"Picturing Oil: A Tour of the Canadian Petroscape in Words and Images" Abstract The transforming effects of oil need to be made visible, if we are to understand its impact on the societies that have grown dependent upon it, and unleash the imaginaries necessary to inspire an energetic transition. Art certainly has a role to play in this matter, as made clear since the turn of the Millennium by unprecedented developments in ecocriticism, in parallel with the production of artistic work that has sought to bring oil and its attendant logics into view. This article will be observing this epochal change through the narrow prism of the petroscape, the representation of the oil fields, in English-Canadian fiction and the visual arts.

Résumé

Cet article a pour point de départ les analyses qu'Amitav Ghosh a consacrées à l'impuissance de la littérature face aux réalités de l'exploitation pétrolière et aux enjeux du réchauffement climatique. Le développement des humanités énergétiques a depuis lors démontré que les arts ont un rôle essentiel à jouer pour préciser la place qu'occupe le pétrole dans notre expérience sensible. A la fois matière première et énergie, les hydrocarbures ont en effet pour caractéristique paradoxale de passer le plus souvent inaperçues parce que, fluides, plastiques et diffuses, elles sont partie intégrante de tous les aspects de la vie contemporaine. Il s'agira ici d'observer comme les hydrocarbures ont néanmoins fait une entrée discrète et précoce dans le champ de la représentation à travers l'émergence du pétro-paysage dans la littérature et les arts visuels du Canada anglophone.

In "Petrofictions" Indian anthropologist and writer Amitav Ghosh was the first to query the negligible attention the oil industry received in Western literature over the same period, a little more than a century, when the extraction of fossil fuels, their exploitation and consumption deeply altered geopolitical forces, the structures of an economy gone global, but also the state of the planet's climate and environment. With the dawning of the "Anthropocene" (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000) the expanding domain of the energy humanities has been witnessing the multiplication of neologisms tailored on Ghosh's title. Such compounds as "petromodernity," "petrocultures," and "petroscapes" attest to the lubricity of oil, a material resource whose ubiquitous uses seep into the nature / culture divide, dissolve superficial oppositions, and ease critical frictions. Oil is an operator whose transforming effects need to be made visible, if we are to understand its impact on the societies that have grown dependent upon it, and unleash the imaginaries necessary to inspire an energetic transition (Wilson et al, 2017). Art certainly has a role to play in this matter, as made clear since the turn of the new millennium by unprecedented developments in ecocriticism, in parallel with the production of artistic work that has sought to bring oil and its attendant logics into view [START_REF] Lemenager | Petro-Melancholia: The BP Blowout and the Arts of Grief[END_REF]. The present article looks at this epochal change through the lens of the representation of the Canadian oil fields in fiction and in photography, from the second half of the twentieth century to the present. The same period saw petroleum become the staple resource that sheltered Canada's economy from some of the major downturns faced by the rest of the Western world, obliterating, especially in contexts of recession, the environmental cost of its extraction, refining and marketing, and the long-term effects those processes have on climate-change (Longfellow in Wilson et al, 2017: 28).

As early as in the eighteenth century, fur-traders mentioned the tar seeping from the banks of the Athabasca River, a substance the Indigenous people used to caulk their canoes.

In his Journals (1801), explorer Alexander Mackenzie also gave a memorable description of the bituminous fountains found in the same region. It was not until the early 1920s, however, that experiments were made to separate bitumen from the water, sand, silt, and clay with which it is mixed in its natural state. The production of conventional oil developed on an industrial scale after Imperial Oil #1 well came in a gusher in Leduc, Alberta in 1947(Wilson et al, 2017: 80). But the commercial exploitation of the tar sands, the process that comes under the heading of "unconventional" or "extreme oil," 1 did not begin until another two decades, on account of the sophisticated technology necessary to extract bitumen from its medium. The production then accelerated in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis (Takach, 2017: 4).

The country was infamously labelled a "petro-state" during the years when conservative Prime Minister Steven Harper held office (2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015), and the interests of the oil-producing sector came to weigh on decisions taken at the federal level. 2 Today Canada is a heavyweight in the global oil sector, a position secured thanks to the immense reserves stocked in the tarsand deposits of Northern Alberta, "the world's third largest recoverable source of oil" (Takach, 2017: 3), behind Saudi Arabia and Venezuela (Wilson et al, 2017: 83).

