Going Out of Their Way: Tourism, Authenticity, and Resistance
in Contemporary Atlantic-Canadian Literature
Herb Wyile
ESC: English Studies in Canada, Volume 34, Issue 2-3, June/September
2008, pp. 159-180 (Article)
Published by Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English
DOI: 10.1353/esc.0.0114
For additional information about this article
Access Provided by Carleton University Library at 02/11/11 9:40PM GMT
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/esc/summary/v034/34.2-3.wyile.html
T,   T,   T Edward Riche in a recent
interview, “is a kind of pollution.” “[A]s something that one has to rely upon
for economic survival,” he adds, “it is the last act of desperation” (“EqualOpportunity”
). Riche’s critical view of tourism is widely echoed in
contemporary writing in Atlantic Canada, reflecting the importance of
tourism to the economic and cultural life of the region but also reflecting
an increasingly sophisticated theoretical appreciation of the dynamics of
tourism as a global phenomenon. As Riche’s comment suggests, there is a
significant structural relationship between tourism and economic underdevelopment,
a relationship which has been a central theme in the growing
body of commentary on the cultural, political, social, and economic
consequences of tourism. Tourist destinations are more likely to develop
not out of an ingrained sense of hospitality and an instinctive inclination
of host societies to share the bounty of their locale with others but out
of economic necessity. Tourism, as Kevin Meethan argues, reconfigures
“the boundaries between hospitality as a form of social obligation ... and
hospitality as a commodified form” (). Consequently, tourism is commonly
characterized by a fundamental tension: that it requires a staged
hospitality, an openness to visitors that, while potentially genuine, is also to
Going Out of TheirWay:
Tourism,Authenticity, and Resistance in
Contemporary Atlantic-Canadian Literature
Herb Wyile
Acadia University
ESC .– (June/September ): –ESC .– (June/September ): –ESC
 | Wyile
some degree compelled. at is, tourist destinations—particularly ostensibly
“exotic” locales—tend to be framed within an economic and political
asymmetry between hosts and visitors and, indeed, are often characterized
by conditions of economic exploitation and coercion. In short, rather
than an innocent, free flow of people from one area to another, tourism
involves a kind of coerced hospitality, with host societies compelled to go
out of their way to cater to tourists’ expectations and needs. Unsurprisingly,
one result of such asymmetrical power relations is a resentment of
and resistance to the material and symbolic imposition that tourism typically
represents. Such a reaction is increasingly visible in the literature of
Atlantic Canada, an economically underdeveloped and vulnerable region
particularly reliant on tourism.
Much contemporary Atlantic Canadian writing—the fiction of Riche,
Alistair MacLeod, and Lynn Coady,¹ for instance, and Frank Barry’s trenchant
play Wreckhouse—highlights the ways in which tourism in the region
amounts to commodifying underdevelopment and affords valuable lessons
about the economic, political, and cultural tensions and conflicts elided by
the buoyant hyperbole of tourist promotion. As Graham Huggan argues in
e Postcolonial Exotic, the construction of the global margins as culturally
exotic leisure spaces amounts to an extension of colonial relations. One
of the more positive valences of postcolonial discourse, he contends, is
its resistance to exoticism as a profoundly subordinating paradigm that
“must be confronted, incorporated into works that challenge—often looking
to subvert—metropolitan mainstream cultural codes” (). Given that
Atlantic Canada’s position within Canada has been described by numerous
scholars as being characterized by a kind of internal colonization,²such
a description (in appropriately modified form) seems apt for describing
the tenor of much contemporary writing in the region. Tourism increasingly
seems to be a preoccupation of writers in Atlantic Canada, and there
is a profound dissonance between the testy attitude of writers such as
Riche and Barry toward tourism and the cheery boosterism of the tourism
industry itself. is attitude is nicely captured in one of MacLeod’s
 For a discussion of tourism in Coady’s work, see my article “As For Me and
Me Arse: Strategic Regionalism and the Home Place in Lynn Coady’s Strange
Heaven” in e Literature of Atlantic Canada, eds. Coral Ann Howells and
Marta Dvorak, a special issue of Canadian Literature  (), –.
 See, for instance, Marc Epprecht, “Atlantic Canada and ‘the End of History’: Postmodernism
and Regional Underdevelopment,” Dalhousie Review . ():
–, and Tony Tremblay, “‘Lest on too close sight I miss the darling illusion’:
e Politics of the Centre in ‘Reading Maritime,’” in Wyile and Lynes, –.
H W is a
Professor in the English
Department at Acadia
University in Wolfville,
Nova Scotia. He is the
author of Speculative
Fictions: Contemporary
Canadian Novelists and
the Writing of History
and Speaking in the Past
Tense: Canadian Novelists
on Writing Historical
Fiction. He co-edited
with Jeanette Lynes
Surf’s Up! The Rising
Tide of Atlantic-Canadian
Literature, a recent
special issue of Studies in
Canadian Literature.
Going Out of eir Way | 
most powerful stories, “Clearances,” set in a Cape Breton increasingly
being transformed by the forces of a leisure economy. Bristling at tourists’
objections to his cutting down trees to make a living, a young man bitterly
complains, “is isn’t my recreational area. is is my home” (). As
Meethan observes, the “development of tourist space means change at the
level of lived experience for those whose space of home, or of work, is the
space of leisure for others” (), and this conflict is registered in a number
of ways in contemporary writing in Atlantic Canada. e preoccupation
with tourism in Atlantic-Canadian literature tells us much about current
economic, political, social, and cultural conditions in the region but also
tells us much about tourism as an extension of an ambivalent and often
imperializing globalization.
Atlantic Canada is a popular tourist destination, but its appeal is part
of a more complex and divided attitude toward the region in the rest of
the country. For many if not most Canadians, Atlantic Canada is a nice
place to visit but otherwise a nagging burden on the federal coffers. is
attitude, however, is typically uninformed by an understanding of the historical
conditions that have contributed to the region’s marginal position
relative to the rest of the country, a position that goes back beyond the
Maritimes’ and Newfoundland’s respective entries into Confederation and
that has been intensified in the current atmosphere of neoliberal austerity.
