Canadian Art Monsters

A CFP, to start, for what may be a doomed endeavour; my sense is that this is still, perhaps, premature?

But the MLA Convention will be in Toronto in January 2026, and the CanLit forum panels don’t seem amenable to the topic (although I may submit something, in case I’m wrong).

And I’m feeling a need for community, in order to think this through, together: the problem of Alice Munro.

We Can’t Ask Alice: Grappling With the Canadian Literature Canon, Childhood Abuse, and Critical Complicity

In this roundtable session we will grapple with the complex bio-critical legacy of Canadian short story writer Alice Munro. In the wake of Munro’s 2024 death, her children attested to Munro’s knowledge that her youngest daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, was sexually abused by Munro’s long-time partner. Relevant Munro stories include “The Children Stay,” “Open Secrets,” “Vandals,” and “Silence.” After such knowledge, how do we read and teach Alice Munro now?

I’ve been re-reading Claire Dederer. She’s written some wonderful books, and this one is a slim but meaty consideration of the Art Monster and the “fan’s dilemma”: what do we do when we continue to love the art that was created, even when the author’s personal conduct has been repugnant?

Instead, I used Dederer’s careful and nuanced thinking as inspiration for spring cleaning and tossed out all of my Lou Reed CDs, a DVD of Chinatown that I don’t remember acquiring, and, for good measure, a couple of cookbooks.

From there, it becomes more ambiguous, at least for me (given that I swore off Woody Allen many years ago, since I would happily set a copy of Manhattan atop a pile of refuse in a dumpster).

A lot of Agatha Christie’s work includes racist and antisemitic epithets, as well as some appalling stereotypes. More recent editions have been updated to excise these.

Re-reading Sayers, I’m noticing some troubling oddities. I’m currently several chapters into Busman’s Honeymoon, the very fun account of Lord Peter Wimsey’s idiosyncratic wedding to Harriet Vane and its crime-ridden aftermath.

They pledge their troth in a ceremony that suits them both nicely and displeases Peter’s sister-in-law Helen greatly.

But Amy E. Schwartz points out some worrying aspects in Sayers’s presentation of Jewish characters in the novel, and her analysis is worth considering.

My book project benefits from my re-reading of some non-Canadian women writers’ crime fiction, so for now, even works with the most distastefully racist language (say Agatha Christie’s Death in the Clouds) stay on my shelves, for reference.

But on to Canadian art monsters.

In Refuse: CanLit in Ruins, back in 2018, the editors and contributors made a substantial effort to tease out some of the complexities of Canadian literature as a purported “dumpster fire.”

It’s a tremendous collection. With the benefit of hindsight, some of the contributions seem more significant than I’d recognized at the time of publication.

This was a moment of collective feminist rage at a series of disparate events that seemed connected: Ghomeishi’s trial and Atwood and co.’s defense of Steven Galloway; Sara Ahmed’s work on complaints, and the increasing awareness in the UK, in particular, that university harassment procedures were toothless and re-traumatizing; revelations about the non-Indigenous ancestry of some high-profile Canadian writers who claimed ties to communities, and ongoing issues related to joking/not-joking about appropriation in Canadian literature.

A.H. Reaume’s title is especially powerful “In the ‘New CanLit,’ We Must All Be Antigones.” She calls for courage against tyranny of belief and conformity, moral conviction even when the cost (professional and personal) is tremendously high.

#UBC Accountable, which she discusses, has long since stopped being a media preoccupation.

But it’s important to note that the university’s response to a series of sexual assaults, brought as a BC Human Rights Tribunal complaint by some very determined former history grad students at UBC, is not yet resolved. The hearings have continued over months and the costs–and here I just mean the legal bills, which doesn’t factor in the personal toll–have been daunting. Huge thanks to those doing this work, which matters. Here’s some early CBC coverage.

The phrase “art monsters” was not, as far as I recall, in common parlance in 2018. But that’s what we were talking about, at least in part.

And there are some key point where I depart from Dederer. To her list of mostly male art monsters she adds in Anne Sexton (agree, given her conduct to her children) and Sylvia Plath (given her suicide, and the fact that her children were at home).

