[In the following review, Söderlind praises Gaining Ground for its successful attempt to begin a dialogue between the literatures of Canada and Europe.]

In case anyone still doubted it, this collection confirms what has been rumoured for some time: Canadian literature is gaining ground in the universities of Europe. With few exceptions the seventeen essays included in the volume indicate that a good number of critics have spent considerable time and effort in getting to know our literature and our history. The authors represent a wide geographical, as well as critical, spectrum. The main centres for Canadian studies in Europe are found in West Germany, Italy, and France; and places like Kiel, Bologna, and Bordeaux have come to be synonymous with Canadian studies. The growing interest in the field is also illustrated in the seven associations devoted to Canadian studies that have sprung up all over the continent in the last decade. The most recent ones are found in the Netherlands and Scandinavia; a Swedish journal has dedicated a recent issue exclusively to Canadian arts, music, and literature. Reingard M. Nischik’s informative survey of the status of Canadian studies in the various countries shows that Canlit entered the European academic establishment by way of Commonwealth studies, a fact that may account for the rather poor representation of French-Canadian literature in the collection: only two essays deal with Québécois writers. The vigorous European branch of ACLALS (The Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies), which has been very active in promoting Canadian literature, is usually located in the English departments and tends to be geared towards the anglophone parts of the Commonwealth. The efforts of the Canadian government to sell the country abroad can also be discerned, for instance, in the choice of writers discussed in the various essays. Many of them have toured Europe at the expense of External Affairs. Besides giving a good picture of the history and the present status of Canadian studies in Europe, Nischik provides useful biographical information about the contributors, as well as an impressive bibliography of publications in the field from different countries. One aspect excluded from Nischik’s discussion is the question of translations. It would have been interesting to know what writers have been made available to a wider public in other languages, and to get an idea of how far Canadian literature has reached beyond the academic community.

The Commonwealth context gives a slant to the study of Canada’s literature different from the often deplored parochialism that has so long prevailed among the country’s own critics. The Canadian works are often seen in a context of other new literatures in English, or in a general framework of post-colonialism. Nischik, who teaches at the University of Cologne, sees the difference in perspective between European and Canadian critics as a result of the distance between them, which makes it possible for the European to apply a more rigorous critical methodology based on formal and generic features rather than on exclusively thematic ones. This does not mean that thematic studies are excluded from the collection; there are in fact several. Nevertheless, the essays represent a wider variety of critical approaches than is usually seen in Canadian criticism. This gives them an added interest: they reveal what particular types of criticism are popular in Europe at the moment. Psychoanalysis and deconstruction are rather conspicuously (some may say refreshingly) absent, and narratology and feminism seem to be more dominant. Cedric May’s study of Alain Grandbois’ poetry can be qualified as high structuralism, while Pierre Spriet’s analysis of Rudy Wiebe borrows heavily from Riffaterrean semiotics. Rather different from the other essays, Eva-Marie Kröller’s “Nineteenth-Century Canadians and the Rhine Valley,” which appropriately closes the volume, provides a much broader context and is one of the few that deal with a comparison between a Canadian and a European aesthetics. Rudolf Bader, in a discussion of Grove’s particular brand of naturalism, does touch on his roots in a European tradition, and Franz K. Stanzel talks about Eli Mandel and John Robert Colombo in the same breath as Peter Handke; but rather than a comparative study, these critics offer a more general generic discussion. European critics would seem to be ideally placed to provide this kind of juxtaposition of writers and literatures from the old and new countries, and its absence is a bit disappointing. Such comparisons would be particularly interesting in light of Canada’s frequent status as a mythical territory for European writers. (One only has to consult a major influence like Michel Tournier to stumble on this.) Indeed, much of the fascination Canada holds for Europeans seems to stem from its transformation from a mythic ground into a real place. The preoccupation with place in Canadian fiction has, of course, become a bit of a cliché, but it definitely comes through as the common denominator in the essays. Borges’ apocryphal remark about Canada being so far away that it hardly exists, which is quoted in one of the papers, could almost function as an epigraph for the whole volume: it is the becoming real of this far-away country that preoccupies the European critics.

