Things I Wish I’d Written: 2: The Life and Times of Captain N

Douglas Glover, The Life and Times of Captain N. 

The historical novel that put me off ever thinking I could write a historical novel.  The plotless plot is almost pretext; fluidity of time, space and culture are Glover’s principal preoccupations, and mine as well.  Only he does it with an intelligence (and perhaps an aplomb) you or I will never possess.

The book revolves around an imbricated series of events taking place at once before, during and after the American Revolutionary War, in an undefined location in Upper New York State.  Aboriginal and European cultures clash then meld, as do Loyalists and Revolutionaries, friends and families, as well as past, present and future.  All manner of social and historical upheaval is contained within the pages of this book.  Liminalities–social, cultural, temporal, moral–are erased as we follow the iconic survivor narrative of young Mary Hunsacker, who has been taken as a prisoner by a Mississauga raiding party and becomes a medicine woman.  Other transgressors include not only the titular Captain N, Hendrick Nellis, a disaffected Rebel turned Loyalist, and his son Oskar, whose conversion is somewhat more forcible (both of whom lead guerilla units composed of Natives and whites), but the Aboriginals Tom Woppit and William Johnson, who have cannily chosen to adopt very specific elements of European culture. 

Just as in his later, Rabelaisian Elle, incident is developed through Glover’s interests in language play, narrative perspective and the reader/author dynamic.  Characters slip in and out of (actual?) 18th-century vernacular, real historical figures interact with fictional contemporary Natives–yet at no point does the careful reader feel overwhelmed by postmodern tomfoolery, and at heart there is a non-linear but completely apprehensible narrative populated by characters one feels affinities for and revulsion toward.  And there is a lot of revulsion, or at the very least disquiet, in a world that has been so carefully and artfully constructed.  The brutality of 18th-century life has rarely been so well portrayed in all its wretched, bloody detail.  It is a testament to Glover’s skill that he can be both brutally naturalistic while making characters out of abstract notions such as time, history and narrative itself.

(Tip: along with Nabokov, Glover has also proven to be a wonderfully astute commentator on Cervantes.  His The Enamoured Knight is one of my favourite books on Don Quixote, and well worth seeking out.)

Daniel Clowes’ Wilson

Daniel Clowes, Wilson. 

 

Oh, that Wilson!  A sentimental misanthrope, a narcissist with a heart of bronze that’s sometimes in the right place.  A guy you very much hate to love.  We see his type quite a bit these days: the Larry David-style, short-tempered antithesis of the Woody Allen nebbish—though in his age and disposition, he is far more emblematic of the prolonged adolescence of the post-postwar generations (oversensitive, hyperaware and reflective; yet obtuse, childish and cynical).

Wilson has essentially no life.  Unemployed and antisocial, he has nothing but memories of family and previous loves.  This could serve as the basis for a monastic, meditative peace, or a self-absorbed, ruminative hell.  Three guesses.  When his father dies, he is given a once-in-a-lifetime chance to re-create his life, essentially by taking up again with the woman who left him—and who bore him a daughter he never knew.  The ensuing misadventures involving a kidnap attempt, incarceration, and the kindling of a relationship of convenience, bring him to a point in his life, years later, where his bitterness may be tempered by a little sweetness, and where enlightenment may be glimpsed—just barely—in the play of drops on a rainy window.   

Creator Daniel Clowes gave us Ghost World, an examination of the search for authenticity amongst teenage girls.  Wilson, too, is in search of authenticity, though if this know-nothing know-it-all finds it, it is despite himself.  He is provoked by his insecurities to expect the worst and to thus maintain a policy of anticipatory retaliation against everyone, including—especially?—those who would wish him well.  The humour is coal-dark, with Clowes getting his best laughs at our expense.  Each Wilsonian outburst is nastier than the last (though a passive-aggressive prank involving a box of dog shit near the beginning is hard to top!), and calculated to dare us to keep liking him despite his unresolved pessimism and infantile anger.  It works.  The most unpleasant episodes are hysterically funny, all the more because we find ourselves shocked at our own schadenfreude.

 

The line-through is somewhat choppy: all the pages are set-pieces with terminal punchlines, with many of the pages standing alone, and only a few making up larger scenes.  The pacing is fine at the outset as Wilson’s personality is established, but the crux of the narrative seems rushed.  A bit precious, perhaps—though I enjoyed it—is Clowes’ employment of a good half-dozen completely different draughting styles and variations thereon, from naturalistic to underground to retro.  I haven’t been able to attach these or the various dominant colour stories to Wilson’s actions or emotional states.

This is, to be honest, after Chester Brown’s Louis Riel, only the second graphic novel I’ve ever read.  I like what I’ve seen so far, though I doubt I will ever become a rabid fan of the genre.  I certainly don’t like the term “graphic novel” (this is no more a novel than a film is a “moving novel”) and such books should at best be regarded as sui generis and receive their own nomenclature—one not betraying the influence of marketing departments.  After all, they are well enough established that there’s no harm in admitting that they are really grown-up comix or adult picture books.  Or maybe I’m just a square.

Québécois as “Aboriginals”

For the best exposition of this ridiculous idea, I would recommend you track down the awful bande déssinée series, Bojoual. 

As a historical document, this short-lived product from the halcyon days of CÉGEPs and Hydro-Québec is priceless: it is loaded with so many bell-bottomed themes, memes, nuggets and touchstones of pop-nationalistic ideology (including takes on Expo 67, the Montréal Olympics, Charles de Gaulle, and kickback-tainted infrastructure projects) that Taras Grescoe should have given it an entire chapter in his wonderful outsider’s view of Québec, Sacré Blues.

