Oh Canadiana? Atlantic Canada, Joel Thomas Hynes, and Heroin Realism

The essay locates Joel Thomas Hynes’s We’ll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night (2017), narrated by the social outcaste Johnny, in an international “heroin realism” tradition. Hynes, styled as Canada’s “bad boy” author, thus evoking his emotional ties to his protagonist, situates Johnny on the margins of Canada: in Newfoundland, which has been systemically disenfranchised from Canada’s centre beside the rest of Atlantic Canada for over a century, as novels by Michael Crummey, Lisa Moore, David Adams Richards, Alistair MacLeod, and Hugh MacLennan show. The regionally representative Johnny complicates romantic figurations of Canada, which prides itself on progressiveness and equal opportunity, and which is globally envisaged as a beacon of mobility and community. Characters like Johnny do not fit into mythical Canada, whether in its pan-Canadian variety, where the East Coast is mythologized as an ocean oasis of what Herb Wyile calls “commercial antimodernism,” or in its depressive, alcoholic Atlantic-Canadian version. Limited by his social positioning, ot unlike Rose in Alice Munro’s collection The Beggar Maid (1978), Johnny cannot actualise the mobility Canadiana advertises – this despite his inculcation of this seductive delusion via books. He instead experiences what bell hooks calls “psychic turmoil”: the discomfiture of simultaneously occupying two distinct yet continuous narratives. Johnny’s regional narrative, then, not only translates to Rose’s national one, as well as to the spirit of the Beats, of road novelists, and of Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo, but also to the international dimensions of other personages in “heroin realism.” Writers like Joel Thomas Hynes, Harry Crews, Denis Johnson, Antonio Lobo Antunes, Jeet Thayil, Eimear McBride, and Niall Griffiths work to deconstruct romantic idealizations. The figures of heroin realism, like Johnny, are those characters who are neither commoditized by class relations nor by national narratives.

Table of Contents: Testimony to the Royal Commission on Book Publishing

This article contains a table of contents to the 4408 pages of official testimony from Ontario’s Royal Commission on Book Publishing,which operated from 1971 to 1973 looking into questions about the business of publishing in Canada. The table of contents helpsresearchers discover who testified before the commission—whether as individuals or on behalf of their company or organization—andwhen they testified in order to be able to find the official transcript of their testimony and their accompanying brief in the archival filesheld at the Archives of Ontario (RG 18-164). The article begins with a short introduction to the commission and its work, followed bysix excerpts from the testimony from Quill & Quire, Peter Martin, the McGraw-Hill Company of Canada, Campbell B. Hughes, Dr.Francess G. Halpenny, and Hugh MacLennan. The table of contents comprises the remaining two-thirds of the article.

Buckler, Ernest (1908–1984)

Ernest Buckler (1908–1984) was a walking paradox. Born in the bookless society of poor, rural Nova Scotia, he earned a BA in mathematics and philosophy at Dalhousie University and an MA in philosophy at the University of Toronto, alongside Hugh MacLennan and Northrop Frye respectively, before going back to the Annapolis Valley to farm by day and write by night. He is best known for his pastoral first novel, The Mountain and the Valley (1952), which garnered as high critical acclaim in the US and Canada as the novels published concurrently by established American writers, notably John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and Ernest Hemingway’s comeback The Old Man and the Sea. The simultaneous publications illustrate the coexistence of early and late modernisms and their correlation to geopolitical space, notably center and margin. Later hailed as a ‘pioneer in Canadian writing’ by Margaret Laurence and a ‘pathbreaker for the modern Canadian novel’ by Margaret Atwood, Buckler nonetheless refracts the interrogations of modernity beyond national borders and connects with writers and thinkers ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson to James Joyce, Marcel Proust (see Purdham), and Albert Camus.