As various historians in the Atlantic provinces have argued, the marginality
of the Maritimes and Newfoundland to the rest of the nation is a dynamic
extending back to Confederation, a time at which the colonies on the
east coast were enjoying a much greater level of prosperity than they are
today. Indeed, the overwhelming sentiment in the region was opposition
to “the unpalatable terms” of Confederation (Forbes and Muise ), amid
fears of central Canadian domination, fears which were borne out in the
Maritimes over the ensuing decades.³ Although the eclipse of the traditional
Maritime economy of “wood, wind, and sail” in the latter part of the
nineteenth century and the progressive decline in the region’s resource
sectors—particularly the crisis in the fisheries—have been important
historical factors in the region’s economic woes, such problems, scholars
from the region have underscored, were exacerbated by the political and
economic reorientation that Confederation entailed, particularly for the
Maritimes. e system of protective tariffs, a cornerstone of the National
 See also Phillip A. Buckner, “e s: An End and a Beginning.” e Atlantic
Provinces to Confederation: A History, eds. Phillip A. Buckner and John G.
Reid (Toronto and Fredericton: University of Toronto Press/Acadiensis, ),
–.
 | Wyile
Policy reinforcing east-west continental integration, as economist Donald
Savoie argues, strengthened central Canada as the base of industry and
manufacturing, at the expense of the Maritimes. Federal economic policies
from then on favoured Ontario and Quebec, leading to a concentration
of economic and political power in central Canada (Savoie ). As Savoie
concludes, national policy since Confederation has had a particular, disguised
“regional” orientation, prioritizing the interests of central Canada
and serving “to define a national perspective that speaks to the economic
interests of central Canada and to concentrate Ottawa’s development
efforts in this region” (). Newfoundland’s much later entry into Confederation
in  if anything proved even more ambivalent and conducive
to a lingering sense of grievance. Having achieved in the early twentieth
century the status of a quasi-independent nation (the only province to have
done so), Newfoundland was forced to surrender that status in  in the
midst of a fiscal crisis brought about by various economic and political
factors. For many in Newfoundland, the ensuing convention and referendum
on Newfoundland’s constitutional future constituted a hijacking of
Newfoundland’s autonomy, with the United Kingdom and Canada actively
if quietly collaborating to promote the unpopular option of Confederation
with Canada (Baker –). As Melvin Baker asserts, an appreciation of
the conflicted historical and political circumstances of Newfoundland’s
entry into Canada “is important to all Canadians wishing to know why
Newfoundlanders and Labradorians still have a strong sense of political
grievance over their place in the Canadian nation and why the people of
the province feel a need to ‘renew and strengthen’ their place in Canada”
(–).⁴us Newfoundland shares with the Maritimes a sense that the
primary source of their economic woes is that the terms of Confederation
with Canada were insufficient to guarantee their financial health and that
control over their political and economic fate resides not in their hands
but in Ottawa’s.
is sense of historical grievance has been augmented by a profound
difference of opinion with much of the rest of the country over the system
of financial transfers developed later in the twentieth century to compensate
for regional disparities and to ensure equality of standards of living
across the federation. is system, the cornerstone of so many Canadians’
disparaging views of Atlantic Canada, emerged in response to the struc
A telling sign of the magnitude of the sense of crisis of political identity in Newfoundland,
the latter phrase refers to the Royal Commission on Renewing and
Strengthening Our Place in Canada struck by the government of Newfoundland,
the findings of which (including Baker’s analysis) were published in .
Going Out of eir Way | 
tural inequalities and regional disparities ensuing from such a centralized
national policy. As Savoie underlines, however, such programs did little
to improve long-term economic prospects in Atlantic Canada because
they did not lead to the region’s integration into “national” economic
policy, in part because economic development funds and government
contracts were still heavily biased toward central Canada under the guise
of “national” economic priorities. us Atlantic Canada suffers from a
double standard in economic policy: what’s good for central Canada is
“national” and what’s good for Atlantic Canada is “regional.”⁵ With little
success in encouraging regional economic development and faced with
the continuing decline in its traditional resource industries, the region
has become increasingly reliant on the service sector, to the point that, as
om Workman notes, in “the year , the service sector in Atlantic
Canada employed more than two thirds of the region’s working people”
(). In recent decades, furthermore, the region’s precarious economic
position has been exacerbated by a gradual erosion of the commitment
to this kind of redistributive federalism, arguably as a consequence of
the increasing sway of the mantra of global competitiveness and of neoliberal
solutions which, as David Harvey argues, tend “to increase social
inequality and to expose the least fortunate elements in any society … to
the chill winds of austerity and the dull fate of increasing marginalization”
(). Starting in the late s, Margaret Conrad and James Hiller
observe, “neo-liberal assertions that government assistance, whether to
the poor or to outlying regions, was counterproductive gradually became
conventional wisdom” (). Such received wisdom in business and political
circles in Canada, Workman contends, informs a neo-liberal policy
framework that has drastic implications for Atlantic Canada, “including
the rising concerns about public debt, the celebration of the free market,
extensive restructuring to social assistance, stagnating minimum wages,
the downsizing of government, the privatization of public firms, the weakening
of labour laws and municipal restructuring” (). In this climate
of neo-liberal austerity, politicians, pundits, and business people have
increasingly viewed compensatory mechanisms such as regional economic
development and equalization programs as discouraging productivity and
weakening the country’s position vis-à-vis its global competitors. Such a
 See also some of the essays in E.R. Forbes’s collection Challenging the Regional
Stereotype: Essays on the th
Century Maritimes (Fredericton: Acadiensis, )
and Robert Finbow, “Atlantic Canada: Forgotten Periphery in an Endangered
Confederation?” in Beyond Quebec: Taking Stock of Canada, ed. Kenneth
McRoberts (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s , ), –.
