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In Search of an Invisible Culture in David Plante’s American Ghosts and Robert Cormier’s Fade

2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 44; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/02722011.2014.914049

1943-9954

Cynthia Lees,

American Literature and Culture

AbstractDavid Plante’s American Ghosts (2005) and Robert Cormier’s Fade (1988), autobiographical narratives about growing up in southern New England in French Catholic neighborhoods called Little Canadas, both employ the trope of invisibility to convey the ethnic community’s lack of presence, agency, or permanence within an englobing American culture that progressively erodes the foundations of its cultural otherness. Both texts hinge upon cultural erasure. In Plante’s memoir, in which he seeks to gain access to his cultural past, his childhood self is haunted by the ghosts of his Indian forebears and his adult self, by the ghosts of his parish. These supernatural beings who shuttle between absence and presence signal the loss of cultural memory and identity that assimilation engenders. Cormier’s novel chronicles the effects of invisibility on three “faders” representing first-, second-, and third-generation French Canadians in New England. A metaphor for the progressive loss of ancestral heritage in the adopted land, Fade offers a portrait of the gradual disintegration of Frenchtown from its heyday in the 1930s to its dissolution in the 1960s.Keywords: Franco-American literaturecultural erasurecultural hauntingethnic literatureregional literatureDavid PlanteRobert Cormier Notes1. Until recently, little scholarly attention has been focused upon Franco-American prose fiction due to the regional nature of the novels and, more importantly, to a general lack of visibility of Franco writers and their texts. Denis Ledoux, Franco-American writer and publisher, explains the importance of breaking through the silence that has enveloped an ethnic group dubbed the “quiet presence” by Maine journalist Dyke Hendrickson (1980, n.p.). Ledoux observes: “It is in writing about the inner world that transcends … cultural borders that I find the most meaning. I write to dispel the silence that envelops us all” (1988, n.p.). Other writers echo Ledoux’s perspective: Janet Shideler (1991, 2) calls the process of Franco-American acculturation “the quiet evolution,” and Franco-American poet Steven Riel contends: “I grew up feeling that my Franco-Americaness was invisible.… We were so assimilated that we did not even realize we were a group” (Ledoux Citation1991, 141).2. Cotton Mather was a Puritan Minister and pamphleteer whose arguments at the Salem Witch Trials in favor of admitting spectral evidence (testimony by the accusers that ghosts of the defendants had tormented them) undoubtedly influenced the guilty verdicts that led to the execution of innocent victims. Impelled by a fascination with the spirit world in general and ghosts in particular, Mather penned The Wonders of the Invisible World (1693) in which he describes each witch trial in detail. Plante’s inclusion of a visit to Mather’s tomb serves as an objective correlative of the righteous legitimacy of the Puritan legacy and its victimization of those individuals viewed as different.3. Plante never uses the term “Franco-American” to describe himself, his community, his parish, or his God. His noun of choice is “Canuck” as in the passage “I thought more deeply than ever about being a Canuck, which at my most authentic I was, though being a Canuck meant, at the deepest, being a failure” (2005, 193). This usage lacks the neutrality and generality that the word Canuck has recently acquired—in, for instance, denoting a Vancouver hockey team or in banner headlines such as “Two Canuck soldiers dead in Afghanistan.” Historically, the term was a racial slur in much the way Plante uses it here: “We were the white niggers, the Canucks, the people for whom this very term was thought up” (194).4. Robert Cormier (1925–2000), a Franco-American author of 17 novels, including the award-winning I am the Cheese (1977) and The Chocolate War (1974), both written for young adult readers, was born in Leominster, Massachusetts, in the French Hill section, an ethnic neighborhood that would be christened Frenchtown in his 1988 novel Fade. His immediate family members were all workers in the textile mills in and around Worcester. The second of eight children, he graduated from a parochial school and a public high school and began to write in response to encouragement from one of his teachers. Like so many other Franco novelists, he worked as a newspaper reporter and columnist. The success of his first three novels enabled him to retire from a thirty-year career with the Worcester Telegram and Fitchburg Sentinel.5. In the decades following the First World War, the Ku Klux Klan gained strength in regions far beyond the southern US. In fact their membership in 1925 was larger in the Northeastern states than in places such as Alabama or Mississippi. Their main target in Massachusetts—specifically Worcester County—was the large French Canadian Catholic population. Ten days before Robert Cormier’s birth in January 1925, the Klan burned St. Cecilia’s Church School in Leominster. Cormier would graduate from the rebuilt school in 1939. Mark Richard, a history professor at SUNY Plattsburgh and a native of Lewiston, Maine, researches and publishes on the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in 1920s New England and the attempts by French Canadians to preserve their cultural heritage in a climate of nativist sentiment.6. In her biography of Robert Cormier, Patty Campbell (Citation2006, 157) comments on what she terms his “stylistic powers” as evidenced in the duality that anchors the plot: two sets of twins, two bullies, two murders, two teens who work for the grocer, and so on. (The list of pairs is long.) She misses the point, however, that a French Canadian and an American comprise many of these pairs, and that this duality reflects the hybrid nature of those who straddle two cultures. I would add to Campbell’s list of twins the character of Paul Roget, the highly successful novelist, and a kind of alter-ego to Cormier himself—one so believable that his friends would earnestly ask him, “Bob, can you fade?” (as quoted in Campbell Citation2006) This is a wonderful anecdote to be sure; however, the biographer misses the overarching metaphor of the novel itself—that the fade is symbolic of the loss of cultural memory and ethnic identity.7. The demographic changes to Paul’s Frenchtown are emblematic of shifts in other Massachusetts cities with large French Canadian populations such as Lawrence, Lowell, Holyoke, Springfield, and Fall River in which boarded-up skeletons of mills and factories abound. Few have been repurposed for commercial or residential tenants.Additional informationNotes on contributorsCynthia LeesCynthia Lees, Assistant Professor of French at the University of Delaware in Newark, teaches French literature, French and Francophone Cinema, and Business French. Her primary research interest is Franco–American literature of New England, and her current focus is on the intersection of queer identity with markers of ethnicity in the work of Steven Riel, Paul Paré, and David Plante.