J'étais un enfant dépossédé du monde.

—Anne Hébert (I)

Mavis Gallant was born in 1922. If she were a professor, this special issue would be a festschrift. Gallant, however, is not a professor, and this is not a festschrift, although it is designed to celebrate critically a writer at the apogee of her career. That she has not received such a celebration yet, with the exception of a special issue of Canadian Fiction Magazine, is a reflection in part, at least, of the manner in which she chose to conduct her career. She has lived in Paris since 1950, spending the year 1983-84 as writer in residence at the University of Toronto. Since 1951, after some early publications in Preview and Northern Review, she has published almost exclusively in The New Yorker. Almost as a reminder of her neglect of Canada, she did not receive a Governor General's Award until she published Home Truths in 1981, a work that bears the revealing subtitle “Selected Canadian Stories.” It could be asserted that other collections are at least as accomplished, notably From the Fifteenth District; and, hence, the award implies that had Gallant chosen to make a more Canadian career, indigenous awards might have been more generous. Gallant's reply seems to have been: my enterprise is writing, which I do to the best of my ability; yours is discernment, which you do within your horizons. It has been remarked that “Our inability to acknowledge the value of Gallant's work is, after all, ultimately a reflection of our cultural parochialism” (Malcolm 116). This collection of essays, if nothing else, is a modest effort to rectify that justly laid charge.

How parochial we are may be measured by a simple fact. Marguérite Yourcenar has lived the same amount of time in the United States. Not only is her prose widely admired in France, and by Gallant herself (Home Truths xiii), but she is also the first woman to have been elected to the Académie Française. If Gallant had chosen to remain in Canada. … Perhaps one conclusion to that sentence would be that we all would be impoverished as result. One of the aspects of such impoverishment would be that Gallant would not have been urged to face with such acuity the problem of exile and dépaysement, which may be found everywhere in her work. It has been suggested, furthermore, by one of her earliest commentators that the “liberty of movement” that life abroad provides gave her “a certain artistic freedom,” followed by “a certain exhilaration” (Wilson 6). But the price has been that she has provoked a certain hostility among members of the Canadian literary establishment to which she has responded so eloquently in the introductory remarks to Home Truths. The very fact that she felt moved to make an apologia underscores the degree of her awareness of the sensitivity of the Canadian reading public. Indeed, to be read in Canada is to be “on trial” (Home Truths xii), suggesting that culture in this country carries with it an aura of criminal offence. How, then, to feel at home in a country where what you say as fiction may be treated as fraud, where writing itself may be considered “an act of intellectual deception” (Home Truths xii)? This is a question that becomes particularly acute when one distinguishes allegiances, as Gallant has done, between the nation of one's birth and the world of art. That she has chosen to do so is reason enough to celebrate her; that she has persisted to write as she does, despite her reception “at home,” is even greater reason.

What is the world to which she has chosen to give her allegiance? Rather than considering the kinds of writers—French, German, and American—with whom Gallant has a prompt familiarity, attention ought to be directed to her sense of herself as a writer. Her self-awareness is determined by the declaration: “I am a Canadian and a writer and a woman” (“An Interview” [“An Interview with Mavis Gallant”] 62). The emphasis placed upon verb and conjunctions charge her assertion with a kind of copulative energy that seems to make each persona almost interchangeable. One seems to thrive upon the other, and all the elements conjoined seem to endow Gallant with a clarity of understanding that is reinforced by her summary statement on the matter: “One's identity—the real one—is never a problem” (“An Interview” 62). One cannot help but feel, however, the more one meditates upon those characters who dominate the scene of her fiction, that such assertions are made in the face of a certain scepticism; which inheres in the erosion of time, experience, history, the mark especially of someone keenly attuned to the moment remembered, the peculiar Stimmung that events have in their passage. The task that Gallant has set herself and achieved in an often stunning fashion is at once to seize upon the order of events, finding what makes them so fitting within a certain historical trajectory, and to carry the reader, often imperceptibly, through and beyond that moment into some indefinable zone in which a sense of vertigo seems inescapable. It is as though the unfolding of her text were a game of I Ching played with both the self and history, each design projecting a certain significance only to be immediately modified by the next, everything in order and everything changing simultaneously at random.

