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Narratives of hospitalities and hostilities
Of guests and parasites

“The Lore of the Place”: (In)Hospitalities in Michael Crummey’s Galore (2010)

La tradition du lieu : (in)hospitalités dans Galore (2010) de Michael Crummey
Anne-Sophie Letessier

Résumés

Dans Galore, roman de Michael Crummey dont l’intrigue est rythmée par l’arrivée d’étrangers dans une communauté côtière de Terre-Neuve, la tension entre hospitalité et inhospitalité offre un point d’entrée pour étudier ce que l’auteur nomme « the lore of the place ». S’appuyant sur la réévaluation contemporaine de la notion de lieu, la présente étude voit dans la représentation de l’(in)hospitalité une réflexion sur l’attachement à l’idée de continuité, la recherche des origines et le besoin d’emplacement, qui désengage le roman des discours sur l’autochtonie.

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Mots-clés :

hospitalité, lieu, terre, seuils, récits
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  • 1 Subsequent references to the novel will appear directly in the text.
  • 2 The image harkens back to an earlier passage describing the young Abel losing himself in the storie (...)
  • 3 While Terry Goldie notes that there are “many folkloric sources for this motif” (Goldie, 2012: 88), (...)

1In his interview with Cynthia Sugars, Newfoundland writer Michael Crummey comments on how his second novel circles on itself […], goes back to the beginning and starts over again” (Crummey & Sugars, 2012: 110). The transgenerational narrative of Galore ends with the character of Abel slipping off the steamer bringing him back to Newfoundland just as a whale surfaces, thus replicating what happened to his great-grandfather, a mute stranger of unknown origins whom an outport community discovered in the belly of a whale a century before. Drawing on Edward Said’s Beginnings, Sugars views the novel’s ending as positioning Abel “gazing back upon his ancestral origins, looking back to the fate of the mystical progenitor and forward to the destiny of future descendants in the communal line” (Sugars, 2010: n. p.). What the conceit appears to indicate—a conservative attachment to continuity through repetition, “time circling on itself like that endless conversation of water and stone” (247)1—might be considered somewhat problematic. All the more so if one interprets Crummey’s insistence that Galore is about “the lore of the place” (Crummey & Sugars, 2012: 108) as evidence that the novel is attuned to what cultural geographer Doreen Massey terms an “essentialist” conception of place (1994: 119): “the idea that identity of place […] is constructed out of an introverted, inward-looking history based on delving into the past for internalized origins.” (1994: 154) Yet, the self-consciousness of the device, indexed in the image of “a story spiralling out of the ocean’s endless green and black to claim [Abel]” (334)2, entices the critic to go back to the distinction on which Said premises his analysis of the different understandings of beginning. Origin, to which “by virtue of precedence and unchanging being, everything can be referred for explanation” (174), is mythical and privileged (xix). Beginning, on the other hand, is “secular, human produced and ceaselessly re-examined” (xix). Looking at the conceit through the prism of this conceptual opposition entails paying closer attention to the authorial gesture of beginning it foregrounds: how, with the story of man found in a whale, Crummey chooses to “re-enter” Newfoundland’s folklore and the topos of the old outport (Chafe, 2016: 40)3 by making the stranger’s appearance on the shore the novel’s “catalyzing event” (Sugars, 2010: n. p.).

2My contention is that Crummey’s interest in the “particulars” of outport Newfoundland (Crummey, 2019: n. p.) evinces a concern with its representation as place. Galore’s plotline is driven by the arrivals of newcomers into the coastal community and the shifts and disruptions they bring about in the “labyrinthine warfare” triggered by family feuds, personal enmities, sectarian and economic conflicts (Crummey, 2019: n. p.). The ramifications of each arrival are a reminder, if need be, that place is never merely a location, and that hospitality therefore always coalesces social, cultural and spatial practices which hinge on bordering: designating who / what is in or out of place—a phrase indicative of expectations, and therefore of meanings and values attached to place (Cresswell, 1996: 4; Massey, 1995: 46). Hospitality also relates to the transactions allowing for a productive relationship between self and place whereby newcomers and livyers alike may “feel at home in the world” (314). If folklore is commonly understood as “culture embedded in place” (Massey, 1994: 1), the novel’s interweaving of hospitality and inhospitality provides an element of answer to the question Massey raises in her critical re-evaluation of the concept of place: “how to hold on to [the] notion of geographical difference, of uniqueness, even of rootedness […] without it being reactionary” (1994: 152). The tests and trials generated by the arrival of an outsider bring to the fore the conflicting interplay between continuity and disruption, the customary and the new, the familiar and the other, thereby troubling persistent assumptions about the simple, constant and defining relation between local culture and place (Massey & Jess, 1995: 1).

Threshold Crossings

  • 4 One may think of the recurring image of Newfoundland and Newfoundlanders as being “enisled” in Wayn (...)