If it was not for the paradox Ghosh identified, oil should have seeped into countless plots dealing with the history of settlement, the colonial and economic exploitation of some regions of Canada until the present. And indeed, it has very rarely been the case. These exceptions are nevertheless worth considering, should one wish to understand the new relations to space that become visible with the petroscape. The neologism has an alluring conciseness about it, which does not necessarily entail clarity of meaning. If petroscape foregrounds the centrality of oil in verbal or iconographic representations otherwise commonly identified as landscape, the substitution of one word for another preserves "the 1 "The extremely heavy crude that saturates oil sands is categorized as 'unconventional' because unlike conventional oil deposits, bitumen cannot simply be pumped from the ground and transported to a refinery by pipeline" (Barney in Wilson et al, 2017: 82). On "extreme oil" and the technologies of in-situ mining, fracking and deepwater drilling, see Longfellow in Wilson et al, 2017: 32-33; Takach, 2016: 24. 2 The term refers to "[a] polity that is subordinated and restructured according to the needs of either the Big Oil multinationals or the global political economy of oil or both. Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Russia and Venezuela are among the most common cited examples" (Mookerjea in Wilson et al, 2017: 331).

intensely visual idea" that became attached to landscape in the course of Western history (Cresswell, 2007: 135). Visuality and the power relations embedded in the gaze place the petroscape within the orbit of W.J.T. Mitchell's definition of landscape as "a medium in the fullest sense of the word. It is a material 'means' (to borrow Aristotle's terminology) like language or paint, embedded in a tradition of cultural signification and communication, a body of symbolic forms capable of being invoked and reshaped to express meanings and values " (2002: 14).

Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky notoriously helped bring oil into public view with his "Oil" series of the 2000s [START_REF] Pauli | Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky, Ottawa, The National Gallery of Canada[END_REF]. His use of the industrial sublime drew international attention to what he termed the "manufactured landscapes" (Pauli, 2003: 10) of the Canadian North, at a time of rising ecological anxiety regarding the environmental cost of fossil fuel extraction and its impact on global warming (Wilson et al, 2017: 58, 225).

Burtynsky's glossy photographs capture the fin-de-siècle environmental disaster with a flamboyance that has eclipsed earlier appearances of oil in less spectacular venues, notably in literary genres viewed as minor according to the conventional hierarchy that ranks parody and short fiction below the novel. In the short forms this article will discuss, oil first registers as an index of the local, a substance that leaves the stain of utility on the sites where it is extracted and on the people involved in the process. In contrast to the natural resources Canada's staple economy came to rely on,3 most prominently fish, fur, and timber, it has been difficult to reconcile oil with the image of the pristine wilderness the country embraced to the point of "nationalising" it in the course of its post-colonial history (O'Brian & White, 2007).

Reverence for the wild acted as a powerful unifying factor across the ethnic diversity of Canada's population, fostering a common sentiment for spaces conveniently viewed as empty of a human presence, untouched, and therefore available for the taking (O'Brian & White, 2007: 4). Industrial landscapes, and petroscapes in particular, make that appropriation visible through the infrastructures that turn the land into a productive asset, the alterations oil operations cause on site, and their impact on all living forms: "Oil," Amanda Boetzkes observes, "now appears in a profusion of media images of pipeline explosions, spills, tailing ponds, and monumental 'landscrapes,' amid headlines of cancers, toxic groundwater, and the ongoing problem of carbon emission" (in Wilson et al, 2017: 223-224). The list enhances the instability that goes hand in hand with the transformative properties of oil. Because hydrocarbons are both viscous and volatile, they flow slowly, imperceptibly, even before their spilling or flaring out hits the headlines. Their molecules seep into organisms, challenging containment, the limits between the outside and the inside, but also between active agent and passive object, two distinctions which also pertain to the mediations of landscape and the control the representation of an external reality seemingly confers upon the gazing subject.

To understand the mutations the representation of oil has introduced into the medium of landscape, this article will discuss Ghosh's paradox in a Canadian context, before moving on to analyse the subversive notes the surfacing of oil introduced into the pastoral landscape of settler literature, but also in short fiction representative of the minority literature of the 1980s and more recent Indigenous art. The petroscape foregrounds the material traces left by oil extraction in situ and in visu, through stains that blur the landscape's composition lines and the clarity of vision they seemingly afford. The hypothesis guiding the investigation is that the petroscape enhances contiguities and continuities between the without and the within that problematize the very nature of the observer's visual pleasure by challenging the securing of an external position.

Questioning the Literary Invisibility of Oil

When Amitav Ghosh formulates the paradox of "oil's literary barrenness" (2002: 77), he is targeting the representation of the substance itself, the infrastructures through which it is produced, transported and transformed, but not the "indirect forms of oil" which, from speed to cosmetics, plastic and all manners of derived chemical products now permeate all aspects of modern life (Schuster in Wilson et al, 2017: 204). The question that bothers Ghosh is therefore not how to give visibility to a substance "hidden in plain sight," as the editors of Petrocultures aptly put it (2017: 5), but rather what blocks the literary representation of oil in its most blatant, material forms. "The truth," Ghosh provisionally concludes in "Petrofictions," "is that we do not yet possess the form that can give the Oil Encounter a literary expression" (2002,79), an admission confirming a sentiment Berthold Brecht uttered as early as in 1929: "Petroleum resists the five-act form." 4 In the interval, it is as if almost a century of aesthetic revolutions has led to nothing -at least when it comes to oil in the age of oil.