This stretches the notion of “art monster” for me. Plath was clearly severely mentally ill at the time of her death, and someone else who was on the scene (yet who wasn’t spending day and night looking after his young children, who were suffering from flu and England’s coldest winter in decades) perhaps better merits the label.

Here’s Dederer in The Paris Review, grappling with what she means, precisely, by “art monster”: “They did or said something awful, and made something great. The awful thing disrupts the great work; we can’t watch or listen to or read the great work without remembering the awful thing. Flooded with knowledge of the maker’s monstrousness, we turn away, overcome by disgust. Or … we don’t. We continue watching, separating or trying to separate the artist from the art. Either way: disruption. They are monster geniuses, and I don’t know what to do about them.”

And here, for contrast, is Zadie Smith, in The New Yorker, from a controversial short story entitled “Now More Than Ever” about the fate of those deemed by influential peers to be “beyond the pale”–cancelled, effectively:

“I bumped into someone on Bleecker who was beyond the pale. I felt like talking to him so I did. As we talked I kept thinking, But you’re beyond the pale, yet instead of that stopping us from talking we started to talk more and more frantically, babbling like a couple of maniacs about a whole load of things: shame, ruin, public humiliation, the destruction of reputation—that immortal part of oneself—the contempt of one’s wife, one’s children, one’s colleagues, personal pathology, exposure, suicidal ideation, and all that jazz. I thought, Maybe if I am one day totally and finally placed beyond the pale, I, too, might feel curiously free. Of expectation. Of the opinions of others. Of a lot of things. ‘It’s like prison,’ he said, not uncheerfully. ‘You don’t see anybody and you get a lot of writing done.’”

In real life, though, the art monsters mostly resume their normal activities, albeit with vastly diminished (sometimes) opportunities.

Few of them go to jail. Even Polanski, remember, has avoided it, by staying out of the United States, having fled England to avoid arrest way back in 1978, because he feared extradition. In France, as a citizen, he’s protected, and won’t be handed over to the U.S.

And his films still get premieres at Cannes. It’s outrageous.

The number of irrefutable Canadian art monsters is small, befitting our nation’s size and modest ambitions.

And I can’t figure out if Alice Munro should now be numbered among them.

She made some monstrously selfish and tragic decisions that sacrificed her children’s interests while also demonstrating herself to be in thrall of a man who sounds awful.

How much, though, do we condemn women for men’s abuse, either for failing to stop it at the time, or for not acting decisively to side with survivors after revelations that are life-shattering? I’m thinking of the instances when women are brave and do protest, step forward, insist on justice. I must write on Women Talking later this week, since I’ve been re-reading and re-watching (and re-listening: there’s a tremendous musical score).

So much of Munro’s fiction is about weakness and shame. Her rare interviews are haunting in their intimations about how much guilt and shame she lived with, and yet how much she compartmentalized her life and work.

We need some new critical approaches to Munro and to other writers that come to terms more effectively with the complex and nuanced relationship between biography and fiction.

I’m rather wishing for a Munro biography by someone like Rosemary Sullivan, or Elspeth Cameron, who blend sensitivity to the subject’s maddening human failings with a broader socio-cultural awareness.

Alongside Munro, I’ve been thinking about the Pratts, and the reverence with which their cultural legacy is treated in their home province. (I wrote a piece about Munro and Pratt, and it’s a not infrequent pairing.)

A recent account of the marriage of visual artists Christopher and Mary Pratt dispelled some of the mythologizing of their relationship. But I’m not certain anyone who writes with admiration about him has fully addressed C. Pratt’s fondness for his pretty young models, including the ones he brought to live in the house, with his wife and children.

In Newfoundland and Labrador, where interest in their art and lives remains high, and there is tremendous pride in their achievements, there’s a level critical veneration (and discretion about personal failings) that worries me. But I’m a come-from-away with no personal connection, and that may make it easier (but nwot necessarily appropriate) to judge how they are assessed at home.

I’ve drafted most of a play about the Pratts and their young model, Donna Meaney. It’s one of several projects I’m looking forward to returning to when my current book project and memoir-in-essays are wrapped.

For now, this is Donna next to the portrait of herself–with thanks to Donna Meaney. I took this at a book event for a new critical biography of Mary Pratt.

Meaney selected which portrait with which to be photographed, and I love this: her boldness, her beauty.