Reading "Histories" As Intertexts In Wayne Johnston's The Colony Of Unrequited Dreams

As the influential Canadian critic Linda Hutcheon (Hutcheon 1988b:ⅷ-ⅹ) elaborates in The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction that, though hundreds years of colonization has come to an end in Canada, its influence never fades away completely, especially in literature: the political and the historical have formed an indispensable part of the Canadian postmodern. All our systems of understanding are deliberate and historically specific human constructs (not natural, eternal and given); even the so-called Truth once released by its colonial mother country to be followed by the colonized is only an expression of the mother country's ideology and its power. When the colonial power over Canada collapses, its ideology also unavoidably but gradually begins to deconstruct. Challenge and refutation over the anterior ideology and power are mainly expressed through a parodic reconstruction of the colonial history and an unprecedented enthusiasm in rediscovering of the history of the marginal and the ex-centric, thus, posing an intertextual relation between the two, leading the readers to revalue the history, politics, power and ideology.Through the use of intertexts in their works, many Canadian postmodernists display the tension between various genres, discourses and voices, which echoes the postmodern cultural intertexts—a plurality of values and truths. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, written by the contemporary Canadian novelist Wayne Johnston (1958～), is one of the masterpieces of this category of novels. By intertextual reference, quotation, parody, refinement, displacement and reconstruction, Johnston outspreads a wide net of histories before the readers, presenting a novel saturated with histories of the New-Found-Land and the Old-Lost-Land, histories under the male's pen and that under the female's pen as well as histories of the colonial and the colonized. The technique of intertext has been delicately and appropriately applied in the novel, therefore, the theory of intertextuality is a golden key to solve the myth of history of Newfoundland.This thesis is an analysis of the fictional-and-real intermingled texts of Judge Prowse, the female historian Fielding and the autobiographer Joe Smallwood and their relations in the light of characteristics, techniques and influences of intertextuality, to dig out what a vivid and fresh anti-colonial history it is, when the hypocritical and power-based colonial history is deconstructed and fragmented. It is also an attempt to discover Wayne's purpose of writing the novel: he focuses his attention on the history of those been marginalized and neglected by the dominant, presenting a panorama of the once unpresented Old-Lost-Land before the reader, completely deconstructing the so-called official history backed by the power, subverting its ideology and aesthetics.