3Galore opens on Judah’s final years “on the shore in a makeshift asylum cell” (1), an evocation which ushers in a description of the outport community “camp[ing] on the grey sand, waiting to butcher a whale” (1) and about to discover the stranger in its belly. The narrative set-up draws as much attention on the twists of plot the inaugural prolepsis announces, as on the spatial referents. In the circumscribed topography of the novel, the shore is an including line which serves as a recurring synecdoche for the twin settlements of Paradise Deep and the Gut. The text, however, inflects the topos of the “self-enclosed and liminal place” (Goldie, 2012: 91) and its insistence on the insularity of Newfoundland’s outport communities4. As a toponym, the shore is a reminder of the outport’s dependence on the sea and on the maritime routes linking it to the world beyond. The actual strip of land bordering the ocean is at once an edge which delimits and defines from within and from without, and an “intervening connective space” (Casey, 2011: 94) between the twin settlements and an elsewhere. With wrecks and castaways washing ashore, packet boats, coastal ships and fishing schooners mooring and departing, it forms a threshold into the community.

  • 5 The character of King-me Sellers is a familiar figure in the economic history of outport Newfoundla (...)

4While the novel’s opening pages set off Judah’s eventual ostracism against the initial surprise of discovery, they defer the moment when the villagers “first la[y] eyes” on him (1) to make room for a scene which sheds light on the negotiations and transactions the shore as a transitional zone necessitates. The starving fishermen and their families see in the beached whale an “unexpected offering,” a “gift” from the sea which, in a time of scarcity, is both a hostile force and a benevolent provider (2). The text does not linger on the superstitions and rituals through which the community makes sense of the precariousness of living on the shore. The rendering of the whale is quickly reframed in the light of the dispute which arises from the contested fixing of boundaries which would warrant claims on the animal: the shore as public property or as an extension of the “premises” of Spurriers & Co. (2), the English merchant company whose local agent, King-me Sellers, rules over the outport—a majority of its population is either indentured or indebted to him5. The episode hinges on an analogy, underscored by onomastics, between King-me’s predatory practices and the way he plays draughts, the grid of the game an apt correlative for the control of place. The merchant owns the board and the harbour, and therefore considers that he “own[s] the rules that govern[s]” the former just as he holds jurisdiction over the latter, which he pointedly reminds the livyers (2).

  • 6 The magical properties the villagers ascribe to the ritual are related to the hardships of outport (...)

5With Judah’s body emerging from the whale, a “strange event” which the merchant’s territorial logic cannot account for (4), the text displaces the conflict of authority. Dismissing King-me’s claims that the stranger’s arrival is a “devilment” (4), the livyers revert to the ritual practices creating and enacting thresholds by entrusting the seemingly dying man on the Widow Devine whom they regard as a “gatekeeper between two worlds” (23), the guardian of the “elemental passages” of birth and death (10). Judah is miraculously brought back to life after the old woman has him christened, along with her ailing grandson, in an old ritual centred on a tree where “[e]very infant born in the Gut and many born in Paradise Deep” have been welcomed into the world and into the community (14). The history of the tree itself, explained in the analepsis which serves as a preamble to the scene, makes it an emblem of both transplantation and (re)emplacement. The sapling, brought from Ireland as a relic of a lost home, once planted in new soil, is endowed with new meanings in a cultural practice which participates in creating and maintaining a sense of place for the people on the shore.6 When the focus of perception momentarily becomes the villagers who have gathered to witness the christening, the description of the men “awkward[ly] negotiat[ing] the white-haired stranger through the branches,” shouting and swearing (14), introduces a jarring note. The scene is collectively deemed “a travesty of something sacred” (14). What prompts such judgment is not so much Judah being a stranger, as the visual immediacy of a body “[t]he white of sea ice” (14) whose irreducible otherness is perceived as threatening to sap the capacity of the ritual to produce home and foster belonging.

  • 7 The Dictionnary of Newfoundland English defines a jinker as “a person (on a vessel) bringing bad lu (...)
  • 8 “[H]ospitality is certainly, necessarily, a right, a duty, an obligation […] but on the condition t (...)

6The villagers’ mute resentment at the Widow allowing Judah passage across the threshold at Kerrivan’s Tree and the way it echoes King-me’s inaugural assertion at the moment of discovery evince a second set of remarks about the trajectory of the character in the first chapter of the novel. The home which the old woman’s hospitality opens to the stranger exists on different scales, each of which constitutes “networks of social relations and understandings” (Massey, 1994: 5) intersecting and at times conflicting with one another. This makes for plot developments which play on the troubling Latin derivation of hostis and its “strange crossing between enemy and host” (Derrida, 2000b: 13). When receiving Judah into her house, her household, and her community, the Widow lets him “take place in the place [she] offer[s]” him (Derrida, 2000b: 25). Understood as a catachresis, “taking place” folds up time and space, and evokes the possibility of making place for what happens. Once the full semantic charge of the verb is restored, the phrase implies the risk of appropriation (taking hold/over), and the potential destruction of the integrity of place (Foucarde & Wallart, 2019: n. p.). Crucially, the christening scene makes no mention of the fish stench which emanates from Judah’s body and “insinuate[es] itself into every nook” of the houses he enters (8). But everyone gathered has already drawn the “obvious connection” (9) between the Widow taking in “the foul-smelling thing under her own roof” (12) and her infant grandson’s failing health, just as shortly after the christening, they will blame the bad fishing season on his presence in their midst (22). The precariousness of the community’s economic structure—the livyers facing repossession and starvation (21)—is tied in with the mix of superstition and religious beliefs which fuels hostility. The stink, which is attributed to the stranger being born of a whale (18), marks him as a “jinker” (25), a Jonah in Newfoundland English,7 and the old woman has to contend with demands from within her household and among the settlement that Judah be sent back where he came from to purge place of his malignant influence. Significantly, the response such demands elicit makes evident the extent to which the Widow’s gesture of hospitality depends on her mastery over the places she has opened to the stranger.8 She exerts her authority as the family matriarch and relies on the deference she inspires the livyers to guard her house and the stranger she has welcomed in it—even as she has him sleep in an outbuilding to placate her daughter-in-law who refuses to allow him across the threshold (28).