With few exceptions the essays deal with contemporary writers and are placed loosely in a framework of postmodernism and, more implicitly, feminism. Three of them are devoted, wholly or in part, to Rudy Wiebe, a frequent visitor to Europe, two to Robert Kroetsch, and two to Margaret Atwood. Other writers discussed are Timothy Findley, Alice Munro, Aritha van Herk, Mavis Gallant, George Bowering, and Jack Hodgins. The short story has often been considered as the Canadian genre par excellence, and generically the “short story ensemble” (171) is the most dominant subject. Thus, for instance, Margaret Laurence is represented by A Bird in the House, Hodgins by Spit Delaney’s Island, Munro by Lives of Girls and Women and Who Do You Think You Are?, Gallant by “Orphans’ Progress”; and Karla El-Hassan includes Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town in the same category. Only two essays discuss poetry: May’s analysis of Alain Grandbois’ Les iles de la nuit and Franz K. Stanzel’s study of the found poem. Stanzel’s discussion is perhaps the least interesting from a Canadian point of view. Rather than defining the typically Canadian characteristics of the poetry, Stanzel proposes a general typology of the genre, using Canadian examples merely as illustrations. A similar generic perspective is exemplified in Paul Goetsch’s discussion of Atwood’s Life Before Man as a novel of manners, in the tradition of Austen, Trollope, and James. Simone Vauthier, in one of the strongest contributions, sees Findley’s The Wars in the context of war fiction. Clearly influenced by narratological theories, Vauthier’s essay focuses on such aspects as focalization, space, and time, and elucidates the dichotomies between scriptor and implied author, and between novel and narration. A related approach is found in Nischik’s discussion of the novels of van Herk, a writer popular in Europe.

Another successful discussion in terms of generic convention is Coral Ann Howells’ “Worlds Alongside: Contradictory Discourses in the Fiction of Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood.” Howells analyzes their different treatment of the conflict between reality and fantasy and argues that, while in Atwood’s work the two are mutually exclusive, they coexist in a state of “mutual contrariety” in Munro’s (122). With its feminist slant and its insightful textual analyses, Howells’ essay is an example of the balance between methodological rigour and respect for the text, which is characteristic of good criticism. Rather than being imposed from a preconceived model, the dichotomy she discovers stems from the texts themselves. The same can be said about Giovanna Capone’s discussion of A Bird in the House, which approaches, from a more thematic angle, a motif similar to the dichotomy studied by Howells. Capone sees Laurence’s short-story ensemble as ordered by the opposition, or the distance, between the real and the imaginary, a familiar tension in Canadian fiction, and one that is also in the background of Wolfgang Kloos’s reading of Rudy Wiebe’s The Scorched-Wood People.

Wiebe is also the subject of Pierre Spriet’s essay on the thematics of failure, which demonstrates a familiar problem for many critics. Spriet concentrates on Wiebe’s latest novel, My Lovely Enemy, which he tries to make fit into a pattern already established for the author’s other works. Instead of questioning the validity of the thematics he has established as fundamental to Wiebe, Spriet insists on making the new text fit into it, and the result is not quite convincing. The essay also contains an unfortunate racial generalization in the opening paragraph, where Spriet lists among the protagonists of the “lunatic fringe” peopling Wiebe’s novels, “dreamers, dissenters, Indians, outlaws” (53).

The Commonwealth and post-colonial connection is particularly visible in Jürgen Schäfer’s discussion of the changing image of the Indian, by way of a comparison between Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear and Kroetsch’s Gone Indian. Schäfer draws several parallels between Wiebe’s masterpiece and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and he sees colonization in a wide sense as a metaphor for modern alienation. The Nigerian novel is arguably the best-known depiction of a post-colonial culture in disintegration, but the similarities pointed out between the two novels at times seem a bit strained. (It could probably be argued that Gone Indian is equally related to Achebe’s novel by way of their shared intertextual parentage in Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” but that is another issue.)