Because Ghosh is essentially concerned with literary form, his analysis diverges from previous explanations formulated in the 1980s in the emerging field of cultural studies. Raymond Williams memorably wrote that "a working country is hardly ever a landscape" (1973: 120). The unlikeliness in the adverb hinges on the assumption that landscape possesses an aesthetic value which mere setting lacks. What turns landscape into art is a question posed by the art historian as Kenneth Clarke famously did. But what accounts for a portion of space being regarded as landscape supposes a different kind of interrogation, one that has social and political underpinnings, as W.J.T. Mitchell subsequently showed. Emotionally attached to the coal mining area in South Wales where he was born, Raymond Williams could not be more aware of the power relations informing the validation of aesthetic tastes, the appreciation or the dismissal of certain sites tainted by the evidence of too much labour. In North America, critical geographers of the same Marxist, materialist persuasion as Williams similarly underscored that "landscape representations are exceptionally effective in erasing the social struggle that defines relations of work […] the thing that landscape tries to hide, in its insistent fetishisation, are the relationships that go into its making" (qtd in Wylie, 2007: 107).

The industrial landscapes of Northern Europe came to be viewed with various degrees of appreciation as the Industrial Revolution was gathering momentum, actively transforming the countries where it originated. With writers like Disraeli, Gaskell and Dickens, the language of the sublime that expressed the awe and terror felt in front of the grandeur of nature was diverted to translate the turmoil of emotions aroused by the prodigies of the industrial age, the result of human ingenuity and an apparently boundless technological progress [START_REF] Rancière | Le Temps du paysage[END_REF].

But oil operations must be distinguished from the coal, textile, or steel industries whose long shadow extends over the novels written in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, much in the same way as colonial profits and setbacks bear over the development of countless Victorian plots. When Ghosh wonders at the invisibility of oil in Western fiction, he does not stop at the local obliteration of the human labour that finds its counterpart in the fetishisation of its outcome, the pleasurable view (occasionally doubling as a matrimonial prospect) that confirms the status of the gazing subject taken as an individual or as a class. Neither does he dwell on the material conditions of the extraction and transportation that made oil less spectacular than earlier extractive industries, although this is arguably another important factor. 5 Determining what aesthetic form may give visibility to oil, the economies that strive on it and the effects of its extraction and consumption remain unsolved questions to which Ghosh returns in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. In this book-length essay, Ghosh extends his earlier observations to consider "global warming's resistance to the arts" (2016: 73). Although the discussion begins with a plural, the canonical genre of the novel is quickly singled out as the epitome of the great English tradition inherited from the eighteenth-century "Age of Reason," and the very locus of this resistance. Ghosh is writing from within another great tradition, the epics of Vedic India, which have lost none of their formidable ability to evoke larger-than-life forces in their on-going, everyday performances. In his view, the complex entanglements found in the epic have no counterpart in the European novel, an art of selection that rests upon the singling out of an individual destiny envisaged in a specific period and setting. Ghosh argues that "boundedness of 'place'" and a "limited time-horizon" are indeed both necessary to anchor the fictional universe of the novel in an "abstracted yet recognizable reality" (2016: 61, 62). When the consequences of climate change manifest themselves under the guise of tornadoes, tsunamis or unprecedented droughts, those events are so "freakish," Ghosh continues, as to exceed what can be apprehended rationally:

To introduce such happenings into a novel is in fact to court eviction from the mansion in which serious fiction has long been in residence; it is to risk banishment to the humbler dwellings that surround the manor house-those generic outhouses that were once known by names such as '"he Gothic," "the romance," or "the melodrama," and have now come to be called "fantasy," "horror," and "science fiction". ( 2016 More than a painter's trick, Alberti's perspectival construction placed the Western subject in the central, dominant position from which the rest of the world could be segmented, measured, comprehended and ruled. Like Michel Serres6 and Bruno Latour, Ghosh therefore warns against the segmentations that inform Western thought, in which he discerns: a habit of mind that proceeded by creating discontinuities; […] break[ing] problems into smaller and smaller puzzles until a solution presented itself. This is a way of thinking that deliberately excludes things and forces ("externalities") that lie beyond the horizon of the matter at hand: it is a perspective that renders the interconnectedness of Gaia unthinkable. (2016: 56) The challenge interconnectedness poses to the analytical method is also the main obstacle encountered when trying to apprehend oil, an energy form that permeates all aspects of contemporary life. Although petroleum is a key asset in Canada's staple economy, the material conditions of its exploitation have been increasingly removed from public view, with the development of unconventional oil away from urban centres, in remote regions the national imagination has been treasuring as wilderness preserves. After extraction, the transformation of oil and its countless outcomes ("speed, plastic and the luxuries of capitalism," Wilson et al, 2017: 15) make it at once ubiquitous and impossible to separate from the affluent life styles that have grown dependent upon it. The complexities of oil are therefore compounded by complicities that resist the processes of fragmentation, selection and distancing which analytical thought and mimesis both share. If oil's interrelation with the living is the main obstacle its representation faces in the realist novel, is this also true of narrative modes that are less dependent on verisimilitude, the metonymies of realism and the selection required to sustain a realistic effect?