Such received
wisdom in
business and
political circles
in Canada
informs a neoliberal
policy
framework
that has drastic
implications for
Atlantic Canada.
 | Wyile
regime, moreover, as both Workman and Savoie note, cultivates a more
public atmosphere of intolerance toward Atlantic Canada, with the region
more frequently stereotyped and denigrated as a welfare basket case, “a
burden on the national economy” (Savoie ).
is is, however, only one side of a profoundly ambivalent attitude
toward the Atlantic provinces. While in this view Atlantic Canada’s lack of
development, manufacturing, and industry is distinctively a disadvantage,
in other respects it is the source of a more positive view of the region as
Canada’s “ocean playground”—officially a slogan of Nova Scotia but an
apt metaphor for the increasingly prevalent construction of the region
as leisure space. As Ian McKay’s influential study e Quest of the Folk:as leisure space. As Ian McKay’s influential study e Quest of the Folk:as leisure space. As Ian McKay’s influential study
Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia
and James Overton’s Making a World of Difference: Essays on Tourism,
Culture, and Development in Newfoundland have underlined, the twoCulture, and Development in Newfoundland have underlined, the twoCulture, and Development in Newfoundland
sides of this Janus-faced attitude, rather than dissonant with each other,
are structurally related. at is, governments, cultural producers, businesses,
and tourist promoters have consciously turned the region’s lack of
development—which much of the country otherwise holds against it—to
its advantage, repackaging the region as unspoiled and culturally distinctive
rather than underdeveloped and backward. Tourist development on
the east coast, responding to the need to generate revenue and diversify
economically, for much of the twentieth century has promoted the region’s
pristine ecology, opportunities for outdoor recreation, and unique cultural
atmosphere. at promotion, as McKay and Overton argue, catered to a
prevailing sense of antimodernism, a negative reaction to the homogeneity
and inauthenticity associated with technological progress and mass
consumption. e east coast, their analyses suggest, provided to outsiders
a “therapeutic space” (Overton ) offering the possibility of contact
with ostensibly authentic and unspoiled peoples. However, in presenting
such a profile to lure tourists, as McKay and Overton have demonstrated,
tourist promoters in Atlantic Canada have trafficked in very problematic
stereotypes of the region as pre-modern, rural, and small-m maritime,
projecting a mythical culture imbued with what McKay calls the ideology
of Folk Innocence. e Folk in Nova Scotia, McKay argues, “lived, generally,
in fishing and farming communities, supposedly far removed from
capitalist social relations and the stresses of modernity. e Folk did not
work in factories, coal mines, lobster canneries, or domestic service: they
were rooted to the soil and to the rockbound coast, and lived lives of selfsufficiency
close to nature” (). Overton similarly argues that tourism in
Newfoundland capitalizes on highly selective, “idealized and romanticized”
Going Out of eir Way | 
() definitions of rural Newfoundland culture as organic and authentic,
shaped by the maritime environment and built around “the way of life and
attitudes and experiences of the rural small producer” of the outport ().
In short, for over a century the culture and environment of the Atlantic
provinces have been constructed as a restorative antidote to the alienating
inauthenticity of a dog-eat-dog, technological, modern society, and the
marketing of the region as such continues apace (a recent tourist pitch
described Newfoundland and Labrador as “about as far from Disneyland
as you can possibly get”).
at cultural atmosphere, however, has been a thoroughly packaged
one, and thus one of the key concerns about tourism is the inequitable
economic and political relationships that such packaging entails. One
of the central insights of McKay’s study is that the construction of this
essentialist, pre-modern Folk identity was to a great degree cultivated by
the state and capitalist entrepreneurs. us, while provincial culture was
presented as an escape from capitalist modernity, “it was almost always
a commercial antimodernism, structured by the very modern capitalismcommercial antimodernism, structured by the very modern capitalismcommercial
from which it seemed to provide a momentary and partial escape, and
reliant upon its fast-developing technologies of persuasion” (). Likewise,
Overton stresses that successive “attempts at economic diversification
and reconstruction” in Newfoundland “have included attempts to develop
tourism not as an alternative to industrialization but as a key componentnot as an alternative to industrialization but as a key componentnot
of the modernization of the economy” (). us tourism, rather than an
escape from capitalist modernity, is instead perhaps one of its quintessential
manifestations.
In that sense, one of the problems with tourism is the way in which it
transforms local cultures in order to attract tourists and generate a profit,
little of which typically goes to the “folk” themselves. As numerous critics
have argued, tourism is a reconfiguration of place with the intent to please
others and, depending on the host culture’s economic circumstances, usually
involves asymmetrical relations of power. Tourism, as Overton argues,
drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre, is part of “the spread of industrial
capitalism into the realm of leisure” (), and tourist development thus
“has proceeded, overall, in an uneven and, for the most part, unplanned
fashion” (–). In his influential early study of tourism, e Tourist: A New
eory of the Leisure Class, Dean MacCannell argues that sightseeing is “a
kind of collective striving for a transcendence of the modern totality” in
response to the fragmentation, discontinuity, and alienation of modernity,
an impulse that “is doomed to eventual failure: even as it tries to construct
totalities, it celebrates differentiation” (). With the spread of tourism to
 | Wyile
every corner of the globe, however, critics have become more inclined
to see tourism as a form of neocolonialism, a central expression of the
structural inequities of globalization. For Huggan, the paradox of tourism
that MacCannell describes is very much a product of the homogenizing
mechanics and logic of global capitalism. While ostensibly seeking the
exotic and novel, tourists implicitly demand the familiar and predictable,
and in the process tourism “contributes to the sameness of a world
whose difference it needs to make its profits. Tourism thus requires the
other that it repeatedly destroys” (). For Zygmunt Bauman, tourism
is a particularly palpable instance of what he sees as a central feature of
globalization: a pronounced spatial “asymmetry” between an increasingly
mobile, unburdened, global capitalist elite and others such as working
families who have much less capacity to assert control over their own
locality or to cut “themselves free in order to move elsewhere” (). It is
important not to caricature tourism either as a simplistically harmonious
sharing of the natural and cultural wealth of a particular locale with others
or (as is more likely the case) as a homogenizing, neocolonial juggernaut.
