Herb Wyile. Anne of Tim Hortons: Globalization and the Reshaping of Atlantic-Canadian Literature.
Fuller, Daniel
Herb Wyile. Anne of Tim Hortons: Globalization and the Reshaping of
Atlantic-Canadian Literature. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier up, 2011. 294
pp. $42.95 paper.
When you have one of the best Canadian literature book titles of
the last several decades on your cover there is a danger that the
contents will not live up to it. Herb Wyile more than delivers on the
title's promise. This engaging and lively discussion of
contemporary Atlantic-Canadian literature offers far more than an
explication of the ideology that situates a fictional creation, the
world-famous girl with the ginger hair, within a network of commodities
that also contains Canada's favourite doughnut store chain. Simply
put, Wyile's impassioned study reminds us why literature matters in
neoliberal times. It matters because, as Wyile demonstrates repeatedly,
literature can explore the human costs of living in a time of unfettered
free-market economics in subtle and creative ways that render visible
moral ambiguities as well as social and material inequities.
Wyile begins his introduction with the contention that "the
Atlantic Canada of today is very much caught up in the profound
economic, political, cultural, and social shifts that have come to be
described by the term 'globalization' " (1). Writers from
the four Atlantic provinces are thus well placed to critique the fallout
from the so-called flows of global capital (that would be the flow that
rushes right past your small rural community or through your
region's natural resources and on to somewhere else). This is,
after, all, a region that is still frequently depicted in the Canadian
media and, as Wyile notes, in speeches by federal ministers, as a
"have not," cash-sucking part of the nation-state inhabited by
people who ought to shut up, ship out, and get a job in the Alberta oil
sands. Such attitudes alone would be sufficient to inspire many creative
writers to produce counter-narratives about their home places, but
Atlantic Canadians must also grapple with the popular images that posit
their region as a leisure space for tourists and as the site of Folk
archetypes and Edenic bliss. In many ways, as Wyile reveals through his
close reading of a staggering range of texts, these images are the
trickiest ones for writers to negotiate because they are, in part, self
generated. The Folk haunt the popular and literary culture of Atlantic
Canada and form a kernel around which this book is formed. In many
respects Wyile's study can be understood as a long conversation
with Ian McKay's The Quest of the Folk (1994), a seminal critique
of the Folk paradigm that has had a profound influence on the
contemporary field of Atlantic Canadian studies. One of the achievements
of Anne of Tim Hortons is that Wyile appreciates McKay's
delineation of anti-modernist ideology but that he also successfully
fulfils his aim of pushing against the historian's tendency to
frame activities associated with the Folk--"fishing, farming,
fiddling"--as either naive, ironic, or cynical (25). Rather,
through his lively and careful interpretations of novels, poetry, and
plays, Wyile is able to identify how "fiddles and shopping malls,
lobster boats, and satellite dishes can and do happily and
unselfconsciously coexist" (25). At times, the passing of maritime
or rural traditions may be elegized or satirized by writers, but the
iconography arising from those traditions is also questioned,
contemplated, and taken seriously. Here is a body of literature, Wyile
argues, that is at once cosmopolitan yet astutely engaged with
expectations that it will be anything but that.
The book's introduction offers a compelling synthesis of
theory about neoliberalism and globalization, as well as an energetic
discussion of how and why contemporary Atlantic-Canadian writers
understand and contest the political, economic, and cultural realities
that surround them. Keeping faith with the argument that the
region's writers are well-placed observers and sophisticated
critics of the ways that neoliberal economics reshape work patterns,
communities, and understandings of time and place, the book is organized
into three sections, each with its own introduction and conclusion. In
section one, "I'se the B'y that Leaves the Boats: The
Changing World of Work," there are separate chapters on writing
that engages with three key work spheres: the fisheries, mining and
offshore oil, and the service sector. Section two, "About as Far
from Disneyland as You Can Possibly Get: The Reshaping of Culture"
consists of two chapters examining work by writers who complicate
idealised and "monochromatic" cultural constructions of the
region. Finally, the third section, "The Age of Sale: History,
Globalization, and Commodification," considers, as the subtitle
suggests, how a series of writers represent the region's history
and their explorations of the cultural and economic losses and gains
sustained in a period of global capital.
One of the benefits of the book's structure (each chapter is
also divided into sections) is that Wyile is able to attend to the
specific histories of the places, events, and issues that are explored
by a wide range of selected writers, and, in so doing, he can highlight
some of the important differences, not only between the four provinces
but also within them. So, for example, the first chapter of section one
focusing on the fisheries examines three novels by Newfoundland writers
in which the narrative lens is trained on output communities imbricated
in a mesh of macroeconomics and the politics of resource management:
Donna Morrissey's Sylvanus Now, Bernice Morgan's Waiting for
Time, and Kenneth J. Harvey's The Town that Forgot to Breathe.
