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| Hearsay: |
Stephen Henighan, what exactly are you saying here? State yourself plainly, man, rather than all this beating around the bush. Out with it.
As soon as Atwood stood up to introduce the fifth shortlisted author, Vincent Lam, anyone who understood power in Canadian culture knew that Lam had won. Margaret Atwood does not introduce losers. By placing her authority behind Lam, she was giving the equivalent of el dedazo, the crook of the finger with which a Mexican president signals his successor. The image was so powerful that the next day’s Globe and Mail misreported the event, stating that Lam had received his Giller Prize from Atwood when, like every previous winner, he was handed his cheque by Jack Rabinovitch, founder of the prize. But in political terms, the Globe’s initial report—later retracted—was accurate.
The peculiarly Canadian feature of Atwood’s intervention was her astonishing decision to tell in public the story of how Lam had approached her to read his manuscript while working as the ship’s doctor on an Arctic cruise on which Atwood was a passenger. The Family Compact takes for granted that advertising pre-existing links between old and new members of the establishment legitimizes the next generation in the eyes of the public. Our bourgeoisie, being weaker than that of other Western countries, must assert its cohesiveness in public. … In an instant Vincent Lam…became a member of the Family Compact and a potential teddy bear.
Oh. Well, yes, that is quite plain. But I’m glad to see you’ve found a positive aspect to it all — the teddy bear angle for our big, happy family.
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January 24th, 2007 at 10:05 am
I admire Henighan for being such a consistent and outspoken critic of the current state of CanLit and Canadian publishing – silence and the occasional arched eyebrow being the norm – but he goes way off the rails here (and elsewhere), and, as usual, ruins his valid points by hitching them to the worst kind of radio call-in show paranoia. He’s like a stranger you meet in a bar and have a great conversation with – right up until the point when he starts saying the CBC is run by the Masons or something.
Anyway, I did my own response to Henighan’s column, if you’re interested:
http://tinyurl.com/yvg7oy
January 24th, 2007 at 2:01 pm
Somebody, at some point, is going to have to explain two things to me, or my head will eventually just explode in frustration.
1) Why does a mediocre novelist like Atwood get so much critical praise? (The fans, well, I can live with bad books selling well. Nothing new there.)
2) Why does Geist continue to publish Henighan’s Conspiracy Theory nonsense?
January 24th, 2007 at 2:33 pm
I think you can ask that first question about most major novelists who’ve become criticism-proof.
Aside from the inevitable “it’s Atwood so it’s great” laziness, I think one of the reasons is that, like it or not, her work has always possessed a unusually distinctive voice and point of view, one that resonates strongly with her readership. You might find that voice grating or patronizing or smug, but at least there is one – the prose of many of her literary descendants is pretty much indistinguishable.
About Henighan, I really do admire him for putting this stuff on the record and being willing to make enemies for it. (Or make a fool of himself, as he does here.) Many of his Geist columns are smart and perceptive, and even in this column there are points worth airing and investigating. (That mixed marriage bit, though – that’s woohoo nutty.)
I wish we could sponsor a six-month internship for Henighan at a major publisher so he could see, from the inside, how banal and hapless some of these “conspiracies” are.
(He could live at Bloor and Yonge and maybe get that obsession out of his system, too.)