  • 9 Cynthia Sugars takes up this idea in her analysis of the ways in which Galore at once affirms and u (...)

7Judah’s miraculous ability to bring fish into the fishermen’s nets puts an end to the community’s hostility, his stink now a “good luck charm” (28) which heralds an era of prosperity. But the name he is eventually given—a combination of Jonah and Judas which is “a compromise between the competing stories of who it was in the Bible had been swallowed by a whale” (28)—continues to point to the inaugural moment of contact and thus to the ambiguities of threshold crossings for a character who can be read as a figure of the “absolute, unknown, anonymous other” (Derrida, 2000b: 25). In that regard, the role the text gives to the “profligate stink of fish” (1) goes beyond the twists of plot. Judah’s descendants inheriting the smell, it becomes an identifying trait in the genealogical history of the shore. In his interview with Sugars, Crummey proposes to interpret Judah’s stench as an analogy for the continuity of cultural memory, the folklore of the place being passed on from one generation to the next (Crummey & Sugars, 2012: 109)9. This does not, in my mind, entirely account for what the smell as a trope insistently suggests. Even after Judah has become a silent yet familiar figure on the shore, that is, even after he no longer is a stranger, he remains the “sea orphan” (1) whose otherness cannot be “restricted to foreignness in relation to language, family” or place (Derrida, 2000b: 8). This is precisely what is incorporated in the shore’s folklore, a movement exemplifying the possibility Massey identifies that the “presence of the outside within […] helps to construct the specificity of the local place” (1994: 170).

“The land don’t want us here.”

8When, in the conclusion to the long analepsis describing King-me’s arrival on the shore, the text goes back to the spectacle of Judah emerging from the whale’s guts, the monstrous birth is couched in terms of a paradoxical and unsettling indigeneity. The image of the stranger as the living embodiment of the wilderness registers inner recoil and a deep-seated anxiety:

King-me felt the widow was birthing everything he despised in the country, laying it out before him like a taunt. Irish nor English, Jerseyman nor bushborn nor savage, not Roman or Episcopalian or apostate, Judah was the wilderness on two legs, mute and unknowable, a blankness that could drown a man. (75)

  • 10 In his seminal Apollon le couteau à la main, Marcel Detienne elaborates on the Ancient Greek verb K (...)
  • 11 A term of contempt for one born in Newfoundland used when the majority of the population was Irish (...)
  • 12 No explanation is given as to the origins of the Gut, the toponym of the predominantly Irish Cathol (...)
  • 13 To explain the correlation between spatial division and configuration of power on which the idea of (...)

9The analepsis plays on the ambivalence of the wilderness as both a place of trial and a place of sanctuary, and ties it to the “land-claiming narrative” of terra nullius (Fee, 2015: 6) which displaces the struggle of settlement onto the land itself to legitimize the gesture separating the inhabited from the inhospitable. The “blankness” is to be filled in, the wilderness domesticated by the enterprising merchant who was promised a “pristine posting […] on a virgin shore” far from the squalor of St John’s and the “old vices” infesting it (75). For King-me, the “wild stretch of coastline” holds the promise of new beginnings (74), taking over becoming synonymous with starting over (New, 1997: 23). His efforts, however, falter on the precariousness of the foundational gesture turning the “nothing[ness]” of the “densely forested spruce” (75) into inhabited place. The land remains adverse to plantation, in the dual sense of cultivation and permanent settlement10: “[t]his is all stone and boulders and plates of shale, not fit for growing. You gets two feet down into that and you’re liable to believe the land don’t want us here” (57). Throughout the passage, the text signposts its reliance on the literature of settlement whose conventions it taps to better diverge from them. King-me does not “wrestl[e]” his fishing empire “out of the wilderness and fog” (134); nor does he “wrestle [the] name” Paradise from the “implacable” silence of the shoreline (75). The shore is far from being empty of human presence, since the English merchant company who employs him has been supplying for years “a crowd of bushborns”11 who know the harbour simply as “Deep Bay” (75). Paradise Deep, as the settlement becomes known, is a palimpsestic name which retains the trace of previous occupation and identifies the merchant as the latter arrival whose act of naming proved insufficient to fully assert control over place12. What is thematized are the ways in which the perception of the natural environment “tell[s] of a pattern of social relationships” (New, 1997: 24) which sustains practices of spatial ordering. Transgression, Cresswell argues, is often defined in spatial terms (1996: 21) because it is measured in relation to “normative geographies” where people, things and actions have appropriate place (1996: 9). Since Judah crosses over sectarian and ethnic boundaries, King-me sees him as out of place, that is, without a place in the social structures on which his authority over place rests. It is thus Judah’s placelessness which prompts his identification with the wilderness and the threat it harbours as an “intractable” space, “unruled, hence unruly” (New, 1997: 29).13

