12: The Modernist Aesthetic: Hugh Hood, “Flying a Red Kite” (1962)

I n spite of critical controversy over Hugh Hood's place in Canadian literary history, it is safe to say that his literary oeuvre occupies a unique position in the canon owing to the way in which he combines an overt Christian content with a decidedly modernist form. In a more immediate way than is perhaps the case with most writers, Hood's literary career seems to have been shaped by his family background and academic training. Born in 1928 to Catholic parents in Toronto, Hood went to a Catholic school, received a Ph.D. in English at the University of Toronto, and taught at a college in the United States before establishing himself as a professor of English in Montreal in 1961. He emerged as a writer in 1962 when his first short-story collection, Flying a Red Kite , was published. In his prolific literary career, which spanned four decades — Hood died in 2000 — he published nine more collections of short stories ( Around the Mountain: Scenes from Montreal Life , 1967; The Fruit Man, the Meat Man and the Manager , 1971; Dark Glasses , 1976; None Genuine without This Signature , 1980; August Nights , 1985; A Short Walk in the Rain , 1989; The Isolation Booth , 1991; You'll Catch Your Death , 1992; and After All! , 2003) and seventeen novels — among them a series entitled The New Age, which tells the story of Canada's coming of age in the twentieth century and is modeled on Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu . Hood's entire oeuvre is marked by his religious belief and his concern with the spiritual dimension of human existence. Rather than conveying any dogmatic religious position, however, Hood explores the relation between the mundane and the spiritual, the “secular and sacred experience” (Lecker 1982, 99). “Canada's most learned, most intellectual writer” (Keith 1980, 28) has never been a popular writer, and critics are divided about his role in Canadian literature. Admirers praise his work as an exceptional literary achievement. While lauded “as one of Canada's most versatile, sophisticated, and aesthetically self-conscious fiction writers” (Lecker 1986, 226), he is also criticized for his “unfashionably exemplary fiction” (Gadpaille 1988, 101).

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