Envisioning Oil outside the Novel

Ironically, Ghosh himself could be held at fault for overlooking local variations in the cultural diversity of the English-speaking world. Because of his concern for the hegemony of the European novel and the alternative traditions realism marginalized, there is little reason why Ghosh should have paused in his argument to acknowledge the discreet yet recurrent attention oil has received north of the 49 th Parallel, especially from regional writers.

Regionalism has been an enduring feature in the formation of Canadian literature on account of the country's immense, contrasted geography, and a colonial history that fostered strong peripheral identities away from central Ontario. Regional expressions have remarkably weathered homogenization in the age of globalization, but their persistence has also encountered contrasted critical responses. Held in suspicion as an enduring form of provincialism -visible cracks in the edifice of the Canadian nation -regionalism has also been valued as evidence that remoteness from centres of cultural and political attraction is an asset when challenging norms, eccentricity stimulating non-conformism and creativity. Paul Hiebert's Sarah Binks is an early illustration of the above. The book began as an academic spoof, a collection of character sketches interspersed with vignettes of Prairie life loosely strung together into a parody of the Boswellian literary biography. Published in 1947, the year when the Leduc oilfield struck a gusher for the first time, its slim volume is devoted to the fictitious life and works of a poet introduced as "the sweet songstress of Saskatchewan" (1947: 7). The insistent sibilance running through the appellation ties Binks's dissonant name to her home place, a rural province severely hit by the drought during the Depression years. In its evocation of an ungainly genius loci, the phrase strikes an off-key note that questions the adequacy between the lyrical and the local, between poetry and place. In the 1940s, Saskatchewan remained associated with the Dust Bowl, the unprecedented ecological disaster that put an end to dreams of settlement in this rural part of Canada: what poetic idiom may "sing" a place into existence where the pastoral survives as a displaced colonial ideal, the intensive farming that wrought havoc in a vulnerable environment? With Sarah Binks, Hiebert provocatively turns the pastoral lyric upside down and taps into the mock-heroic vein to attend to the particulars of life on a Saskatchewan homestead.