In it, we follow the adventures of the burly Bojoual, a Huron (i.e. “Kébékois”), as he and his cohort of drunken, childish “dumb lazy Injun” stereotypes must foil the machinations of sell-out Hurons such as the devious martial artist Pétak (Trudeau) and the bumbling goof Peau-de-rat (Jean Drapeau) in order to preserve their little corner of Kébek from the encroachment of Whites/Anglos. 

In other words, it’s a miserable rip-off of Astérix (a series, by the way, fraught with problems of its own: those ancient Gauls are themselves staunch Post-War French nationalists in the face of—what?  Shame at their recent Vichy past?  European hegemony under somebody else’s administration?). 

   

The names, at least, were inspired.  “Pétak” translates as “Spud” in Canadian French, and “Peau-de-rat” is a spoonerism for “Drapeau” (and incidentally translates to “Rat Pelt”).  Cute.  “Bojoual,” for its part, comes from an expression, (se) mettre en beau joual vert, meaning to get “righteously pissed off,” which is fitting, since the titular character obtained his legendary strength not by means of a potion but by simply getting upset. 

More significantly, the word “joual” itself is the working-class French-Canadian pronunciation of cheval, or horse, and is used snobbishly (and therefore erroneously) as a dismissive term to denigrate working-class speech and speakers: “I hate the way he talks!  He speaks joual!  Why doesn’t he learn proper French?”  To his credit, then, Bojoual is a Michel Tremblay-era, vernacular-using populist, to be distinguished from self-important federalist Gallomaniacs, etc.

Things I Wish I’d Written: 1: Volkswagen Blues

Jacques Poulin, Volkswagen blues.

 

A road trip like no other.  Native affairs and the 40-foot stare, hysterical sweeps of historical brooms writ deadpan.  This is of course one of Canlit’s greatest hits, one of a vital list of French-English crossover publishing phenomena.  But for all that, it is also a great introduction to Poulin and to some of the perennial themes in his oeuvre. 

Jack(/Jacques?) Waterman is the quintessential wry, taciturn Poulin non-hero who spends most of his time engaged in the simple acts of making coffee and driving his Westphalia.  At times despondent, often bemused, mostly perplexed, his yin finds its yang in the ardent La Grande Sauterelle, a Métis firebrand whose public quest to expose North American (White) injustices toward Natives mirrors his private quest to find his unobtainable (br)other Théo in San Francisco.  It’s a tidy trip, starting at the Baie de Gaspé, near the origin point of French expansion, and ending on the west coast, the countercultural ground zero.  

Poulin, through the outspokenness of La Grande Sauterelle, takes the piss out of a rather annoying and bizarre theme in Québec nationalist rhetoric–namely, the not-wholly-metaphorical identification of Québécois with Aboriginals vis-à-vis Anglos (those who, in the words of nationalist poet Michèle Lalonde, speak “White”); it’s a tired conceit, and insulting to Aboriginals, toward whom the Québécois have been every bit as nasty as Anglos–and who, as living, breathing people, are not to be “read” as signifiers, analogues or terms!  Mercifully, it’s a trope infrequently seen these days, reflecting a decidedly Lévesque-era mentality.  Yes, as a Métis, La Grande Sauterelle is both White and Native, French and Montagnais.  But as such, she stands principally on the side of her Aboriginal heritage, and not metaphorically.  Her manic outburst before a museum-piece Gatling gun is a corrective against the whole idea of historical commemoration, when “history” is nothing less than bloodshed, and “commemoration” is no more than an unreflective, even smug, display of artefacts.  Scenes such as this remind us that it is thoroughly obscene to compare the Québécois’ acknowledged difficulties in putting up with Anglos, with the abject sadism, barbarity and stark genocide suffered by Natives under Whites.      

Similarly, the naïveté of Québec’s love affair with the United States is exploded in Jack’s search for Théo, a mysterious Bay-area beatnik.  Arguably, the Québécois view of the United States is restricted to areas of international importance, supplemented by an awareness of the hotspots of 19th and 20th century industrial re-settlement (principally the Atlantic states).  Few of us–Anglophone or Francophone, American or Canadian–know or appreciate how truly extensive the French presence is throughout the whole continent. Setting aside the usual home-grown inanities and pop-cultural clichés, Poulin takes the US head-on.  It’s telling that Jack should meet Saul Bellow(!), a quintessentially American writer born in Lachine and living in Chicago, a quintessentially American city founded by the French.  And the object of Jack’s quest is a sort of Kerouac-figure, with all the social, (counter-)cultural and linguistic liminality explicit there. 

When Jack finally arrives in Frisco his perplexity at life, the universe and everything is not relieved, for the elusive Théo is all but impossible to track down, and may or may not have revealed himself as the merest glimpse of a barely recognizable figure.  This Beckettian ending is only appropriate, not merely narratively, but historically.  How much of the quest is about Jack himself?  Enough to create his own brother out of whole cloth?  And how much of Théo was even a character, and how much an abstraction of cultural topoi?  In Québec, the counterculture came on the heels of the Quiet Revolution and was invested with a political and nationalistic significance unknown in the rest of Canada, and whose effects permanently altered every institution in the Province.  Many people arriving in San Francisco today expecting the vitality of the hippie and Beat movements of the past are disappointed in what they find.  To a Québécois trying to come to terms with the last half-century of Franco-American history, based as it is so firmly on a particularly robust strain of the erstwhile youth movement, it is sobering and unsettling to arrive at its cultural and ideological epicentre and find a void.

In a word, few have done so well as Poulin at dissecting the North American consciousness–and fewer still from a Québécois perspective.  Tragically funny or funnily tragic?  Yes.