Here, as in other chapters, Wyile considers how aesthetic aspects of the
texts, in particular the use and adaptation of different genres, enable
or constrain the power of the novelists to resist didacticism or the
retreat into romantic notions of a less complicated past. What emerges
from Wyile's reading of these novels and from his consideration of
three more that deal with accidents and disasters in the mining and
offshore oil industries in the succeeding chapter is a nuanced
examination of the capitalist and class relations structuring the
working worlds and lives of the communities and protagonists depicted.
As Wyile argues, these relations are usually effaced by the Folk
iconography and by cultural stereotypes, even though such images are
constructed by and through them. Alongside two novels which have
garnered international reputations, Alistair MacLeod's No Great
Mischief and Lisa Moore's February, Wyile examines, in chapter two,
Leo McKay's Twenty-Six, a moving and unsentimental novel about the
Westray disaster in Nova Scotia and a book that deserves to be much more
widely known. The final chapter in section one shifts the focus to
service sector work, and here there is a shift in genre as well, as
Wyile considers poetry by Sheree Fitch, Corker, a play by Nova Scotian
writer and politician Wendy Lill, and Ed Riche's satire of
education-as-global-commodity, The Nine Planets. Writers considered in
the other two sections of the study include Michael Winter, George
Elliott Clarke, Rita Joe, Frank Barry, Harry Thurston, Lynn Coady, and
Michael Crummey.
Throughout the book, Wyile repeatedly and generously acknowledges
the work of a scholarly community that he himself fostered through the
organization of conferences, his leadership of projects such as the one
that produced the online resource Waterfront Views, and via the
collaborative editing of various publications focusing on Atlantic
Canadian literature. In the early twenty-first century, as Wyile notes
at the beginning of the book, Atlantic Canadian studies took a
deliberately political version of the cultural turn, and Anne of Tim
Hortons continues the ideologically engaged and materially situated
scholarship made familiar by Tony Tremblay, David Creelman, Jeanette
Lynes, and others. It is mostly, although not entirely, smooth sailing.
(Ironic puns, as Wyile's section titles indicate, are very much
part of the critical discourse about Atlantic Canadian culture in the
new millennium.) Partly because Wyile establishes such a convincing
politically, economically, and historically grounded methodology in the
introduction, the deployment of a Freudian approach to Moore's
novel in chapter 2, although credible on its own terms, feels slightly
jarring. For me, this was a minor off-key moment in an otherwise tightly
argued three-chapter section. Similarly, chapter 7, which begins the
book's third section about revisionist and romantic histories of
the region, is a little disconnected from the otherwise well-sustained
and neatly sign-posted arguments about the operations of global capital
and neoliberal ideology. The conclusion to the study more than
compensates for this, however, with Wyile re-presenting contemporary
Atlantic Canadian writing as "speculative fiction" for the
rest of Canada: "an advance glimpse of what life is like when one
of the only things that you have left to sell is your past" (243).
It is a rousing finale that had me practically bouncing up and down in
my seat, such is the energy and passion driving the argument for the
literary and political significance of the writing surveyed.
To Wyile's great credit, Anne of Tim Hortons is not a polemic
aimed at the roc, nor is it the next episode in a declension narrative
about the fortunes of Atlantic Canada. It could easily have been either
of these and it would still been a valuable scholarly work because of
its impressive critical survey of contemporary Atlantic-Canadian
writing. But it is a much better book because it exceeds all of these
categories. Wyile's study is a convincing analysis of a literature
that articulates and reshapes the cultural and economic effects of
globalization in a region that is often considered to be off the map,
behind the times, or, at the very least, marginal to the centres of
power. Equally impressive and significant is the confidence and clarity
of the prose style: here is a book that is written out of a deep feeling
for and an extensive knowledge about the literary culture and social
history of the four provinces. And that--quite apart from the seduction
of the catchy title and the shock of red hair adorning the cover of the
book--is the reason why Anne of Tim Hortons is such an absorbing study
to read.
Works Cited
McKay, Ian. The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural
Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia. Montreal:
McGill-Queen's up, 1994.
Waterfront Views: Contemporary Writing of Atlantic Canada.
http://waterfrontviews.acadiau.ca.
Danielle Fuller
University of Birmingham
