Author Carol Shields passed away this summer, while I was unable to update. I wanted so very much to express to my readers how much of a loss her death really was to Canadian literature. Thanks to my site’s down time, I was able to give a lot of thought to what I want to say.
Though I never got to meet her, Carol Shields taught me that literature, even if it isn’t always for everybody, is always for somebody. Her books were for me. They were about Canada, but not just that; they were about a Canada that I recognized. The Stone Diaries was the first Canadian book I read that did not take place either in Toronto, elsewhere in Southern Ontario, or in the Maritimes. It took place primarily in Manitoba and the United States, with Winnipeg holding a prominent place. You see, I had been to Toronto once or twice, but outside of what I saw on the news, it, along with most of Southern Ontario, occupied a huge fuzzy space in my mind. But Winnipeg! I knew Winnipeg. Growing up in Dryden it was always on the edge of my imagination. It was where we did our back-to-school shopping, where we went to see specialists and surgeons, a place to go on special occassions. When someone said, “The City,” you knew it meant Winnipeg. It was a real place, and that made the book real to me too.
There were other things, of course, that attracted me to The Stone Diaries. It took chances in how it told its story; it didn’t have a clean ending. Shields may not have been quite on the cutting edge, but she knew her craft, and that made her books (and still makes them, The Stone Diaries especially) preferable than many of the more popular experiments of the ’90s.
Last spring I exchanged e-mails with Stephen Henighan about his book, When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing. In it he accuses The Stone Diaries of being “free trade fiction,” putting American characters and settings in prominent positions in order to make the book more palatable to audiences South of the border. I called him on it. I explained to him that he didn’t understand how central Canada works. The border is, to borrow a descriptor from David Foster Wallace, porous. In Manitoba, and in Northwestern Ontario, people and ideas move freely from one country to another, and from one province to another. When Henighan told me that he had the impression (from growing up in the Ottawa valley, he said) that the Canada/U.S. border was “The Front,” he implied that Shield’s vision of a prominent America in a Canadian novel could be nothing other than pandering. Shields de-emphasized Manitoba’s peculiar history, he said, leaving out the Riel rebellion, the curious ethnic mixing, and instead emphasizes the United States.
First, I think it needs to be said that the curious ethnic blends of Manitoba are completely irrelevant to the novel, and after reading Henighan’s work, I think that emphasis on ethnicity is a bee in his bonnet; he ought not transfer it to Shields. Second, Shields, while growing up and living most of her life in Canada, was born in the United States. Third, the frequent border crossings in The Stone Diaries are perfectly in keeping with Manitoba’s peculiar history. Riel took refuge in the United States. Sitting Bull took refuge in Canada, and Big Bear, a prominent Native Canadian leader, took no notice of the border, crossing it as he pleased. Indeed, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were formed because American bandits (possibly with some Canadians; the record is imperfect as to their nationality, but they did come from South of the border, no matter who they pledged their allegiance to) slaughtered a Canadian settlement near the Manitoba/Saskatchewan border. Manitoba was brought into confederation in order to keep it from the hands of American expansionists. The entire “peculiar” history of the province revolves around the American border and its crossing. That Shields did not mention specific historical events that had no direct bearing on her story is not a weakness in her story. It is a strength.
Shields will always have her critics; all writers worth anything do. But she will always occupy a special place on my bookshelf. She wrote the first real Canadian book I read, the first book in which I could see a piece of myself, and quite possibly the book that made me think seriously about literature for the first time.
It’s perhaps too late now, but I’d like to thank her.