At the same time, however, it is also important to recognize that tourism
is, as John Urry argues (), often the last resort, particularly in developing
countries. When we travel, according to Urry, “we gaze at what we
encounter,” and that gaze is “socially organised and systematised” (); this
gaze, furthermore, “orders and regulates the relationships between the
various sensuous experiences while away, identifying what is visually outof-ordinary,
what are the relevant differences, and what is ‘other’” (Urry
). Tourist destinations thus feel compelled to stage a kind of spectacle
of the extraordinary or the exotic in order to satisfy their tourist clientele,
and that sense of compulsion has significant political, economic, and
cultural implications. Tourism, Overton contends, is marked by conflicts
that “may arise over control of resources, access to land, and even access to
affordable housing” as well as “over how history and culture are packaged
and presented” (). As Overton, Urry, MacCannell, and others suggest, the
host society may come to resent being compelled to perform their culture
for visitors, to provide it in packaged, consumable, ersatz form, through
staged events, the framing and construction of tourist sites, and so on.
us many regions reliant on tourism as an economic mainstay, including
Atlantic Canada, nonetheless exhibit resistance to its influence. Indeed,
such a reaction to tourism is more and more visible in contemporary
Atlantic Canadian literature, reflecting how tourism provides a powerful
frame through which the region is viewed, as well as how tourism, in
Tourist
destinations
thus feel
compelled to
stage a kind of
spectacle of the
extraordinary
or the exotic in
order to satisfy
their tourist
clientele.
Going Out of eir Way | 
the minds of many Atlantic Canadians, is thoroughly bound up with the
region’s economic, political, and cultural marginalization.
Tourists are often figures of fun in Western culture, and certainly one
recurring response to tourism in Atlantic-Canadian literature is an inclination
to satirize tourists as naïfs propelled by a kind of wilful self-delusion.
As commentators on tourism such as Urry and MacCannell note, tourism
is a highly overdetermined process, in which tourist expectations, often
informed by essentialist cultural stereotypes, shape and frame tourism
as an encounter with different places and cultures. What tourists want,
as Newfoundland poet Mary Dalton’s “Lies for the Tourists” suggests, is
a highly airbrushed experience. us Dalton’s speaker provides reassurances
that “that rug was hooked by a sweet white-haired grandmother
/ for love, not money” and that “ose children playing in the crooked
streets—so friendly / so quaint— / are fed on the milk and honey of our
simple island kindness” (). Because of a pragmatic reluctance to disabuse
tourists of their routinely unrealistic and misguided assumptions, the host
society must take pains, in effect, to give tourists what they want. us a
paradoxical process occurs in which hosts cater to the desires of tourists
to the degree that the tourists experience not an authentic other but a
performance of culture and place tailored to their expectations and needs.
In that sense, tourism is an instance of what Jean Baudrillard describes as
the hyperreal, the displacement of the real by the simulacrum, “substituting
signs of the real for the real” ().
is aspect of tourism, as Paul Chafe has nicely illustrated, is deftly
spoofed in Riche’s novel Rare Birds, which revolves around the concocted
sighting of a rare duck near the restaurant of Riche’s protagonist Dave
Purcell in order to revive the restaurant’s flagging fortunes. As Dave’s
co-conspirator Alphonse Murphy presciently argues, what matters is the
spectacle rather than the substance, the perception of authentic experience
rather than the experience itself. “One will catch a gull or a kittiwake out
the corner of his eye,” Phonse reassures Dave, “and say ‘Did you see that?’
and another one will say ‘Yeah! I saw something!’ and they’ll go wild for
it. Psychology of the mob, Dave, mass hysteria!” (). As Chafe argues,
such deception is facilitated by tourism’s reliance less on authentic experience
than on tourists’ perceived consummation of their preconceptions:
“ese birders do not need to see the duck so much as they need to be in
the presence of its mystique” (), and, in staging that presence as a lure,
“Dave and Phonse commit the central deception of the tourist industry”
by “creating their own exploitable ‘reality’” ().
 | Wyile
In a similar vein, in her poem “Markings” Jeanette Lynes highlights
tourists’ pursuit of an illusory, mythical Maritime culture. Evoking tourists’
desire for the idyllic pastoral society of Anne of Green Gables or the
imaginary happy fisherfolk McKay describes— two staples of tourism in
the Maritimes—Lynes likewise suggests that what matters is the anticipation
rather than the consummation:
ere’s an island where
lives, much of the world believes, an orphan
with red hair. She has never been home.
ere’s a regal shore where fishermen dance,
women gather moss in contentment. No one
has ever found it. Perhaps no one
wants to. ()
She likens tourists in Cape Breton to the disappointed Vikings who, while
searching for the mythical Vinland, “a land where you could hump and eat
grapes all day long,” instead discovered Newfoundland’s Great Northern
Peninsula, where “they beat their fists / against the barely thawed ground,
wept bitterly.” In their giant RVs, “not so different from Viking ships,”
these tourists—parodic, latter-day adventurers with “tanned skin, plastic
cards”—“have no idea how lost they are” (). Lynes, like Riche, suggests
that what tourists consume is a preconceived image rather than the reality,
highlighting how, as Overton nicely puts it, “It may be that people are
perpetually cheated of that which they are offered and forced to consume
the menu rather than the meal” ().
However, Overton also argues that “to see people as dupes who are
manipulated by the advertising industry does not get us very far” (),
and he emphasizes that the myths retailed to tourists work because they
cater to their needs and desires (). Meethan more strenuously resists
what he sees as the “mistaken assumption that people are simply passive
consumers or even cultural dupes, in particular that ‘the masses’ are easily
fooled into accepting contrivance as the ‘real thing.’ Such a position
is both arrogant and patronising and … quite erroneous” (). Meethan
furthermore resists the view of tourism as a form of neo-colonialism,
especially in the developing world, arguing that “the notion that other
cultures need preserving from the onslaught of a totalising modernity and
that their authenticity is under threat” is a potentially disempowering form
of essentialist Folk romanticism (). While there is merit to Meethan’s
stance, however, it arguably underestimates the degree to which tourism
constitutes a serious political, economic, and spatial imposition on the
Going Out of eir Way | 
lives of local inhabitants, an understanding that is increasingly visible in
contemporary Atlantic-Canadian literature.
