She wonders where this legend came from, how it migrated to the settlements along the North Shore. There is a parallel story, written over and over again in sixteenth-century France, about a girl who was abandoned on an island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence during one of the earliest attempts to colonize the country. But that was eighty years before the French came to live here for good. Did they bring this strange tale back to Canada with them? Or did the Indians themselves remember enough to pass it back to the colonists? Or did the story simply inhabit the place like a ghost, letting itself nestle in the minds of receptive hosts as they came by?
She feels so bearish today. She and her lover have seen mysterious signs in the sky since they drove here from Montreal
â
coronas, sun dogs, mock moons. Her lover took her from behind like a bear. She was once a dancer, so she knows how to change herself merely by shifting rhythms, by changing the way she walks, her posture. She can almost feel her head sink into her chest. Her arms become impossibly heavy, dragging her down on all fours. It is suddenly dark. Black night. Blood moon with a halo of fire. Afire burns in
a hollow beside a hide hut. A girl is watching the girl on the beach. A bear paces at the verge of the light. Fire seems to come from its mouth. It is immeasurably ancient, haggard and nearly blind, yet impatient, angry at some unwanted invasion. But she can wait.
LAWRENCE MATHEWS
If exuberance is beauty, as one of William Blake's
Proverbs of Hell
has it, then this is a beautiful book. So began my review of
Elle
in
The Fiddlehead.
To some readers, the connection may have seemed odd; Rabelais and
Robinson Crusoe
provide the most obvious analogues. But I wasn't alone in looking for more complex literary comparisons. One reviewer mentions
Moll Flanders;
another, H. Rider Haggard's
She.
Ken Babstock, in
The Globe and Mail,
invokes James Joyce, Ralph Ellison, Peter Carey, and Richard Ford. Lorna Jackson, in the
Georgia Straight,
opts for the weird-amalgam approach: “George Bowering meta-histo-slapstick⦠meets Cormac McCarthy meta-histoscatology.” In
Canadian Literature,
Herb Wyile calls
Elle
“a kind of cross between Susan Swan's
The Biggest Modern Woman of the World
and John Steffler's
The Afterlife of George Cartwright”
Philip Marchand in the
Toronto Star
refers to Mordecai Richler's
Solomon Gursky Was Here,
concluding that
Elle
is “equal to that novel in its contribution to Canadian mythography.”
The citation of so many parallels might suggest that
Elle
defies easy categorization, insisting on being read on its own terms.
***
Elle's
powerful verbal energy demonstrates Douglas Glover's love of language, which manifests itself in many bizarre, hilarious, and imaginatively compelling ways. However the book may have been composed, it conjures up the image of the author as a
man possessed by words, scrambling to get them down (or out) in a state of high glee. Here's the first paragraph of the main section, set in July, 1542:
Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I am aroused beyond all reckoning, beyond memory, in a ship's cabin on a spumy gulf somewhere west of Newfoundland, with the so-called Comte d'Epirgny, five years since bad-boy tennis champion of Orleans, tucked between my legs. Admittedly, Richard is turning green from the ship's violent motions, and if he notices the rat hiding behind the shit bucket, he will surely puke. But I have looped a cord round the base of his cock to keep him hard.
Aficionados of Glover's work will be prepared for the over-the-topness of the voice, the situation, and the details. This is historical fiction that will cheerfully disregard the current Canadian convention that Our Past must be presented with Due Solemnity and with an Eye to Political Correctness.
The voice belongs to a Frenchwoman known only as “Elle.” Her well-to-do father is faced with the dilemma of “what to do with a headstrong girl” who, at nineteen, has had an illegitimate child and is, she says, “possessed of a backside that made my life both difficult and sublime.” He considers sending her to a nunnery, but she successfully implores him to let her be part of the expedition to the New World that her uncle, the Sieur de Roberval, is about to undertake.
So begin Elle's adventures. When her shipboard dalliance with Richard is discovered, she is marooned with him and her nurse, Bastienne, on an uninhabited island at the mouth of the St. Lawrence. Richard and Bastienne perish, but Elle, improbably,
survives, lives with an aboriginal hunter, and gives birth to Richard's child, who dies soon afterward.
At this point, about halfway through the novel, Elle encounters a “hunchbacked savage woman of extreme years,” under whose enigmatic auspices she develops the capacity to shape-shift by changing herself into a bear and in general to enter an aboriginal psychological reality that transforms her sense of identity:
Did I really turn into a bear, or was I but a captive of a system of belief into which I had wandered all un-knowing? There is something I cannot explain here, some character of reality not contained between the via antiqua and the via moderna of the scholars who debate at the universitiesâ¦. What I have become is more like a garbled translation than a self.
Eventually she returns to France, enjoys a liaison with a writer she calls “F.” (clearly Francois Rabelais), marries an innkeeper in Perigord, and, as an old woman, writes the memoir that is the novel. She also retains her ability to morph into a bear, a fact which allows her to take belated, brutal revenge on Roberval.
Behind and beneath the absurdities of the plot and the pyrotechnics of the prose, Glover explores serious moral and spiritual issues, focusing on questions of authenticity: “Is it possible that with the help of God's light we can know the true substance of things, or is everything just a sign of something else? Or is neither proposition true?”
Addressing such questions at their most basic level,
Elle
deals with the interaction between Europeans and the New World, but, as Elle herself observes, “The wilderness is inside as much as it is outside.” As an educated (mostly self-educated) woman,
she is also acutely aware of her marginalization, with respect to matters of intellect and spirit, within her own culture: “Plato himself, after all, so little values the female receptacle for the soul that in the
Timaeus
he considers being born female a punishment for a previous failed life. I try to think: What did I do wrong last time to deserve this?”