  • 14 The landscape and the seascape, when they are described (which is rarely), function as backdrop to (...)

10The passage exemplifies the way Crummey reorients the motif of the inhospitable land. The struggle of early settlement, although alluded to, remains outside the scope of the narrative. Likewise, while there are multiple allusions to the harshness of the climate, the empty barrens and “the ocean’s stark” (126), little attention is given to the perceptual transactions through which the physical environment is apprehended.14 Instead, Crummey’s interest veers towards place as lived and practiced space. Episodes in the novel continuously oscillate between the communal—Christmas mummers roaming from house to house (41), the seasonal departures and homecomings of “migratory” fishermen (171)—, and the individual—Father Phelan living among his parishioners “like a refugee” (32), the “outcast’s habits” of some of the Devines (83). If people read place by acting in it, making practice “simultaneously a form of consumption […] and production” of meanings and values (Cresswell, 1996: 16–17), what those are often remain implicit: when place “appears to be working well” (Cresswell, 1996: 10), the urge to define them seldom arises. In this respect, characterization in Galore appears to rely on the distinction Yi-Fu Tuan establishes between the standpoint of the insider—the “native”—, and that of the outsider—the visitor, the newly-arrived settler—(Tuan, 1974: 64–68), but it does so to question how seeking to fix the identity of place draws on verbal tropes related to “configurations of land” (New, 1997: 5).

  • 15 Before the arrival of the established church, Father Phelan and Jabez Trim attend to “both sides of (...)
  • 16 In the introduction to her comparative analysis of Galore and Kenneth Harvey’s The Town That Forgot (...)

11King-me is the first in a line of characters who grapple with the feeling that “something of the place [will] always be beyond [their] influence” (75). The day after landing, Reverend Dodge has the French Cemetery fenced in an attempt to assuage his sense of disorientation upon discovering an ill-defined expanse whose very name is of uncertain origins: “The earth beneath him was solid enough but he felt as if he was still at sea, adrift on a grey expanse without demarcation or border” (57). On a first level, fencing signals the character’s purposeful engagement in the “geographical ordering of society” (Cresswell, 1996: 149): it is designed to stamp ecumenical practices and enforce dogmatic orthodoxy by building a dividing line which distinguishes and keeps apart Episcopalians and Catholics15. With the chronotope of the sea voyage, the analogy between the boundless ocean and the unbounded graveyard reinscribes the temporal in the spatial, thus further elucidating what is at stake in the character’s determination. Fencing is also meant to designate a moment in time. It monumentalizes the point of arrival as the point of departure, the discontinuity which beginnings entail. When later in the diegesis King-me’s English daughter-in-law Ann Hope arrives in the community, she is equally intent on effecting changes and embarks on a “crusade against squalor and ignorance” (180) to bring the “language of reform” to the shore (199). Just as the Reverend before her, she invokes the merchant’s foundational gesture, the idea of a place “built from nothing” to rival with older Newfoundland settlements (53). Both characters are disappointed in their expectations of transformation, which is troped in almost identical terms: “the implacable barrens” (126), “the implacable rock of the place” (198) oppose their unyielding resistance to their efforts, the primordial element refusing the imprint of civilization, the markings of progress. The environmental Darwinism underpinning the image operates a shift from place as a site of conflicting practices to the primeval terrain which is perceived to have determined the identity of its inhabitants16. Gillian Rose notes that “[a]ll places are interpreted from particular social positions and for particular social reasons” (89). In the case of Reverend Dodge and Ann Hope, indigenization is a construct which accounts for those who occupy the same location yet inhabit place in a way that is construed as radically other. Designating the livyers as “elementally of the land” (Sugars, 2010: n. p.) allows the two characters to position themselves as “existentially removed from the milieu of [their] place” (Cresswell, 1996: 154), and thus to legitimize their refusal to recognize the mutual tests and trials between newcomers and the community they settle in. Like other “unhappy visitor(s)” before her (134), Ann Hope, who has refused to “surrender some part of herself to the shore” (197), eventually goes back to the “world of civility” (180) when she follows her children to the Boston States. Only the Reverend, who has relinquished some of his dogmatic certainty in his older years, is said to have become “a Newfoundlander at heart” (190). And yet, as Absalom Sellers acknowledges this “unlikeliest transformation,” he closes his door to him, preferring the company of the Trim brothers and “the illusion of a shared past” their “wandering through histories” about the shore creates (190).