The mock epic traditionally depends for its derisive effect on a hiatus between elevated diction and prosaic content. Hiebert's parody deepens the gap by foregrounding the biographer's pompous voice while the poet herself remains largely in the shadow of his commentary. The discrepancy between the voluble, self-proclaimed "Author," his elevated treatment of Binks's life and the mundane facts that caught her whimsy only prepares for another deflation when, after much delay, fragments from her poems are disclosed to illustrate the biographer's claims. This causes a double recoil, the second defla(gra)tion amplifying the first rupture in tone, as on the occasion when the "Author" recalls the great expectations the drilling for oil raised on the farm: It is poetic licence also which enables Sarah to describe the well as a "gusher." The actual gush, always excepting that of the Millenium Development and Exploitation Company, subsided after twenty-five minutes to a mere trickle. The oil content, which William Greenglow's field notes classify as "smear" were later corrected by more exact chemical analysis to "trace". […] Those haunting lines Should maddened pterodactyl chance to meet With raging crocodile, Then crocodile the pterodactyl eat, etc., etc. express more than an oil well. They speak to us of the Upper Silurian. They speak to us of the Lower Galician. They speak to us of the Plasticine, the Preluvian, the overburden, the underburden, the chert concretion, the Great Ice age. Nay, the whole super epic breathes in and breathes out the geological soul of Saskatchewan. (Hiebert, 1947: 75-76) Not only is there hardly any oil to write about on Binks's homestead, but neither does the plonking tercet contain any of the poetic gems the reader was led to expect. The consolation for the absence of a find comes after the poem, in a Homeric catalogue of grandiloquent, pseudo-geological periods which, however, soon peters out. Who, or rather what is being derided here? The poetic pretensions of colonial yokels? The pedantries of donnish prose? Or the enduring fascination the geological sublime has exerted upon Canadian writers (Mason, 2013: 475)? Far from providing an alternative to the exhausted conventions of the pastoral, geology is just one of the poetic poses the book mercilessly lampoons. As oil drains from the dust in Binks's fields, leaving a "trickle," a "smear," and then only the merest "trace," the description veers away from what the eye can barely see to what can only be imagined, the parody plummeting down geological depths impossible to fathom. Throughout Sarah Binks, excess and absence operate in a dialectical opposition that undercuts representation and the formation of a stable image. For each new episode in the poet's life, there are either too many decorous words but not enough reality to warrant them, or an abundance of realities for which no appropriate words, and certainly not decorous ones, can be found, as evinced in the "Lower Galician" and the fraught labour relations that lurk below the jocular gloss. 7 With "Meneseteung," a short story from the collection Friend of My Youth (1990), Alice Munro pens another parodic, diminutive epic in which the prospect of oil serves to interrogate the nature of the gaze that views the colonial land as landscape and the challenges its artialisation represents. Like the geologist in Sarah Binks, Jarvis Poulter is a character moved by the hope that has kept generations of immigrants on the lookout out for the next economic boom, from the eastern seaboard to Canada's most western provinces. The narrator, one of the many local historians that people Munro's fiction, provides the necessary context: "The first oil well in the world was sunk in Lambton County, south of here, in the 1850s" (Munro, 1990: 322). The indication points to Oil Springs, the village where James Miller Williams discovered the first commercial oil well in North America in 1858, 158 kilometres from Munro's hometown, Wingham, and the implicit place of enunciation to which the deictic refers. 8 The prospect of oil drew the entrepreneur to a province then known as 7 The term alludes to the economic exploitation of Ukrainian immigrants, derogatively called "Galicians" in reference to their origins in the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia. 8 ("Village of Oil Spring" n.p.). The fact is little known, as the modern discovery of oil is usually recorded as having taken place a year later, in 1859, in Titusville (Pennsylvania). Both foundational events should be further "Canada West," later to be renamed Ontario, but it was salt extraction that made his fortune.

Although the two mineral deposits make for a colourful contrast, they elicit similar reactions from Poulter who views the land from a utilitarian perspective that rules out its artialisation as landscape. This is quite different with Almeda Roth, the amateur poet with whom he begins a hesitant courtship. The pair embodies the uneasy marriage between two perceptions of the resources of the land and those of language. When they go out for walks, Poulter's dull conversation has contradictory effects on Almeda, either cutting her off from the countryside she cherishes, or stimulating the acuity of her own perception (Munro, 1990: 325). As the entrepreneur drones on about his salt wells, his companion's attention wanders off to the Sermon on the Mount and the praising of "the salt of the earth," her imagination reeling at the idea of the immense inland sea that covered the whole area eons ago (Munro, 1990: 323).

Almeda develops an imaginative vision that goes beyond the ordinariness of her surroundings to infuse the useful with the beautiful. Arguably a similar convergence is less likely to occur with oil. But the inscription of salt in the biblical repertoire facilitates the crosspollination of the geologic and the poetic, an aspect of Munro's writing [START_REF] Dutoit | Boring Gravel: Literary Earth, Alice Munro's Geolithic[END_REF] which is rooted in settler interrogations regarding the adequacy of colonial aesthetic prisms, and the "sliding" that results when the land is viewed through them (New, 1997: 74-75). The quirky, little poems Almeda penned in the manner of the picturesque illustrate this tension between land and language. Their offbeat tonality is a characteristic Sarah Binks wrought to perfection in her own geological epic, Up from the Magma and Back Again. Although Munro's narrator presents her amateur poet in a kinder light than Hiebert does with Sarah Binks, the humiliation that seals Almeda's fate rules out the appeal to pure, unadulterated pathos on the reader's part. The two women's attempts at anchoring poetry in a land defined first and foremost in practical terms of production and value are met with discomfitures that elicit mixed responses from the reader, mirth mingling in varying degrees with sympathy and unease. 9 This unstable combination suggests that the response to the land was far from having solidified into a stable structure of feeling, to use Raymond Williams' phrase, neither in the periods when the stories are set nor at the time of their writing. But assuming that Almeda Roth's small frontier town and Binks's Prairies were respectively awaiting their William Wordsworth or their Wallace Stevens amounts to a colonial fantasy of relativized, bearing in mind that the exploitation of oil started much earlier in Burma, though not on the same industrial scale. 9 Almeda loses her head to laudanum, and becomes the butt of cruel pranks from local youths; Sarah dies of poisoning after swallowing a horse thermometer.

progress that gauges local potential in terms of another country's literary history. Instead, the short story and the parodic biography both hesitate on the place occupied by the gaze that grants consideration to certain aspects of the land or dismisses them as trivial and therefore unworthy. Such is the conversion at stake in Rudy Wiebe's "The Angel of the Tar Sands" (1982).