Such ludicity, if one were to translate from another French neologism yet, to my knowledge, to be invented, plays at the core of Gallant's work, whether in “The Pegnitz Junction,” so frequently praised for its understanding of the working of Fascism, or in the more recent “Speck's Idea.” No one is more aware of this than Gallant herself, who has remarked: “I can't imagine writing anything that doesn't have humour. Every situation has an element of farce. I have a friend … who went through Auschwitz—my God, one says that as though one were going through finishing school” (Gabriel 24). Play it is, but deadly play, and the continual gesture toward the war is what endows her work with its curious quality of the tragic, the futile, and the vulnerable, overcome, as Gallant has said, by “the fits of laughter that you get at a funeral” (Gabriel 24).

To say “the war” is to refer to the predominance of the Second World War as a presence, explicit or not, in her work. The war is a determination, and its force may be observed in the record of her recollection of first looking upon photographs from the concentration camps in 1945. It is significant that Gallant believed then, as she does now, that in order to understand what has occurred, an explanation must not be solicited from the victims, but from the Germans; she shares this position with Hugh MacLennan. To find an answer, she observes, was “desperately important to people like myself who were twenty-two and had to live with this shambles” (“An Interview” 40). As Janice Kulyk Keefer has argued, for Gallant, “female experience in which passivity, captive and sometimes complicit suffering have been traditionally the norm, becomes archetypal of the human experience of history in an age in which ‘total war’ has eclipsed all other concepts of conflict” (“Mavis Gallant” 296), and Gallant's career has been a sustained search through the shambles of the twentieth century to know why war happened. No less significant is the fact that she calls her German stories, her meditations on catastrophe, “a kind of personal research” (“An Interview” 39), and the problem for her is not the brute facts themselves, nor even the larger issues that form the discourse of political history. The war is not actual, in the French sense, with Gallant, but filtered by reminiscence; her fictions are an archaeology of war (Woodcock 82). Her characters, therefore, are inevitably epigones: they are either emblems of the shambles of war or, like Gallant's narrators, figures who pick their way through it. The war, then, formed a certain sensibility in Gallant that was exquisitely attuned to language, and she realized, even at 22, that the article she had been commissioned to write had turned the war into kitsch. Hence it is equally valid to say that Gallant's career has also been a search for a certain shaping discourse without which all the talk of war and its wake would become, as kitsch becomes, gestures of immorality and cynicism.

To neglect Gallant's understanding of language, then, is as careless as it is to overlook her attentiveness to how things fall apart. This is why it is well to remember a comment Gallant made about Yourcenar, that her “subject is not cruelty, but heresy” (“Limpid” [“Limpid Pessimist: Marguérite Yourcenar”] 185), and it is well to remember further that a heresy is a movement away from the official view in such a way as to promote division. But even more, heresy is a special mode of perception (in Greek it is hairein: to grasp [for oneself]). It is a move of power and assertion that takes as its domain suffering and loss; it is at home in the shambles. It is precisely here, in such early pieces as “The Picnic” and “The Other Paris,” those apparently plotless stories, that the themes most readers have noticed in Gallant's work emerge. In the first example, characters never seem to arrive (at the picnic), and in the second, they gradually confuse the real with what “had never been at all” (“Other Paris” 30), and thus manifest themes of something that occurs against or beneath what is being explicitly said. Such are the themes of the heretic; they concern the act that is repressed by the dominant discourse. Gallant's “personal research” has thus been conducted to discover a language appropriate for being in some way apart, whether as exile in the political, social, or personal sense.