Storying Place

  • 17 In the wreck of an English vessel bound for the Arctic, Patrick Devine stumbles into “a pool of nov (...)

12As much as “genealogical memory becomes a key signifier of membership in the community” (Sugars, 2010: n. p.), the concluding chapters of the novel upsets assumptions as to how genealogical ties ground one in place. The people on the shore put down Abel Devine’s isolation to the “peculiar inheritance of his blood” (263), the family tree a “list of symptoms” passed from one generation to the next (242). However, rootedness—tracing one’s lineage in one locality—whets a sense of unhomeliness when “the bare genealogy” is not “filled out with courtships and marriages, arguments and feuds and accidents” (310). The young man feels like “a stranger among his own kin” (289). The barrens he endlessly walks seem “a place without history and memory compared to the “densely populated world” of his grandfather’s salvaged library”17. Although he knows this “landscape of perpetual present” as “his country,” is “at a loss to say how” (289). Belonging is indeed emptied of its actuality without the stories which would “flesh out the topographical record with its human accretions” (Heaney, 1980: 132), and thus allow him to relate to place.

  • 18 William Coaker is the only historical figure to appear in Galore. The union leader, who began organ (...)

13By now, the narrative has reached the 20th century. The coastal community is poised on the brink of momentous changes as it is “dragged into the modern world” (274) by William Coaker’s Fisherman’s Protective Union18 and the war in which the Newfoundland Regiment is fighting. One should be wary nonetheless of ascribing Abel’s predicament to impinging modernity and the erosion of traditions—he is the last child ever to be christened at Kerrivan’s Tree (262). His malaise and the questioning it conveys resonate with Callum Devine’s inarticulate sense of loss, four generations past, when he mourns the absence of Father Phelan, the wayward priest forced into exile: “it was the certainty of Phelan’s calling he missed most, its suggestion that the people on the shore were something more than an inconsequential accident in the world” (143). The certainty Callum feels bereft of has less to do with the religious orthodoxy than with what Said calls “transitive”, “project-directed” beginnings (50–51). In retrospect, the priest’s rebellious, nomadic ministry and his trials are construed as a continuous and cohering trajectory whose starting point in time, space and action was his arrival on the shore. The anxiety of dereliction which besets Callum bears on the negotiating of self-representation through which place becomes more than the sole occupying of a location. What becomes a harrowing question is precisely the articulation between location, locale (the shore as “the material setting for social relations”) and a sense of place (Cresswell, 2004: 7–8). “Sense” should be understood here in the dual meaning of significance and orientation: the capacity to invest a portion of space with value is related to a search for direction. In Callum’s rumination, there is no comfortable and comforting continuity stretching backward and forward in time; the contingency of beginnings (“accident”) forecloses the possibility that they point towards and intend continuity (Said, 1985: 33). Implicit in the passage is the failure of narratives of pioneering in which the foundational gesture is given eminence because of its inaugural intention, beginning that “which has persisted and endured” (Said, 1985: 32)—a failure which is given a cogent illustration in the description of the backcountry where roads built by “destitute fishermen forced to work for their dole during the worst years of the century […] peter […] out among the […] dense strands of spruce and low scrub and blackwater marshes” (152). Such narratives, it is implied, are insufficient to establish a horizon of identity and belonging for the capacious designation of the settlement community (“the people on the shore”) which encompasses bushborns, livyers and latter arrivals without distinction.

  • 19 This last iteration drives the transgenerational plotline to its conclusion by triggering a series (...)

14Callum’s search for direction is reciprocated in the movement of the narrative: in its heavy reliance on analepses tracing genealogies, traditions and toponyms; in the pattern of resurgences which suggests a desire to accommodate the tension between persistence and oblivion, recursion and rupture, coherence and transformation. This tension is made evident in the articulation between the novel’s two sections: in the first half of the narrative, the characters live their lives between “the physical world” and the “netherworld” of lore and superstition; in the second, the otherworldly elements begin to recede, but remain “just barely below the surface” of daily life and strife (Crummey & Sugars, 2012: 108). Over the course of Galore, episodes in the main story line are turned into tales which are episodically “revived and retold” (227), starting with Judah’s mysterious “arrival and influence on the fish” (51). In times of abundance, newcomers, who prefer to “think their success the result of their own cunning and skill and hard work,” downplay the story of the whale as “entertainment” (51); in times of dearth, it is elaborated on to become a “growing hagiography travell[ing] on vessels heading north and south” (227). Until the man himself disappears from people’s minds (265), the only remnant a photograph in a forgotten album which prompts the last iteration of the legend of the Great White as Esther “unspool[s] the family’s tale” (304) to make her cousin Abel “feel at home in the world” (314)19. Underlying Galore is the idea that stories are “a form of sustenance, in part because they affirm a sense of continuity over time” (Crummey & Sugars, 2012: 106), but storying is not merely inward-looking and introverted—to return to Massey’s words quoted in the introduction. The tales of the shore, whose elaboration and adaptations the transgenerational plotline outlines, do not provide a bedrock of identity. Crummey explores rather the possibilities offered by their latency. Their resurgences, each of which brings sightly different configurations, participate to the “imaginative processes” (Massey, 1995: 48) through which the singularity of place may be envisaged to accommodate the needs of both the story-tellers and their audience.