From the Visible to the Edible Landscape

Wiebe's short story contains an early description of the oil operations that developed in the 1980s around Fort McMurray, an area that has since then become synonymous with the largescale exploitation of unconventional oil (Wilson 2017, et al: 33, 82). The oxymoronic title embraces aspects of the Canadian North that are rarely shown to coincide in a site which is now "the world's largest industrial project" (Takach, 2017: 3), nestled in an environment prized for its pristineness. The story opens on a composite landscape that pastes the dirt and the unsullied together. Dazzling light, expansive vistas, and vibrant, colourful contrasts are signature traits of the Group of Seven whose striking paintings have made an important contribution to the construction of the North as a symbolic counterweight to the urban growth to the South and a compelling source of identification for the Canadian imagination [START_REF] Grace | Canada and the Idea of North[END_REF]O'Brian & White, 2007: 4). 10 The industrial plant is delineated against that treasured backdrop, thanks to a couple of synecdoches that index largely invisible processes of extraction and refining:

Spring had most certainly, finally, come. The morning drive to the plant from Fort McMurray was so dazzling with fresh green against the heavy spruce, the air so unearthly bright that it swallowed the smoke from the candy-striped chimneys as if it did not exist. Which is just lovely, the superintendent thought, cut out all the visible crud, shut up the environmentalists, and he went into his neat office (with the river view with islands) humming, "Alberta blue, Alberta blue, the taste keeps -" but did not get his tan golfing jacket off before he was interrupted. (Wiebe, 1982: 188) Adverbs and modalities foreground the viewer's involvement in what is described. Through the internal monologue, landscape comes across as an active way of seeing, much more than as the reception of an external view (Cresswell, 2007: 135). Narrative focalization also sets

off the limit between what the superintendent perceives and what remains indiscernible,

between what is visually pleasing and what is so unsightly it must be left out. Such discrepancies create irony, as with the parentheses that frame a picturesque river but crop out 10 Along with the wilderness landscapes in which they asserted their distinctive style, the Group of Seven also painted Canada's coal mining areas and industrial sites during the 1920s and 1930s, when the development of new technologies inspired large sections of the Modernist movement. But by the late 1960s and the celebration of the Centennial, this aspect of the Group's output had largely fallen into oblivion. Posterity chose to remember their celebration of the wild because it reflected values that distinguished Canada's "peaceful kingdom" from the rowdy industrial giant south of the 49th Parallel (Pauli, 2003: 20).

the plant and its toxic fumes. The visual arrangement foregrounds the selective process at work -the separating and filtering necessary to "cut out all the visible crud" -not unlike the refining of heavy crude into colourless, odourless chemicals. The parallel therefore enhances the complicity between the extractive and the romantic gaze that has received some critical scrutiny in recent years [START_REF] Hodgins | Taking the Romance Out of Extraction: Contemporary Canadian Artists and the Subversion of the Romantic/Extractive Gaze[END_REF]. But sight is not the only perception on which the description comes to rely for its effect. "The candy-striped chimneys" contains an enigmatic reference to taste that anticipates on the short story's turning point and ending after a mechanical spade excavates an angel encased in the black-oozing sand. Against all realistic expectations, the angel comes to life and utters a couple of incomprehensible sentences before unfolding its wings and flying away under the crew's bemused eyes.

In this Anabaptist parody of the Annunciation, the Hutterite woman operating the excavator realizes that the angel addressed her in Low German, the ancient language of her people. In this respect, "The Angel in the Tar Sands" is quite typical of the minority literature of the 1980s and its questioning of the affective ties through which newcomers find a place in the new land. Such are the implications of the story's ending when the Hutterite tells her Japanese co-worker: "Next time you'll recognize it […] And then it'll talk Japanese" (Wiebe, 1982: 191). In Wiebe's optimistic version of Canadian multiculturalism, belonging finds its expression in the landscape viewed as a potent affective factor, one that creates a common ground where a plurality of origins, religious beliefs and languages may meet. 11 This is the reason why the plant's superintendent, still struggling to understand what happened, is overwhelmed by a vision harking back to a rather different cultural tradition:

[A]ll the surface of the earth was gone, the Tertiary and the Lower Cretaceous layers of strata had been ripped away and the thousands of square miles of black bituminous sand were exposed, laid open, slanting down into the molten centre of the earth, O miserere, miserere, the words sang in his head and he felt their meaning though he could not have explained them, much less remembered Psalm 51, and after a time he could open his eyes and lift his head. The huge plant, he knew every bolt and pipe, still sprawled between him and the river; the brilliant air still swallowed the smoke from all the red-striped chimneys as if it did not exist; and he knew that through a thousand secret openings the oil ran there, gurgling in each precisely numbered pipe and jointure, sweet and clear like golden brown honey. (Wiebe, 1982: 191) As with the previous instances in which geology afforded an approach to the land where the pastoral failed, the mention of oil causes the perspective to shift from horizontal prospect to vertical fathoming. The point of view soars with the angel's flight above the geological map, 11 Meet but not necessarily converse, a point forcefully made by artists from racialized minorities like Koreanborn-Canadian Jin-me Yoon. Yoon's photomontage, A Group of 67 (1996), also draws upon the ambivalence of parody as homage and dissonance. The series confronts the invisibility of Asian-Canadians in the national space by placing the face portraits of sixty-seven Asian people (their number alludes to 1867, the year when the British North America Act established Confederation) in the foreground of two of Emily Carr's iconic landscapes.

taking in eons of time piled up into sedimentary strata. The same towering viewpoint, the point of view of the surveyor and map-maker is also characteristic of Edward Burtynsky's "Oil" series, as if the petroscape could not be apprehended otherwise, except from high above, in an all-encompassing bird's eye view. Burtynsky has thus drawn upon the pictorial legacy of the nineteenth-century sublime and ruin painting in photographs of the Albertan oil patch that explore the blurry zone where consumption meets destruction, and the guilty pleasure both afford. Unsurprisingly, his photographs have been criticised for artistic choices that erase signs of a human or animal presence, and let the beholder experience the thrill of ruination vicariously without any of its brutal consequences on local life (Wilson et al 2017, 225). This is an aspect which Warren Cariou, a Métis writer and artist now living in Manitoba, chose to address in a recent experimental project for which he used bitumen collected from the banks of the Athabasca River to photograph the oil fields. His repurposing of oil -Cariou ironically refers to it as a "re-mediation" (personal website, n.p.) -was inspired by the technique of photoengraving perfected by Nicéphore Niépce's in the years 1819-1824. While experimenting with different types of sensitive plates, Niécpe discovered that surfaces thinly coated in bitumen reacted to the light and would reveal astounding images after the exposed plates were rinsed in lavender oil diluted in white kerosen. 12 Relying on the same technique, Cariou produced a series of "petrographs" in which bitumen fulfils a triple function as material, object and active principle. The golden, mirror-like surface of the petrograph reflects the light, but also the face of whoever is drawn to it. On the shimmering plate, the landscape and the reflection of the viewer's face blend in such a way that it impossible for beholders to deny their involvement in the consumption of the image and the aesthetic pleasure it procures. But because the petrograph was made using bitumen, it also gives off a strong, heady smell. Long-term exposure to these pictures is therefore likely to cause discomfort, such as headaches and nausea. Cariou's petrography thus makes palpable the invisible cost of the enjoyment of oil, not only its impact on distant regions and invisible populations, but on all living organisms, including our closest and most intimate companion, our own body. In this respect, Cariou's artwork is all the more disturbing as it appeals to the senses in a way that causes them to disagree, forbidding any harmonious merging comparable to synaesthesia, one of poetry's highest achievements. The petrograph makes such a sensorial convergence impossible by sending simultaneous, discordant information to the body. The golden, oily surface of the picture looks so smooth the eye could almost touch it. And yet, it gives off such a powerful smell that one can feel, even while briefly looking it, that long exposure to the picture would be toxic. The demonstration rests on the visual instantaneity of the image and the tactile and olfactory impact of the material used to produce it. The indexical and sensorial qualities of the petrograph impress the senses in a way that the temporal development of narrative, perhaps, cannot match. This, however, remains to be seen.

If we go back to the ending of Wiebe's short story, the familiar notes of the geological sublime are not sustained for long, but quickly shade into a reminiscence of the psalmist's plea for divine mercy which, in turn, evokes a deeper-seated memory of transgression and punishment. Although the comparison of oil with "golden brown honey" partly recalls biblical descriptions of the Promised Land, the image owes a lot more to the descriptions of the "edible landscape" found in traditional and modern fairy tales, themselves harking back to the mythical land of Cockaigne. 13 A topos of consumer culture with venerable antecedents, "descriptions [of edible landscapes] were meant partly to assure children that the world was a perfectly good and kind place, with abundant things for everybody" (Leach, 1993: 247). But the abundance of the edible landscape also contains its own threat -the punishment incurred for over-indulging, that is being consumed after having consumed in excess. Such is the peril looming on the horizon of Mark Anthony Jarman's "My White Planet" (2008), a cunning parody of "Little Snow White" that weighs the possibilities of survival in the Arctic after the last drop of petroleum has been burnt. The poetic justice of the fairy tale is invoked to warn against the pleasures of acquisitiveness, greed and gluttony, both in Jarman's and in Wiebe's stories, when the narrative veers away from the conventions of realism on account of its inability to represent the complexities of oil, its complicities and their far-reaching, global effects [START_REF] Omhovère | Snow White and the Polar Bears in the Age of Global Heating: A Reading of Mark Anthony Jarman's 'My White Planet[END_REF].