No one would suggest, however, that Gallant responds to shambles with shambles—a not uncommon contemporary move. She is an author who appears to know precisely, amid what often are no more than the fragments of a life, where to direct her reader, in such a way that even the sense of loss that dépaysement gathers in is part of the plan. Nor can anyone, even someone with the most random acquaintance with Gallant's work, fail to notice her penchant for wit whose resonance within the narrative almost invariably takes quirky turns. And while it is true that poetry is born with the poet, experience and constant exercise are its only nourishment. Hence, it might be asserted that Gallant's own move to Paris, another heresy, has played a significant role in her use of language. For, as she remarks of Yourcenar, “Writers who choose domicile in a foreign place, for whatever reason, usually treat their native language like a delicate timepiece, making certain it runs exactly and that no dust gets inside” (“Limpid” 189). Such a statement is true, if only in the rarest of instances, and Thomas Mann, James Joyce, and, to choose a contemporary, Milan Kundera, all deserve mention as writers for whom language is the ultimate country.

Why, then, should one make so much of Gallant's statement that she sees herself as Canadian, and a writer, and a woman? Because for Gallant they are words, as I have remarked, that are synonymous, and that together constitute an identity. But beneath her wonderful wisecracks about “national identity” (Home Truths xiii), and about the cultural Philistinism of her fellow citizens, it is difficult for her to escape the fact that for her, “expatriate” is not an apt term to describe a Canadian living elsewhere, for the condition is “a natural product” (“An Interview” 62). A Canadian is, it would seem, by nature of but not in, and thus endowed with attributes similar to those of a woman in a patriarchal world. To accept these conditions is to become, by definition, a heretic, refusing the official version, whose text consequently becomes the articulation of such a state, such a country. Life and history, as Keefer has remarked, happen to Canadians elsewhere (289), such that Gallant's texts, to speak without generalizing, are continual alibis that forever gloss the official account into a condition of irony, playfully shifting and displacing meaning until the shambles constitutes its own economy and polis, and we discover that we are at home wherever we have always been. …

Gallant's character finds herself in a labyrinth—literally mise en abyme—and her task is to come to terms with that subtle, shifting, heretical scene in which the self is to be created from the shambles it finds are the donnés of its existence. For truth, indeed, lies in fiction. The way out, for Gallant, is the way in, and especially the way in to a text that is designed to shatter expectations, subvert our sense of language, find truth in ironic guise, and suggest, finally, that our image on the mirror is often so much the contrary of what we profess to value that we must accept the unheimlich as where we will have to be at home. And all of this is performed with a smile as coolly seductive as that of Leonardo's “La Gioconda”—enthralling, entrancing, and transforming.

Works Cited

Gabriel, Barbara. “Fairly Good Times: An Interview with Mavis Gallant.” Canadian Forum Feb. 1987: 23-27.

Gallant, Mavis. “An Interview with Mavis Gallant.” With Geoff Hancock. Canadian Fiction Magazine 28 (1978) [special Gallant issue]: 18-67.

———. Introduction. Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories. By Mavis Gallant. Toronto: Macmillan, 1981. xi-xxii.

———. “Limpid Pessimist: Marguérite Yourcenar.” Paris Notebooks: Essays and Reviews by Mavis Gallant. Toronto: Macmillan, 1986. 180-91.

———. “The Other Paris.” The Other Paris. Toronto: Macmillan, 1986. 1-30.

Keefer, Janice Kulyk. “Mavis Gallant and the Angel of History.” University of Toronto Quarterly 55 (1986): 282-301.

Malcolm, Douglas. “An Annotated Bibliography of Works by and about Mavis Gallant.” Canadian Fiction Magazine 28 (1978) [special Gallant issue]: 115-33.

Wilson, Edmund. O Canada: An American's Notes on Canadian Culture. New York: Farrar, 1965.

Woodcock, George. “Memory, Imagination, Artifice: The Latest Short Fiction of Mavis Gallant.” Canadian Fiction Magazine 28 (1978) [special Gallant issue]: 74-91.