Literary Celebrity in Canada (review)

Reviewed by: Literary Celebrity in Canada Joel Deshaye Lorraine York. Literary Celebrity in Canada. Toronto: Toronto UP, 2007. 192 pp. $38.00. Lorraine York’s Literary Celebrity in Canada (2007) is the first book in an emerging field of study. It’s a book of opening gestures that will be important for having identified, sometimes inadvertently, many of the problems related to studying, embodying, and buying into literary celebrity in Canada. York argues that “we need a theory of literary celebrity” that doesn’t simply conceive of a widely recognized author as “the high-culture personality artist” or “the crass-minded potboiling best-seller hack” (21). Her theory puts that author on a line between the poles, and she appreciates the difficulty of balancing there. Ultimately, she disagrees with the “sour” (8) opinion of literary celebrity as superficial and elitist. York succeeds in showing (and in promoting) literary celebrities as people who must anxiously negotiate the public disclosure of their private lives and contend with debates about their superficiality or authenticity. Her conclusions are general, partly because of the breadth of what she considers: poems, novels, biography, awards, the tourist industry, reviews, radio interviews, other journalism, and the fundamental scholarly debates about celebrity. York’s book is not written as an exposé, but it nevertheless peeks behind the curtain at the machinery that produces literary celebrity. York refers in her introduction to “the ideological ironies of the very concept of literary celebrity” (13). It’s driven by capitalism, enabled by publicity, and yet those who embody it are often reluctant—authentically or otherwise—to sacrifice their privacy. Furthermore, authors hardly ever have the glitz, the glamour, and the exposure in the media that we associate with celebrity. Literary celebrity seems to be “a contradiction in terms” (170). The notion that Canada could support literary celebrity is (to some) an even more unbelievable stumper, but York shows that it does and has, though the first instance of such widespread recognition for Canadian authors is a subject of debate. One of the difficulties in determining the historical beginning of literary celebrity is that it’s often confused with literary fame. As most critics do, York uses terms such as celebrity and fame interchangeably, though Chris Rojek and Tyler Cowen have suggested that celebrity has a significantly shorter duration than fame. York argues that duration is “slightly beside the point” (26) and that the “effects” (26) of fame or celebrity are more important, but what if the effects depend on the duration? Arguably, her conclusions about literary celebrity—that it is an uneasy and conflicted status—are the result of thinking about two related but different [End Page 251] phenomena as if they were the same. Authors who want careers tend to seek fame (“being talked about” in the “good sense,” as per the oed); sometimes, celebrity is what they get. Andy Warhol’s “fifteen minutes of fame” is celebrity. Time is relative in that distinction, but if the experience of celebrity is worth considering—which it is, as York says—then something more could be said about the intensity of widespread recognition that comes and goes. Something could also be said about how media would need to interact to change someone’s status so rapidly, whether from celebrity to fame or from celebrity to obscurity. I had always thought of celebrity as a function of film and television, so I agreed with what Graeme Turner calls the “standard view” (10): that it is generally a twentieth-century phenomenon. York’s book helped to convince me that the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century mass-market of books, newspapers, and public readings was sufficient for the creation of celebrity, or at least its unmistakable prototype, for writers such as Pauline Johnson, Stephen Leacock, Mazo de la Roche, and Lucy Maud Montgomery. York compares these writers with later ones, suggesting that Leacock and Michael Ondaatje responded similarly to celebrity by carefully protecting their privacy and that “the canny interventions of Margaret Atwood into her own celebrity representations find their historical precedent in the clear-eyed awareness of [...] Montgomery” (167). I was interested to read about the “interventions” that these writers staged to counteract...

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