Essay question: Can it be that Mordecai Richler is too mainstream for Canada’s university literature courses, which have, at least for the moment, abandoned him? Discuss. Make reference to: a. The irony. b. the absurdity c. the stupidity.
Mordecai Richler was the outsider’s outsider. He was, as a man, a bit like the Isaac Babel character Lyutov, a Jew in a Cossack brigade fighting for the Bolsheviks: an individual par excellence, triply alienated (at least). Among Quebeckers, he was a Jew. Among Jews, an artist, a hostile observer. In England, a Canadian. He didn’t fit, anywhere.
And aren’t literature courses supposed to love alienation and subversion? All Mr. Richler’s work was touched by the loneliness and ferocity of the alien who, finding himself on the outs, wants to change the world to accommodate him. Or if not change it, at least kick its doors in and run away, chortling.
Mordecai Richler matters. He matters because his heroes and anti-heroes, from Duddy Kravitz to Barney Panofsky, were emblems of alienated 20th-century man, who refused to give up their uniqueness as the price of acceptance. In The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, published not 15 years after the Holocaust ended, he dared offer up what could have been simply a vicious stereotype, a Jew of ruthless ambition, willing to cheat to be someone, and made him human. In Barney’s Version, his ridiculous man, losing his memory as he slides toward death, became a national hero to readers in Italy, testament to the universality of Mr. Richler’s creations.
He matters because he was laugh-out-loud funny. Moral rage was one side of his coin, laughter the other. In that sense, he belongs with the satirists of the ages. In Barney’s Version, each page, perhaps each line, was funny, especially when read for its inverted meaning.
He matters because, from the 1950s till his death in 2001, his voice whispered to outwardly stodgy Canadians of their secret subversion, their thumbing of the nose at convention, their pride in their own stubborn and sometimes wacky individualism. He said it was okay to be who you are – and now the guardians of our literature have decided he’s old hat. CanLit courses at Queen’s, Dalhousie and many others, even Concordia, in his beloved Montreal, don’t bother with him. In diverse Canada, he is passé. Oh, the irony, the absurdity, the stupidity.
