Articles

Although Thomas King has never been called a literary celebrity in the popular press or in critical work, his negotiations with the landscape of Canadian cultural production are freighted with questions of public visibility, subjective authenticity, literary canonization, and national consecration. His literary works are readily appropriated by the nation even as he publicly takes on radically resistant notions of national legitimacy and belonging. This essay is located at the intersection of celebrity studies, critical race theory, and CanLit and argues that King’s position as a national literary celebrity gives us an opportunity to explore the nation’s complex and ambiguous appointment of the “cultural ambassador” and the particular success and visibility that King and his work maintain in Canada. It concludes that through his management of his celebrity image, King offers a critique of identity politics as the schema of Canadian cultural production.

The paper focuses on two mature novels by Mordecai Richler, namely St. Urbain’s Horseman and Solomon Gursky Was Here. Taking into account the powerful influence of orthodox religion on the writer’s imagination, the two works are analyzed through the lens of the messianic myth, central to Judaism and underlying, overtly or otherwise, a considerable portion of Jewish writing worldwide. The author of the paper argues that Richler, given to all-encompassing ambivalence (a term already employed by Ramraj in an early critical study), infuses the messianic with a picaresque element; this deconstructive gesture, however, does not rob the myth of its power. The eponymous Horseman and Solomon Gursky are the results of this unusual blend of the messianic and the picaresque, mythicized into larger-than-life figures by Jake Hersh and Moses Berger, respectively, two self-avowed failures badly in need of spiritual and moral guidance. Whereas on the one hand the argument helps situate Richler on the verge of postmodernist discourse, on the other it serves to emphasize the ethical dimension of his writing.