Judged by his profile in the media and entertainment industries, no Canadian author alive or dead is as popular today as Mordecai Richler, the subject of a thick new biography (Mordecai: The Life and Times by Charles Foran), an upcoming documentary (Mordecai Richler: The Last of the Wild Jews), as well as the posthumous inspiration for the soon-to-be-released film adaptation of Barney’s Version.
Judged by his profile on university courses that teach Canadian literature, however, Mordecai Richler barely exists. No other author so widely admired both in his day and after is less conspicuous in the emerging canon of Canadian literature – a continuing irritant his admirers are eager to redress.
A quick survey shows that neither Queen’s University, nor the University of Toronto, Concordia University, Dalhousie University, University of Alberta, York University, the University of Saskatchewan and Simon Fraser University name a single work by Richler in lists of texts for either undergraduate or graduate-level courses on Canadian literature.
Among the dozens of authors listed for study in the University of British Columbia’s undergraduate courses in Canadian literature, Richler is mentioned only once. And the Montreal author gets equal treatment in both undergraduate and graduate CanLit courses at McGill University – appearing on only one course list on urban writing as author of The Street, a little-known volume of early stories.
That alone does not make Richler neglected, according to McGill English professor Peter Webb. “He happens not to have been on either of my courses at McGill in the fall, 2010, term, but one should not imply any aversion to Richler on that basis,” he wrote in an e-mail, adding that he has, in the past, taught Richler work to undergraduates.
But lagging academic interest is also evident in the lists of research grants given out by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council over the past dozen years. Margaret Atwood has been the subject of 10 SSHRC-funded studies in that time frame, with popular colleagues Michael Ondaatje and Alice Munro the focus of seven studies each. Six projects studied the comparatively little-known Toronto writer Dionne Brand. Richler, by contrast, has been the subject of only one SSHRC-funded study since 1998.
“The sense that the teaching of Mordecai Richler’s work is in decline within the Canadian academy is not new,” according to Karis Shearer, a Montreal academic who teaches a graduate course at Concordia University on the teaching of Canadian literature, including the all-important business of “canon-making.” The issue first came to a head six years ago, when the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada organized a Richler symposium to make up for what organizers called the “remarkably little academic attention” he has achieved.
But little changed as a result, and Richler’s status remains at best indeterminate. One of the reasons, according to Shearer, is the sheer diversity of course offerings in Canadian universities. “That's not a bad thing,” she says, “but it can make it more difficult to speak generally about an author's status in the academy.”
The author’s many non-academic fans are less reticent. Richler is “both misunderstood and totally under-represented,” according to Toronto literary agent Michael Levine, who worked closely with the author in his later years. Levine blames “elements of the community, including elements of the Jewish community and French community and others,” for repressing academic research on Richler.
Levine says he is determined to rectify the situation but has “no master plan and green eye shade” prepared for the task. “To me it is simply a matter of speaking to a wide swath of people,” he says. “There are many sympathetic academics.”