One of the potential problems with tourism, as Mike Robinson asserts,
is that it usually involves sharing, and even vying for control of, places: “A
more intangible and yet fundamental characteristic of contemporary tourism
is the extent to which it converges on the spaces and places occupied
by the host community. Tourists at various times occupy the places which
‘belong’ to others and which carry cultural meanings for the host community”
(). is competition for space is central to MacLeod’s “Clearances,”
in which MacLeod’s aging protagonist sees his Cape Breton homestead
increasingly encroached upon by the forces of a leisure society. e decline
of the resource sector, increasing out-migration, and the outsiders’ view
of Cape Breton as leisure real estate combine to create conditions that
replicate the earlier Highland clearances that led to the migration of the
protagonist’s Scottish ancestors to Cape Breton in the first place. e story
dramatizes the disruption of familial and occupational continuity that
has been a central consequence of the Maritimes’ economic plight from
the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century, during
which, as David Creelman notes, nearly one-hundred-thousand Maritimers
left the region every decade (). Near the end of a life that he has
lived much as his forebears did, the protagonist has witnessed one son go
off to fish in Lake Erie after the decline of the local fisheries, while, after
the accidental death of his other son, his daughter-in-law has sold off the
part of his homestead that she inherited to “a surly summer couple who
erected a seven-foot privacy fence and kept a sullen pitbull who paced
relentlessly behind it” (). Furthermore, the government has curtailed
salmon fishing by locals “for the benefit of the summer anglers” (),
while a nearby park increasingly encroaches on their lives, traveling “like
a slow-moving glacier, claiming more and more land to be used as hiking
trails and wilderness areas, while the families in its path worried about
eviction notices” (). e sense of rupture and dispossession that these
developments cultivate is reinforced for the protagonist by the arrival of
a real estate agent, trying to broker the purchase of his land by a pair of
German visitors “looking for land with ocean frontage” (), who fail to
appreciate the irony that the area is “[n]ice and quiet” because, as the protagonist
observes, people have been forced to migrate to the U.S., “Halifax
or southern Ontario” (). us “Clearances” serves as a succinct allegory
for the politics of the transition from a resource economy to a leisure one,
highlighting the vulnerability and aggrieved dignity of those who find
themselves effectively being evicted in the process. As the protagonist’s
 | Wyile
young relative complains, “People like you and me … are no match for the
Government and the tourists” (). ough the story ends on a note of
resistance to such encroachment—with the protagonist and his faithful
sheepdog (an emblem of Gaelic heritage characteristic of MacLeod’s work)
confronting the neighbours’ pit bull—the outcome of that resistance is
inconclusive and the tone of the ending profoundly ambivalent. Nonetheless,
through its portrait of the external pressures eroding the foundations
of a long-standing way of life built around natural resources, “Clearances”
succinctly dramatizes how tourism so often is a literal contest over territory
and over how physical spaces are to be configured and used.
Another recurring response to tourism in Atlantic-Canadian literature
is the depiction of tourism as more than a physical imposition. While
recognizing that tourism entails a certain level of self-deception, most
writers also appreciate the power exerted by such preconceptions and thus
the need to counter the symbolic imposition that such preconceptions
involve. One strategy for doing so is the reassertion of the complexity of
place in the face of the simplistic reconfiguring of place for consumption
by tourists. As Overton argues, “Space is transformed by tourism, but so
is the meaning and representation of space” (). With the tourist industry
“skewing the built environment to meet the expectations and preferences
of the tourist,” Robinson argues, “the cultural elements of placeness—continuation,
evolution, stability and familiarity—are eroded” (–). Part
of the response to tourism in Atlantic-Canadian literature is thus a contesting
of such touristic definitions of space and place. In Prince Edward
Island poet Brent MacLaine’s “North Shore Park,” for instance, the speaker
contemplates a frozen seaside vista after a winter storm. Highlighting
the seasonal selectivity of touristic perceptions of the island, the speaker
underscores the incongruity of a summer-oriented leisure apparatus, as
“the seaward-facing benches / look ironic” and “uncomprehending cottages
/ close their plywood eyes” (). In what might be seen as a chilly
reversal of Charles G.D. Roberts’s famous late-nineteenth-century poem
“Tantramar Revisited” (in which Roberts’s speaker prefers the imagined,
remembered version of the landscape spread out before him and sustains
the illusion by staying at a distance), MacLaine’s speaker considers the
truth of the present landscape, in contrast to the perception imposed by
“those others …, / dreamy for sleep-inducing surf, / hot for magic castles”
who “will reconfigure all this ice / to sand, make an oasis here / beneath
the tilting pines” (). is contrast suggests a distinction between what
MacCannell, reworking Erving Goffman’s model of social interaction, calls
back regions and front regions of tourism, “the putative ‘intimate and real’
Going Out of eir Way | 
as against ‘show’” (). As MacCannell also rightly suggests, however, the
distinction between back region and front region is difficult to maintain,
and one of the paradoxes that both McKay and Overton highlight is the
way that host societies are complicit in the perpetration of, and often
internalize, touristic constructions of their own cultures. Meethan goes
further, arguing that characterizations of tourism as an agent of alienated
modernity soiling ostensibly unitary and authentic cultures are both erroneous
and patronizing, based on false dichotomies between the authentic
and the inauthentic, the traditional and the modern (–). In this light,
MacLaine might be seen as trying to assert an illusory and potentially
essentialist “real” sense of place in response to the tourist’s “artificial”
one, reflecting how, as Tracy Whalen cautions in considering literary
representations of Newfoundland, essentialist constructions of place are
“beloved by tourist operations and those whom one might term cultural
nationalists” alike (). However, resisting hegemonic touristic definitions
of space is not the same thing as reasserting a geographically essentialist
identity. Instead, “North Shore Park” can be read as foregrounding the
one-dimensionality of the tourist version of , perpetually frozen in
summertime, in the process stressing the problematic transience of the
leisure economy, its limited existential investment in a place that has not
one season but four.
