studies of fantasy and allegory; see L. Hunter, Modern Fantasy and Allegory.

3. R. Rorty takes this as a positive feature, describing the world as a group of clubs around a bazaar; see Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, p. 209, and Essays on Heidegger and Others; and J. Kellas takes it for granted that club culture is a positive metaphor for nationalism, The Politics of Nationalism and Ethnicity (1991).

4. A Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (1981), p. 5.

5. For an analysis of the argumentative structure technology can permit to discourse, see L. Hunter, “Remember Frankenstein: Rhetoric and artificial intelligence.”

6. See in particular P. Rowe and V. Schelling, Memory and Modernity.

7. This literature derives from a focus on the rhetoric of the Nazi party during the 1930s and 40s, and fed into studies on advertising and general propaganda in the early developments of Communications Studies: the two being linked by the use of mass media technology to extend the narrative persuasions of nationalism into the authoritarian persuasions of totalitarianism.

8. This principle is the basis for the classical argument that education in rhetoric is necessary to avoid violence. See L. Hunter, Rhetorical Stance in Modern Literature.

9. Both B. Anderson and E. Gellner describe this move, albeit from different angles, in, respectively Imagined Communities and Nations and Nationalism.

10. The forgetting, or amnesia, necessary to successful nationalism is discussed by nearly all the recent commentators on the topic from Gellner (1982, 1983) and Anderson (1983), to T. Eagleton (1990a), to Kellas (1991). George Orwell theorized the strategy quite precisely in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948).

11. George Bowering's Burning Water (1980) is an excellent example of the concurrence of poststructural writing with postcolonial concerns. In many ways The Empire Writes Back, ed. B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, and H. Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1989), could be said to focus precisely on this dilemma.

12. Homi Bhaba, among others, has elaborated Fanon's theoretical concerns with identity and psychoanalysis and colonialism, in for example Nation and Narration.

13. G. Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science (1981), lays out this position, and it has been the basis for a substantial debate in the 1980s among political theorists. R. Rorty denies that it is a problem; and Frank Davey, along with others such as J. Habermas, has come to articulate its drawbacks: see Post-national Arguments (1994), part of which was given as a paper, “The Canadas of Anglophone-Canadian Fiction 1967-1990,” at the University of Leeds conference, Difference and Community, April 1992.

14. See also Past the Last Post, ed. I. Adam and H. Tiffin (Calgary: U of Calgary P).

15. See A. Aijaz, In Theory (1992) for a revisioning of ‘third-world’ as a category. For an interesting positioning of ‘third-world’ within feminism, see ed. C. T. Mohanty, A. Russo, and L. Torres, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (1991).

16. See, for example, G. Spivak, In Other Worlds (1987), and The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews (1990).

17. N. Ricci discusses this problem in “Questioning Ethnicity,” Alphabet City: Nations and Nationalism 2 (Toronto 1992); see also Z. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Polity, 1990).

18. L. Cohen, Beautiful Losers (1966) is the classic Canadian text on this dilemma.

19. See. F. Jameson's shift from utopia in The Political Unconscious (1981) to conspiracy in Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991); see also T. Eagleton on good and bad utopias in “Nationalism, Irony and Commitment” (1990)

20. D. Marlatt, Salvage (1992), p. 9.

21. This has been a preoccupation of feminist theorists for much of the 1960s-80s, but some writers now seem to be finding alternatives. See earlier chapter on “sexual alternatives.”