15Galore is indeed self-reflexive in its handling of folklore, and ponders its seductive allure, the sense it may convey that place, when it is envisaged as a repository for collective memory, is authentically rooted in autochthonous history. Although the narrator notes that some of the stories and ghosts which people them come to “occup[y] a dark corner in the dreams of every soul on the shore,” so much so that they “seem […] as ancient and abiding as the ocean itself” (114), the significance of the phrase lies in the verb which introduces the comparison and entices the reader to reconsider the correlation it posits between the primeval element and the perceived antiquity of folklore. Such correlation is further problematized with the character of Newman who plays the amateur ethnographer discovering a place locked in the past, “a medieval world that was still half fairy tale” (154). When the Trim brothers acquaint the American doctor with the topography of the shore, its genealogies, and its legends, their gesture of hospitality only seems to confirm the “ex-centric ‘otherness’” (Fuller, 31) which attracted him to Newfoundland in the first place (148). In his letters to his family or during his American fund-raising tours, the newcomer is also presented as purposefully engaging in “imagining geography,” constructing meaning, producing images, creating identities (Massey & Jess, 1995: 3). Looking at the pictures which offer his readers and his audience a “picturesque window onto the historical past” (Sugars, 2010: n. p.), he is acutely aware that the “outlandish” geographical, temporal and imaginary distance they manifest gives them an “air of forgeries” (186–187) which belies the direct, intimate relation with place he craves (235). The photographs evidence the conundrum the character grapples with: for the shore to continue to exert its pull on his imagination and fuel his desire for emplacement, it must remain “impossibly remote” (187).

“Some shadowy time long past”

  • 20 Sugars, who has written a thought-provoking essay on the way Crummey’s River Thieves is underpinned (...)
  • 21 Terry Goldie mentions how “at a conference […] a Native academic commented on the absence of the Be (...)
  • 22 Other examples include Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams and Patrick Kavanagh’s Gaff Topsa (...)

16One story is conspicuously absent from the pattern of resurgence informing Galore. The sole reference to Newfoundland’s original inhabitants is prompted by the rumours and stories about the Woundy brothers’ genealogical ties to early settlement “some shadowy time long past” (20). Given the critical interest “reimagining or invoking” the Beothuk through fiction has garnered in Newfoundland literature (Fuller, 2004: 33), the passage deserves more than passing attention20. It hints at a familiar colonial narrative, that of Indian hospitality ensuring the first planters’ survival, soon followed by disappearance, which conveniently leaves the land open for new arrivals (Fee, 2015: 1) on whose descendants “the legitimacy conferred by priority” (Fee, 2015: 10) gets passed on. One can take issue with the way Crummey’s text unhinges settlement from invasion, and appears to relegate Indigenous presence to the pre-historic past only to invoke it in relation to the settlers’ preoccupations21. Readers should perhaps also heed the insistence on the indeterminacy of genealogy and consider what it may intimate: a reluctance to present the arrival of the settler-invaders and the subsequent disappearance of the Beothuk as a defining, inaugural moment, and a refusal to conveniently incorporate the Beothuk in the history and stories of the shore. Paul Chafe sees in Galore an example of historical fiction which does not “reify” but “reshape[s]” Newfoundland’s history and folklore (40)22. It does so, I would argue, by striving to disengage the “lore of the place” from a “discourse of autochthony” (Fee, 2015: 7). It is not an origin story chronicling the emergence of “distinctive identity formed by the land” (Fee, 2015: 6). Crummey’s “reshap[ing]” of folklore both thematizes and performs the ways in which “the constant interconnections of economy, culture and ecology” (Massey & Jess, 1995: 1) make place a social and historical construct whose meanings are both continuously and conflictingly produced and consumed. What persists, and makes Galore a “complicated and complicating novel” (Chafe, 2016: 40), is the need for emplacement. For the novel’s circular movement to be complete, the shell-shocked Abel, for whom home is a yawing absence (332), has to be allowed across the threshold and “giv[en] place” (Derrida, 2000b: 25).

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Bibliographie

Casey Edward S. (2011), “The Edge(s) of Landscape: A Study in Liminology”, J. Malpas (ed.), The Place of Landscape: Concepts, Contexts, Studies, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 91–109.

Chafe Paul (2016), “‘a Terrain of Jagged, Fearful Aspect’: Reconsidering Patrick Kavanagh’s Gaff Topsails”, Newfoundland and Labrador Studies, 31(1), 37–7.

Cresswell Tim (1996), In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Cresswell Tim (2004), Place: A Short Introduction, London: Blackwell Publishing.