Schäfer’s discussion of Gone Indian can be juxtaposed with that of Walter Pache in “The Fiction Makes Us Real: Aspects of Postmodernism in Canada,” which is more generic than thematic in its approach, as the title indicates. Pache, who clearly possesses a good knowledge of the history of Canadian literature, places Kroetsch, together with George Bowering, in the general framework of postmodernism, a concept which underlies many of the studies in the collection. Kroetsch is seen as the father of Canadian postmodernism, and The Studhorse Man and Gone Indian as “paradigmatic examples of postmodern narrative in Canada” (70). Pache, the driving force behind Canadian literary studies at Trier, West Germany, draws some interesting conclusions concerning the particularly Canadian brand of postmodernism. Although Kroetsch, like most of his colleagues, opposes the traditional imposition of order on the text, he is, says Pache, Canadian insofar as he does not go to extremes but rather strives for a balance between “structural artifact and unstructured fabulation” (71). It is thus caution, or at least moderation, that characterizes Canada’s variant of the genre. Pache’s emphasis on this want of extremism, however, may be due to his focusing on the latter aspect, the fabulation, rather than on the often ingenious formalism that characterizes Kroetsch’s novels. The structural intricacies of the two texts remain subservient to the story in a hierarchy that has been put into question recently. Kroetsch’s own contention that Canada never had a modernist period comes to mind when Pache claims that postmodernism and post-colonialism go hand in hand. It was not until American literature reached a point of exhaustion and lost its dominance that Canadian literature really came into its own.

Postmodernism is also the focus of Rosmarin Heidenreich’s study of Hubert Aquin’s novel Trou de mémoire. Like Pache’s and Spriet’s essays, it focuses on aspects of undecidability and openness, features that are generally seen as defining the genre. The choice of writers like Aquin and Kroetsch to illustrate the typical open work is, however, rather problematic and will only work if the emphasis is put on the fabulation that Pache underlines. Narrative, or diegetic, openness does not necessarily exclude or contradict a certain formal hermeticism. It could indeed be argued that some of the tensions often felt in what is generally called postmodern works stem from the simultaneous presence of the two opposite movements, as Pache implies, although his analysis does not quite bear it out. Heidenreich’s study of Holbein’s anamorphic painting “The Ambassadors,” which provides the central formal metaphor of Aquin’s text, would in fact seem to contradict the novel’s claim to openness. The painting is a rather strictly hermetic mannerist portrait, in which two images, one overt and one covert, stand in a clear relation of opposition. If, as Heidenreich claims, there is an obvious isomorphism between painting and novel, the latter’s claim to openness is illusory. There are no signs of the recent controversy surrounding the term “postmodernism” in any of the essays.

The shortest essay in the book, Waldemar Zacharasiewicz’s “The Invention of a Region: The Art of Fiction in Jack Hodgins’ Stories,” suggests a potentially fruitful direction for comparative studies. The author, who teaches in Vienna, juxtaposes Hodgins with writers of the American South, notably Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. The Gothic of the South is more commonly associated with the literature of Quebec or of rural Ontario, as in Howells’ discussion of Munro and Atwood. Although Zacharasiewicz’s comparison, which is based on both thematic and stylistic features, quite convincingly shows a number of similarities, particularly between Hodgins’ and O’Connor’s stories, his conclusion is questionable. He contends that Hodgins is more of a modernist than a postmodernist, a claim that would reveal the writer as something of an anomaly in Canada. It is the limitation of the comparison to Spit Delaney’s Island that permits this contention. Hodgins’ later stories would, no doubt, reveal a similar affinity with the South, but it is unlikely that the same thing could be said about his novels.

We can only be grateful for the enthusiasm shared by Kroetsch and Nischik over a beer in Munich that eventually led to the publication of this book. It is to be hoped that it will encourage further transatlantic dialogue.