Anne-Sophie Letessier

 

Anne-Sophie Letessier is a senior lecturer at the University Jean Monnet-Saint Etienne, where she is affiliated to the research group CELEC (Centre d’Etude sur les Langues et les Littératures Etrangères et Comparées). Her PhD dissertation, which focused on the politics and poetics of intermediality in Canadian novelist Jane Urquhart’s landscape writing, won the 2018 SEPC Award for best PhD thesis in the field of postcolonial studies. She has presented and published papers on the parody of pictorial codes, the politics of looking, the theoretical foundation of the Western conception of landscape, and more generally on landscape writing in contemporary English Canadian literature.

anne.sophie.letessier@univ-st-etienne.fr

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In Place / Out of Place: 

Hospitalities and Hostilities in Michael Crummey’s Galore (2011)

Université Jean Monnet – St Etienne

 

Native critics have underlined the absence of the Beothuks in Michael Crummey’s Galore, a historical novel set in colonial Newfoundland. The sole reference is a vague memory among the settlers of the Beothuks’ extinction, a tenuous allusion to the issues raised by any revisiting of Newfoundland’s – and Canada’s – settler-invader past. Coupled with Crummey’s contention that Galore is about “the lore of the place,” this absenting might suggest a form of colonial nostalgia, the novel a foundation narrative “delving into the past for internalized origins” (Massey) to legitimize Newfoundlanders’ autochtony. I would argue, however, that with his third novel, Crummey revisits a persistent literary topos about Newfoundland, “the notion of a culture embedded in place” (Massey), by pondering how the close parentage between hospitality and hostility informs experiences and practices of place, a reminder, if need be, that the latter is constructed out of ever shifting social configurations.

Galore is a multigenerational narrative spanning a hundred and fifty years whose plot is driven by the arrivals of strangers to the Shore, an isolated outport community. The novel explores the ramifications of the disruptions brought about by each arrival but resists any simplifying reading pitting hospitality against hostility. The presence of a stranger, however she or he is initially received, becomes both the object of new tales to be told and the occasion for older stories to be revived and transformed, thereby ceaselessly re-constructing the meaning of place for the villagers and the new-comers alike. Such is the case with the character of the Great White, a figure of the “anonymous other” who, when he is discovered by the villagers in the belly of a whale in the opening scene of the novel, has “neither name, nor patronym, nor family, nor social status” (Derrida). “Neither fish nor fowl,” a mute whose strange physical appearance sets apart from the others, his is a precarious position which is indexed in the name he is eventually given, Judah, a compromise between the competing stories of Judas and Jonah which the villagers draw on to make sense of the mystery surrounding his arrival. The trajectory of the character, who remains an enigma on which the text hinges without dispelling it, epitomizes the fact that, in Galore, the equilibrium between openness and closedness is the object of constant negotiations, making the position of the host and the visitor equally provisional. Crummey, indeed, weaves in together the stories of the “unhappy visitors” resisting “surrender[ing] some part of [themselves] to the shore” who eventually flee the inhospitable land, the “outsiders” fearing they “might overstay [their] welcome,” and the villagers feeling like strangers among their kin, “courting a world [they are] barely acquainted with.”

This paper therefore proposes to look at the representation of hospitality and hostility in Galore as a reflection on the precarious construction and conflicting practices of place, both host and visitor alike finding themselves in turn in place and out of place (Creswell).