Perhaps the most significant strategy for confronting tourism in contemporary
Atlantic-Canadian literature is a kind of resistant reading that
exposes the coercive conditions behind the performance of culture for
tourist consumption. Such a strategy is evident, for instance, in Kenneth
J. Harvey’s e Town at Forgot How to Breathe, a magic realist allegory
about the loss of purpose and identity in a Newfoundland outport community
in the wake of the collapse of the cod fishery. In many magic
realist texts, plagues serve as allegorical devices for exploring societies
undergoing profound social and cultural changes,⁶ and such is the premise
underpinning e Town at Forgot How to Breathe. Various inhabitants
of the community of Bareneed—most previously healthy and all previously
employed in the fisheries—find themselves becoming increasingly volatile,
lashing out at those around them, and at the same time experiencing a
sense of disorientation, a loss of a sense of their own identity. e culmina
Plagues figure prominently, for instance, in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One
Hundred Years of Solitude, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and Louis
de Bernières’s Marquezian trilogy published in the early s, e War of Don
Emmanuel’s Nether Parts, Senor Vivo and the Coca Lord, and e Troublesome
Offspring of Cardinal Guzman.
In this light,
MacLaine might
be seen as
trying to assert
an illusory
and potentially
essentialist “real”
sense of place in
response to the
tourist’s
“artificial” one.
 | Wyile
tion of these strange symptoms is an inability to breathe without making a
conscious effort to do so, ultimately leading to death. rough this series
of symptoms, Harvey creatively allegorizes the social consequences and
the crisis of identity precipitated by the eclipse of a long-standing way of
life—underscoring the degree to which people’s identity and dignity are
bound up with the centuries-long heritage of working in the fisheries.
“Forgetting how to breathe” serves as a succinct metaphor both for the
fundamental existential crisis Harvey chronicles as well as for the shift
from independence to dependence, as the afflicted must be kept on artificial
support while the authorities struggle to remedy their condition—a
physiological parallel to the province’s social and economic plight in the
wake of the  moratorium.⁷
As Robinson observes, tourism can cultivate cultural conflicts manifested
in a range of ways, “from a rather intangible sense of disgruntlement
and embarrassment on the part of the host to (in extreme cases)
violence against tourists and the component elements of the industry as
symbols of external influence and cultural change” (). A central part of
the conflicted response to the calamity in Bareneed is an aggrieved resentment
of the role of outsiders in bringing it about, including tourists. As
Urry argues, a key consideration in tourism is the “extent to which tourists
can be identified and blamed for supposedly undesirable economicists can be identified and blamed for supposedly undesirable economicists can be identified and blamed
and social developments” (). Such an impulse, furthermore, is usually
more evident when there are significant economic, cultural, and ethnic
differences between tourists and visitors and “when the host population is
experiencing rapid economic and social change” (Urry ), as is the outport
Newfoundland of Harvey’s novel. us the resentment of the residents
is directed in part at tourists because they are seen as exploiting the vulnerability
of a society in dire circumstances. One of the novel’s principal
characters, Doug Blackwood, is an inshore fisherman infuriated by the
moratorium on fishing for cod, which he sees as an authoritarian intrusion
by a “bunch of pasty-faced bureaucrats” (). With similar spleen, Doug
depicts tourism as a kind of cultural prostitution and predation, outsiders
picking the bones of a once vital community:
Put the people of Bareneed on display like they were museum
pieces, the last of the fisherfolk done up in period costumes for
 For detailed discussion of federal and provincial responses to the crisis in the
fisheries, see, for instance, Kent Blades’s Net Destruction: e Death of Atlantic
Canada’s Fishery (Halifax: Nimbus, ) and Nicole Gerarda Power’sCanada’s Fishery (Halifax: Nimbus, ) and Nicole Gerarda Power’sCanada’s Fishery What Do
ey Call a Fisherman? Men, Gender, and Restructuring in the Newfoundland
Fishery (St John’s: , ).
Going Out of eir Way | 
some arse-backward re-enactment. Have a good look, ladies
and gentlemen. Step right up. See how they wiggle like fish on
the ends of a hook, gasping their final breath. Bait for you to
nip at. See how their boats are rotting and their children don’t
have a clue what a codfish even looks like. ()
Here Harvey, like Ian McKay, stresses the irony of performing a seafaring
way of life that has been eradicated, so that tourism becomes a kind of
cultural necrophilia—getting off on the corpse of the departed, as it were.
Harvey’s novel dramatically underscores how trafficking in such anti-modern
cultural essentialism, as McKay argues, “is ethically troubling because
it exemplifies the transformation of living people (and their customs and
beliefs) into articles of exchange” ().
Such a view of tourism as a kind of imposed, coercive cultural minstrel
show is particularly evident in the work of Edward Riche, though Riche
approaches it with a much more satirically subversive tone. In Rare Birds,
for instance, Riche scathingly highlights the performance of culture, in
which, as Chafe nicely puts it, “the culture marketed to tourists is more
act than actual” (). As his anti-hero Dave contemplates tourism as
literally the last resort for a desperate province, Riche underscores how
Newfoundland culture is reduced to a humiliating pantomime: “Tourism.