Crummey Michael (2001), River Thieves, Toronto: Doubleday Canada.

Crummey Michael (2010), Galore, London: Corsair.

Crummey Michael (2019), Most of What Follows Is True: Places Imagined and Real, CLC (Canadian Literature Centre): University of Alberta Press.

Crummey Michael & Sugars Cynthia (2012), “‘Our Symbiotic Relationship with the Stories that We Tell’, An Interview with Michael Crummey”, Canadian Literature, 212, 105–19.

Derrida Jacques (2000a), “Hostipitality”, Angelaki (B. Stocker & F. Morlock, trad.), 5(3), 3–18.

Derrida Jacques (2000b), Of Hospitality (R. Bowlby, trad.), Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Detienne Marcel (2009), Apollon le couteau à la main : une approche expérimentale du polythéisme grec. Avant-propos inédit, Paris: Gallimard.

Fee Margery (2015), Literary Land Claims: The “Indian Land Question” from Pontiac’s War to Attawapiskat, Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Fourcade Guillaume & Wallart Kerry-Jane (2019), “Introduction”, Sillages Critiques, 27, <doi:https://doi.org/10.4000/sillagescritiques.9225> (17 July 2022).

Fuller Danielle (2004), “Strange Terrain: Reproducing and Resisting Place-Myths in Two Contemporary Fictions of Newfoundland”, Essays on Canadian Writing, 82, 21–50.

Gillian Rose (1995), “Place and Identity: A Sense of Place”, D. Massey (ed.), A Place in the World? Places, Cultures and Globalization, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 87–132.

Goldie Terry (2012), “Is Galore ‘Our’ Story?”, Journal of Canadian Studies, 46(2), 83–98.

Harvey Kenneth (2006), The Town That Forgot How to Breathe, London: Picador.

Heaney Seamus (1980), “The Sense of Place”, Preoccupations, Selected Prose 1968-1978, London: Faber & Faber, 131–149.

Hiller J. K. (2013), “Sir William Ford Coaker”, The Canadian Encyclopedia, Historica Canada (14 Dec.), <https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/sir-william-ford-coaker> (15 July 2022).

Johnston Wayne (1999), The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, New York: Knopf Random Canada.

Kavanagh Patrick (1996), Gaff Topsails, London: Viking.

Massey Doreen B. (1994), Space, Place, and Gender, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Massey Doreen (1995), “The Conceptualization of Place”, D. Massey (ed.), A Place in the World? Places, Cultures and Globalization, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 45–86.

Massey Doreen & Pat Jess (1995), “Introduction”, D. Massey (ed.), A Place in the World? Places, Cultures and Globalization, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1–4.

New W. H. (1997), Land Sliding: Imagining Space, Presence, and Power in Canadian Writing, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Said Edward (1985), Beginnings: Intention and Method (2nd edition), New York: Granta.

Story G. M., et al. (n. d.), Dictionary of Newfoundland English, available at <https://www.heritage.nf.ca/dictionary/a-z-index.php> (19 June 2021).

Sugars Cynthia (2005), “Original Sin, or, The Last of the First Ancestors: Michael Crummey’s River Thieves”, English Studies in Canada, 31(4), 147–78.

Sugars Cynthia (2010), “Genetic Phantoms: Geography, History, and Ancestral Inheritance in Kenneth Harvey’s The Town That Forgot How to Breathe and Michael Crummey’s Galore”, Newfoundland and Labrador Studies, 25(1), 132–59.

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Wayne Johnston (1998), The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, Toronto: Knopf Canada.

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Notes

1 Subsequent references to the novel will appear directly in the text.

2 The image harkens back to an earlier passage describing the young Abel losing himself in the stories his mother reads to him: “The complications and disappointments and modest epiphanies of those disparate lives seemed part of a single all-encompassing story that had swallowed him whole” (268; my emphasis).

3 While Terry Goldie notes that there are “many folkloric sources for this motif” (Goldie, 2012: 88), Crummey explains having found inspiration for the character of Judah in an old dancehall song—“Jack Was Every Inch a Sailor”—which is often referred to as a Newfoundland folk song (Crummey & Sugars, 2012: 108; Goldie, 2012: 88).

4 One may think of the recurring image of Newfoundland and Newfoundlanders as being “enisled” in Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998). On this question, see Fuller, 2004: 26–27.

5 The character of King-me Sellers is a familiar figure in the economic history of outport Newfoundland: the local merchant who, in the truck system, “gave supplies and equipment to fishermen on credit with the stipulation they sell their season’s catch to the merchant. The merchant set the prices for the supplies given out in the spring and for the fish taken in the fall” (Crummey, 2019: n. p.). The lengthy evolution from the truck system to the beginning of unionisation in the first decades of the 20th century serves as the novel’s historical backdrop.

6 The magical properties the villagers ascribe to the ritual are related to the hardships of outport life, more specifically to the illnesses which “burned through the shore” and to which Sarah Kerrivan, an Irish emigrant, survived (14).

