A rhetoric of colonial exchange, time, space, and agency in Canadian exploration narratives (1760-1793)

Abstract

My study analyzes the language used to represent and to enact the multiple forms of exchange that occur in colonial relationships. Specifically, I examine three canonical narratives of Canadian exploration literature: Alexander Mackenzie's Voyages from Montreal, on the River St. Lawrence, through the Content of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans; in the Years 1789 and 1793; Samuel Hearne's A Journey from Prince of Wales's Fort in Hudson's Bay to the Northern Ocean in the Years 1769, 1770, 1771, and 1772; and Alexander Henry's Travels and Adventures in Canada and the Indian Territories Between the Years 1760 and 1776. Because the texts arise out of, and are meant to transform, real, lived social exigencies, they are sites of symbolic action, and, consequently, are rhetorical. To develop a rhetoric of colonial exchange, I examine how the texts' particular selections and combinations of grammatical and narrative features realize the symbolic actions of colonial exchange, and how the texts' discursive choices, in turn, are governed and constrained by the social contexts and ideological structures in which they operate.

The study consists of six chapters: an introduction, a theory and methods chapter, three chapters of close analysis (one on each of the major explorers), and a conclusion. The first two chapters - "Introduction: Analysis in the Contact Zone" and "Theoretical Framework and Critical Methodology" - introduce my understanding of Mary Louise Pratt's contact zone. The first chapter establishes the importance of the contact zone to postcolonial study of explorer narratives. The second chapter develops a systematic, comprehensive, and applicable theoretical framework - drawing on discourse, narrative, rhetorical, and postcolonial terms and concepts - one capable of producing theoretically-informed, contextually-sensitive close readings of the primary works. I will show how the features of time, space, and agency play a crucial role in all the texts, and, especially, how one of these three terms dominates the other two in distinctive ways for each text, establishing a pattern of emphasis central to understanding its rhetorical and ideological dimensions.

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 each focus on one of the principal texts and its key narrative feature, although comparisons among the texts are made throughout. In Chapter 3, "Alexander Mackenzie: Narrative Constructions of Heroic Time," I argue that Mackenzie develops a narrative ratio in which time dominates space and agency; that he uses discursive structures of time to maintain representative and ideological control over the contact zone in which he finds himself; and, finally, that he relies on temporal manipulations consistent with the heroic paradigm to present ideologically fissured ethnography. In Chapter 4, "Samuel Hearne: Exchanging Bodies in Space," I argue that Hearne depends on a narrative ratio in which space dominates agency and time; that he uses spatial distinctions of agency to map culture onto geography when contradictions in the contact zone become overwhelming; and that he uses spatial distinctions to reinscribe the gendered exchange economy operative in the zone to stabilize his own loss of cultural agency. In Chapter 5, "Alexander Henry: Gothic Hero of Commodity Adventure," I argue that Henry depends on a narrative ratio in which agency dominates time and space; that he deploys the cultural coherence of narrative forms, specifically in their gothic manifestations, to tell his story of a body in crisis; and that his text's dominant narrative forms suppress ethnographic context and reinscribe European mercantilism in exclusively valourized terms.

Finally, in Chapter 6, I conclude my study by showing how differences among the texts reflect their discursive negotiations of bodies in crisis, their characteristic selections from language resources to do so, and their distinctive production of "uncanny commodities." By doing so, my study functions as a strategic attempt to rethink Canada's colonial history and to imagine forms of analytical resistance to contemporary structures of neo-colonialism.