It was the last hope for Newfoundland, to become some kind of vast
park, its people zoo pieces, playing either famished yokels or bit parts in
a costume drama, a nation of amateur actors dressed up like murderous
Elizabethan explorers, thrilling to the touch of their tights and tunics as
they danced for spare change” (). In his latest novel, e Nine Planets,
Riche subversively reframes Folk stereotypes of Newfoundland’s cultural
heritage—built around romantic images of the hardy, independent petty
producer of the outport—in a diatribe by George Hayden, an opportunistic
developer frustrated by environmental opposition to his plan to build a
gated community on ostensibly unspoiled downs outside St John’s. e
real heritage of Newfoundland, Hayden rails, “is commerce. ey didn’t
cross the pond in leaky boats for a theatre festival or to watch whales, they
came to this place to make money, to kill whales and sell their fat. North
America is about capitalism, and it got its start here, right here. Money
means vitality, money means movement. at’s our lost tradition …, not
running the fucking goat” ().
While Riche’s satire in both e Nine Planets and Rare Birds spoofs
the simplistic and anti-modern stereotypes that permeate touristic attitudes
toward Atlantic Canada, however, that satire is underpinned by a
more sobering awareness of the economic conditions that make tourism
 | Wyile
the last resort that it is, as well as of the social and cultural implications
of that state of affairs. At the end of his cynically expedient free-market
diatribe, Hayden underscores the problems with Newfoundland’s increasing
dependence on a service economy: “Men have been doing business
in Newfoundland for five hundred years. We’ve traded with Lisbon and
London and Havana and Genoa from the get-go, and there are those that
would have us all gamekeepers and actors. Build, baby, or wait tables” ().
e point here, essentially, is that tourism expands to fill a vacuum—that
is, the economic void left by the collapse of the fisheries that Riche, for all
his wicked satire of tourism, recognizes as the source of a profound crisis
of identity for Newfoundland. As Riche observes, Hayden, unsavoury as
he may be, is nonetheless giving voice to a crucial imperative for Newfoundland:
the need to redefine itself culturally and economically rather
than continuing to retail a culture that has expired (“Equal-Opportunity”
). Indeed, in Rare Birds, Dave mournfully contemplates the legacy of
remote and abandoned roads, soccer pitches and softball diamonds, the
relics of Sisyphean efforts to develop Newfoundland, and likens them to
“the wooden planes built by the cargo cults, ghostly activity undertaken to
attract somebody with a real purpose, industrial decoys” (). is palpable
evidence of failure then prompts him to consider Newfoundland reverting
to its pre-contact state: “e Norse had failed. e Basques had failed.
And now the British Empire and its Canadian water boys were failing. e
island belonged to the black bears and caribou and lynx and crows. And
they would soon have it back” (). Despite the satiric hyperbole of Dave’s
lugubrious meditations, the underlying message is an earnest one: “[I]f
we don’t change, that is our future. We can hand the keys to the crows”
(Riche, “Equal-Opportunity” ).
is apocalyptic tone, muted in Riche’s work, is much more pronounced
in Barry’s Wreckhouse, a particularly mordant satire of tourism.
In an economically exhausted, allegorical landscape (the setting is
an abandoned mine site), a band of Newfoundlanders conspire to lure
and tranquilize outsiders, who are then literally consumed in ritualistic
fashion. ough the central action is framed as a hallucinatory, cautionary
nightmare—“‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ meets ‘Deliverance,’” to borrow
an apt phrase from the play ()—Barry’s satire is nonetheless pointed
and trenchant. e premise of the play is that competition between communities
for tourists to feed off, as it were, has (as with the cod fishery)
exhausted the stocks, or the “gawpfish” as one character describes them
(). In a clever, parodic reversal of tourism as a performance of culture,
in which locals have to transform themselves in order to meet tourists’
Going Out of eir Way | 
expectations, Barry’s locals have “got to the point where we got to get
people down and train them to be tourists instead of training us to be we.
So that we can keep up our culture, see bye’s. We got a taste for tourist
and it’s like a heroin addiction in the blood” (). In a hyperreal turn that
Baudrillard and McKay would appreciate, attracting tourists itself becomes
the folk tradition.
Barry situates such desperation in the larger context of Newfoundland’s
infantilizing, subordinate relationships with England and Canada.
Larky, one of the locals whose job it is to recruit fresh tourists, describes
the province as being “[s]tunted,” “[p]assed from one withered milkless tit
to another nursemaid younger but even more austere” (). In a scathing
indictment of the condescension with which they are viewed by the rest of
the country, Newfoundlanders are likened to “[a]ged children sent to the
basement without any supper whenever they act up. A basement they’ll
never be allowed to leave” (). is colonial debasement is then linked
to tourist promotion, as these “aged children” consequently must “strive
so hard to please. Dressed up in little costumes to dance little dances and
sing little songs” (). e literal predation on tourists, Larky contends,
is thus a response to a crisis of identity: “Because we have become unreal.
at’s what it is. Having to force them to acknowledge that we are real so
that we can become real again” (). As Larky goes on to underscore, in
a passage highly reminiscent of McKay’s deconstruction of Folk ideology,
essentialist Folk conceptions of culture—coercive caricatures of people’s
sense of cultural identity—cultivate not only a loathing of the tourists
such images are designed to attract and satisfy but also a self-loathing on
the part of the host society:
Don’t those  ads depicting the bright-eyed lassies and their
Menschfolk dancing in circles beneath the perfect sky to the
music of accordions give off a faint whiff of Bavarian Uberjoy.
Just add some lederhosen and steins of Lowenbrau and you
got a perfect picture of Aryan Folk Himmel. And all this self
promotion can only stem from one thing. A grimacing mask
of hospitality covering a cringing clock of desperation. Besides,
everybody hates tourists. It’s natural. ey create so much
envy. ey’re always on holiday. ey turn everyone into servants.
Excuse me. Service industry workers. (–)
e view of tourism as a species of neocolonialism is deftly allegorized in
the ritual of consumption that provides the climax to Wreckhouse. Fiercely
satirizing heritage culture as a kind of commodified nativism and touristic
behaviour as a kind of dance of automatons, Barry presents the consump-
 | Wyile
tion of tourists as a parody of the Newfoundland tradition of the “boil-up,”
a ritual communal feast, simultaneously playing on colonial caricatures of
native savagery. e “tourists” “are dressed in beige khaki safari outfits with
shorts, white socks with hiking boots, and Tilley hats,” while locals Sydney
and Larky are “dressed in full oilskins and Cape Anns battened downand Larky are “dressed in full oilskins and Cape Anns battened downand Larky are “ ” ().