7 The Dictionnary of Newfoundland English defines a jinker as “a person (on a vessel) bringing bad luck, a Jonah” (Story et. al.: n. p.).

8 “[H]ospitality is certainly, necessarily, a right, a duty, an obligation […] but on the condition that the host […], the one who receives, lodges or gives asylum remains patron, the master of the household, on the condition that he maintains his own authority in his own home, that he looks after himself and sees to and considers all that concerns him […] and thereby affirms the law of hospitality as the law of the household, […] the law of his household, the law of a place” (Derrida, 2000b: 4).

9 Cynthia Sugars takes up this idea in her analysis of the ways in which Galore at once affirms and unsettles a geo-historical deterministic vision of Newfoundland identity (2010).

10 In his seminal Apollon le couteau à la main, Marcel Detienne elaborates on the Ancient Greek verb Ktizein whose meaning coalesces the god’s foundational gestures: clearing the land, cultivating, founding (2009: 26): “Il n’est pas de cité ‘fondée’, ‘bien fondée’ (euktmenos) qui ne soit en même temps une terre défrichée, un territoire mis en culture, un espace domestiqué, civilisé depuis l’état sauvage initial.” (2009: 27)

11 A term of contempt for one born in Newfoundland used when the majority of the population was Irish and English born” (Dictionary of Newfoundland English).

12 No explanation is given as to the origins of the Gut, the toponym of the predominantly Irish Catholic village. It is nonetheless suggestive of the social and economic relations between the twin settlements: Paradise Deep is where the “town quality” resides (151).

13 To explain the correlation between spatial division and configuration of power on which the idea of wilderness is premised, W. H. New goes back to the Anglo-Saxon roots of the term: “The wilder-ness was the place of the wild deer, and hence by tacit understanding, the territory beyond the reach or authority of English common law” (1997: 29; italics in the text).

14 The landscape and the seascape, when they are described (which is rarely), function as backdrop to the human conflicts the novel puzzles out, or as objective correlatives for the characters’ emotions. The first description of the ocean is a case in point: Mary Tryphena “stared out at the water, the endless grey expanse of ocean below reflecting the endless grey nothing of her life. The nothing stretched for miles in all directions, nothing, nothing, nothing, she was on the verge of bawling at the thought” (11).

15 Before the arrival of the established church, Father Phelan and Jabez Trim attend to “both sides of the house” (4). Conversely, Reverend Dodge and Father Cunnico the Italian priest, are aligned both in their dogmatism and in their detestation of the “irredeemable wilderness” (123).

16 In the introduction to her comparative analysis of Galore and Kenneth Harvey’s The Town That Forgot How to Breathe (2006), Sugars discusses at length the long history of “the mystique of geographical and historical determinism” in discourse about Newfoundland (2010: n. p.).

17 In the wreck of an English vessel bound for the Arctic, Patrick Devine stumbles into “a pool of novels and books of poetry, tomes on botany and science and history, philosophy and religion, bound copies of Punch. […] Worlds within the world” (221).

18 William Coaker is the only historical figure to appear in Galore. The union leader, who began organizing the Fisherman’s Protective Union during the 1908 and 1909, was determined to have it play a political role (Canadian Encyclopedia). In Crummey’s novel, his political ambition is cast in dubious light inasmuch as his role in the introduction of conscription is interpreted as a betrayal.

19 This last iteration drives the transgenerational plotline to its conclusion by triggering a series of events which brings into tension the storying of home and the search for origins. When Esther refuses to explain how Judah found his way into the belly of the whale (313), Abel discards the “preposterous little history (314) and enlists in the Newfoundlander Corp fighting in Flanders”.

20 Sugars, who has written a thought-provoking essay on the way Crummey’s River Thieves is underpinned by the notion of an irretrievable and unrepresentable loss, makes no mention of this passage in her article on Galore (Sugars, 2010).

21 Terry Goldie mentions how “at a conference […] a Native academic commented on the absence of the Beothuk from Galore” (2012: 86). He proposes two interpretations for it. “Perhaps [it] simply represents the fact that Crummey did not need to add to what he had said in [River Thieves]” (2012: 86). Alternatively, historical accuracy may be considered a justifification since, by the time the novel opens, “no outport community such as Paradise Deep would have encountered any Beothuk” (2012: 94).

22 Other examples include Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams and Patrick Kavanagh’s Gaff Topsails (Chafe, 2016: 40). The artistic and political indigenization of the settler-invader in the latter has been a moot question among critics as Chafe’s own re-assessment of it exemplifies.

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Référence électronique

Anne-Sophie Letessier, « “The Lore of the Place”: (In)Hospitalities in Michael Crummey’s Galore (2010) »ILCEA [En ligne], 50 | 2023, mis en ligne le 01 mars 2023, consulté le 29 mars 2023. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ilcea/16499 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ilcea.16499

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Auteur

Anne-Sophie Letessier

Université Jean Monnet Saint-Étienne, ECLLA.
anne.sophie.letessier@uni-st-etienne.fr

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