The narrative, then, becomes “the unofficial account of an anti-quest,” a counter statement to triumphalist accounts of European appropriation of the New World, the contents of which are invariably self-servingly arbitrary in any case:
On his first voyage past Newfoundland, M. Cartier met a fishing ship from La Rochelle sailing in the opposite direction. He reported, not that these sailors had discovered the New World before him, but that they were lost. Thus he became the official discoverer of Canada, behind the crowds of secretive, greedy, unofficial Breton cod fishermen, unofficial, oil-covered Basque whalers, unofficial Hibernian monks, and who knows who else. (Not to mention the inhabitants.)
But Elle is more interested in the collision of world views that results from the European intrusion. Referring to the aboriginals, she says, “It seems to me that their world is as much a disproof of ours as ours is of theirs.” As someone who lives out this contradiction in her own experience, she becomes, despite herself, an exemplar of a new way of understanding one's identity and place in the world: “infected with otherness,” she recognizes that the mindset of the Old World, based on “a dream of order,” is made to seem ridiculous from the perspective of the New.
Glover (mercifully!) does not fall into the trap of having Elle idealize aboriginality as a touchstone of the changelessly authentic. Instead he has her think clear-sightedly about the impact of her own presence in the world of her “bear-woman” companion: “I am the herald of the new, a new world for the inhabitants of this New World, as disturbing for them as they are for usâ¦. She would no longer fit into the world without an explanation, everything would have to be translated.”
If there is wisdom to be extracted from Elle's experience, it might be found in such passages as this: “If I have learned anything, it is that the universe gives no clear word as to its state, that our lives are bracketed by fog. And yet there is no holding back. We change ourselves by plunging into the thick of things (a wife, a lover, a New World). We change ourselves or die.”
F./Rabelais provides the literary expression of such a view; he has, Elle reports, written “a new kind of book; he makes fun of everything. But then he doesn't. I know what he means.” And the reader
of Elle
will know what F. means, too. Glover makes fun of everything, including his protagonist, with her amusing propensity for “plunging into the thick of things.” But her own comic self-awareness, radiating from nearly every paragraph, somehow results in a paradoxical sense that she is, after all, much more than a target for her author's ridicule, that her odd combination of humility, wit, and insight makes her more fully and sympathetically human than many a central character in standard realist fiction.
Though Elle vigorously denies that her “narrative” is “an allegory,” it is clear that her own gloss on “the thick of things” encourages the reader to move in that direction. Every individual's journey is “unofficial,” an “anti-quest.” And perhaps it is
not possible for the (inevitably marginalized) anti-quester to return home as “a conquering hero.” “Instead⦠you become a clown or fuel for the pyre or the subject of folk tales,” fates that might imply a life of greater depth, intensity, and vision than those enjoyed by the leaders of expeditions and the governors of states.
***
And, on the subject of allegory, it's possible to see Elle's story as a reflection of Douglas Glover's literary career. The
Maclean's
reviewer of
Elle
called him “probably the most eminent unknown Canadian writer alive.” Certainly one of the best writers of his generation, he is the author of some of the most brilliantly imaginative short fiction in the history of CanLit (see his collections
A Guide to Animal Behaviour
and
16 Categories of Desire).
Though well-known to a discerning readership for those books and for his novels
The South Will Rise at Noon
and
The Life and Times of Captain N.,
he seemed, before the publication of
Elle,
to have been marooned on the literary equivalent of a desert island.
With
Elle's
success, Glover's isolation appears to have changed definitively; like Elle, he has been transported to a place where good writing may be recognized and celebrated.
Elle
won the 2003 Governor General's Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In 2006, the Writers' Trust honoured Glover with the Timothy Findley Award for a male writer in mid-career.
The academic branch of the CanLit industry is also beginning to take note.
The Art of Desire,
a collection of critical essays on Glover's work, edited by Bruce Stone of the University of
Wisconsin at Green Bay, was published in 2004 by Oberon Press, which has also published two of Glover's other books:
Notes Home from a Prodigal Son,
a collection of Glover's own idiosyncratically insightful essays, and
The Enamoured Knight,
a meditation on
Don Quixote.
And what accounts for Glover's long pre-
Elle
sojourn in the limbo of the “eminent unknown”? My theory is that his work is too strong, too original, and (often) too comic for what has at least until recently been identifiable as the taste of the Canadian mainstream. He's a contemporary version of Elle's F., his writing playful, passionate, and intelligent. Perhaps Canada is now ready to respond positively to such qualities in its nationally recognized authors. Perhaps a wider audience is at last ready to appreciate his work as Elle appreciates F.'s: “What I love about his stories: He writes as if he is never afraid of what he might say next.”
Douglas Glover was born in 1948 and grew up on a tobacco farm near the town of Waterford in southwestern Ontario. He studied philosophy at York University and the University of Edinburgh and worked for several years at daily papers in New Brunswick, Ontario, Quebec, and Saskatchewan. He is the author of three story collections, four novels, and two works of non-fiction:
Notes Home from a Prodigal Son
and
The Enamoured Knight,
a book about
Don Quixote
and the novel form. His novels include
Precious, The South Will Rise at Noon,
the critically acclaimed historical novel
The Life and Times of Captain N.,
and
Elle.
Elle
won the Governor General's Award for Fiction and has been published in several languages. It also appeared on the shortlists for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Canada and the Caribbean.
The Life and Times of Captain N.
was listed by the
Chicago Tribune
as one of the best books of 1993 and as a
Globe and Mail
top-ten paperback of 2001. His most recent collection of stories,
16 Categories of Desire,
was a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Award and a top fiction pick for
This Morning
(CBC Radio),
Hot Type
(CBC Television), and the
Toronto Star.
His 1991 story collection,
A Guide to Animal Behaviour,
was a finalist for the Governor General's Award.