In synchronized fashion, the tourists, with cameras strung around their
necks, ritualistically shuffle along, stopping while one points out an attraction
to the others, who “nod their heads in unison. en in unison they all
smile at each other, take each other’s picture, sigh and return to their places
and proceed with the ‘tour’” (). e tourists are then beaten with oars,and proceed with the ‘tour’” (). e tourists are then beaten with oars,and proceed with the ‘tour’”
verbally berated, and thrown into a pot, with lobster claws attached to their
arms. As this parodic barbarism reaches its crescendo, with the victims
turning on each other, the action seems to return—as in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream—to where it began, with one of the “tourists,” Dr omas
O’Steinway, seeking help to fix a flat tire. However, the ambiguous status
of the ending (which raises doubts about whether or not it all has been
just a dream) reinforces the cautionary effect of the nightmarish vision
at the core of the play, which grimly (if hilariously) points to the strains
caused by the fundamentally neocolonial relations underpinning tourism
as a consumption of culture.
What pervades not only Wreckhouse but indeed almost all of these
representations of tourism is a profound sense of loss—loss of resources,
loss of a traditional way of life, loss of dignity—but that loss is articulated
in various ways, from the elegiac to the angry to the satirically defiant.
One of the reasons that tourism seems to be an increasing preoccupation
of Atlantic-Canadian writers is that tourism is a palpable symbol of
and agent of larger and more amorphous political and economic forces
—both at the national and the global level. As most of these works suggest,
tourism is a force to be contended with, because what is on the line in
catering to tourists is not just economic survival but also dignity, cultural
integrity, and a sense of identity. Writers in Atlantic Canada, as Danielle
Fuller contends, have long had to contend with the “risk of reinforcing
sentimental, nostalgic, or romantic notions of particular places, thereby
masking regional inequalities and /or having your work dismissed as unsophisticated”
(“Strange Terrain” ). In this light, the critical response to
tourism in the literature of contemporary Atlantic Canada can be seen as
a form of counter-colonial resistance, as these writers defuse and deconstruct
the power of tourism by dramatizing the constructed identity and
subordinate position that the tourist paradigm characteristically imposes
on host societies.
What
pervades not
only
Wreckhouse but
indeed almost
all of these
representations
of tourism is a
profound sense
of loss.
Going Out of eir Way | 
Such innovative and critical responses to tourism are a significant part
of the current boom in creative writing on the east coast, which arguably
is at least partly a reaction to the substantial economic and social struggles
of the region, of which tourism is both ostensible remedy and visible
symptom. ough the vibrancy and popularity of contemporary Atlantic-Canadian
literature vis-à-vis the otherwise dire economic and social
circumstances of the region might suggest that its economy’s loss is its
culture’s gain, however, that might well prove to be a temporary consolation.
e popularity of realistic fiction about Atlantic Canada in the s,
argues Fuller, “suggests the attraction of cultural difference, particularly
that apparently offered by geo-politically marginalized communities, to
those inhabiting urban sites in northern industrialised countries that
increasingly look the same” (“Crest” ). at is, while Atlantic-Canadian
literature is currently enjoying a good deal of attention, it may well prove
to be a passing fad, subject to the same “inexorably capitalist logic” that
Huggan sees in tourism: “[O]nce tourism has made the other accessible,
other others must emerge to take its place” (). Indeed, the present
popularity of the literature of Atlantic Canada is very much bound up
with tourist constructions of the region and substantially infused by the
discourse of exoticism that Huggan describes.
But if readerly taste is capricious and transient, so are the forces of
capital, particularly in an increasingly mobile global regime, and in an
economy built on perpetual novelty it is difficult to predict what regions
might be subject in the future to the kinds of economic deprivation that
force the Atlantic provinces effectively to prostitute their culture for
tourist dollars. In that sense, the fate of Atlantic Canada, as dramatized
in the literature of the region, may well provide a useful cautionary tale
to the rest of the country, particularly those provincial and federal politicians
who fiddle while Fort McMurray burns, so to speak, ignoring the
social, economic, and ecological consequences of Alberta’s booming oil
economy. Atlantic Canada was once one of the most prosperous regions
of the country, and its fortunes precipitously declined as a result of, among
other things, the political and economic readjustments that Confederation
entailed, as well as shifts in trade patterns and resource availability.
As sociologist Michael Clow argues, given the increasing light-footedness
of capital and the political and economic readjustments entailed by such
international agreements as , it is not unreasonable to speculate
that it may be the ultimate fate of the rest of Canada to be “Maritimized.”
Given the tradeoff of political autonomy for trade harmonization, Clow
argues, “e Canadian state will be substantially hamstrung to ameliorate
 | Wyile
the devastation of the population under de-industrialization as long as we
remain part of these unions predicated on neo-liberalism” (). Clow’s
prediction arguably is being borne out in the current de-industrialization
of Ontario, and one can without too much effort envision a similar
scenario in the more prosperous west. Just as the Atlantic provinces built
their wealth on the bounty of an ocean that proved to have its limits, so the
present economic boom in the west has been fueled by natural resources
whose finitude few seem bothered to stop to contemplate. Who knows,
perhaps in a hundred years’ time we will see Albertans “performing” the
epic history of the oil sands in a depopulated, desertified west. In that
sense, Atlantic-Canadian literature may prove to be speculative fiction
for the rest of the country, giving an advance glimpse of what life is like
when the main thing you have left to sell is your past.
Acknowledgements
A shorter version of this article was presented at the conference of the
Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English in
Saskatoon in May . is work is part of a research project funded
by a  Standard Research Grant, and I would like to gratefully
acknowledge  for its support. I would also like to thank English
Studies in Canada’s two anonymous readers for their helpful feedback
on the piece.
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