These complexities and complicities come centre stage in Warren Cariou's "An Athabasca Story" (2012), another cautionary tale, but one that draws upon the Indigenous tradition of the Trickster. On the verge of exhaustion Elder brother is desperately looking for a place to get warm in the Athabascan forest when he picks up a strange burning smell: So he quickened his frail pace and followed the scent, over one hill and then another and yet another. And eventually he came to the top of one more hill and he looked down across an empty valley and saw the source of the smoke. A huge plume billowed from a gigantic house far in the distance, and between himself and the house there was a vast expanse of empty land. Empty of trees, of muskeg, of birds and animals. He had never seen anything like it. The only things moving on that vacant landscape were enormous yellow contraptions that clawed and bored and bit the dark earth and then hauled it away toward the big house. And the smell! It was worse that his most sulphurous farts, the ones he got when he ate moose guts and antlers. (Cariou, 2012: 70) The summit view follows a visual composition now recognized as conventional, from Petrarch's inaugural vision on top of Mount Ventoux to Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1817), a painting that thematises the landscape imperative to "look at the view!" (Mitchell, 2002: vii) through the inclusion of a figure contemplating an endless recession of mountain lines draped in mist. The pleasure of recognition is nevertheless mitigated by defamiliarising periphrases, such as "gigantic house" or "enormous yellow contraptions," for which the reader is required to silently supply equivalents, the refinery and mechanical shovels that are not part of Trickster traditional lore. The trick has several effects. Not only does it stimulate reader-participation, the equivalent in a written piece of call-andresponse patterns in oral performances, but it also entices the implied audience to rescue the Trickster from the Indigenous mythical past, translating what he sees into contemporary terms, and filling the wilderness with elements that belie its assumed pristineness. The same is true of the recurring references to the "empty" valley. The meaning of the qualifier evolves through the description. Initially an attribute of landscape understood in its narrow sense as the "representation of a natural scenery in and for itself," (Mitchell, 2002: 11) it subsequently morphs into an active emptying indexing the activities that have cleared the space now invested by the gaze. Whereas in Wiebe's story refinery smoke was "swallowed" by the bright air (1982: 188), consumption leaves visible, loud and smelly traces in "An Athabasca Story." When Elder brother likens the excavators' exhaust fumes to "his most sulphurous farts," the crude comparison supposes a chemical intimacy between the living body and the machine that calls into question the naturalist duality between subject and object, and further narrows the distance between the spectator and the scene. 14 Elder brother wants to get warm so badly that he comes down to beg the machine operators for their help. Although he cannot grasp why the company men reject him, the Trickster deduces from their threats that burning "magic dirt" will "make so much heat that the winter never comes back" (Cariou, 2012: 72-73). Consumption comes with a vengeance for the blundering Trickster. Elder brother digs into the oily soil with both hands and grabs so much of it that he sinks and disappears into the sand, before one of the excavating buckets scrapes him up: "Soon the thing began to move, and it hauled him across the wasteland, encased there in the tar as if he was a fossil" (Cariou, 2012: 75). Although the storyteller's earlier allusion to global heating is likely to speak to all 14 Carbon represents approximately 18% of the human body weight in which it is the second most abundant element after oxygen ("Carbon is…" n.p.). readers across the board, the fossil (fuel) reference cannot fall lightly on the ear of an Indigenous audience that the nineteenth century "wrapped into the literary shroud of the vanishing Indian" and dismissed as the fossilized remains of a "noble race" unfit to survive the onslaught of modernity. 15 With the advent of the Anthropocene, however, the fossil trope has become a persuasive metaphor to configure the impact of human activities on the earth and the future of humankind, should the man-made, sixth extinction proceed unnoticed and unchecked.

Both "An Athabasca Story" and Cariou's petrography project certainly resist indifference by appealing to the senses in ways that foreground continuities and discordances, stimulating a "sentience" (personal website, n.p.) to the environment from which modernity has allegedly become cut off [START_REF] Zhong Mengual | L'illisibilité du paysage: enquête sur la crise écologique comme crise de la sensibilité[END_REF]. Whereas the indexical image appeals to the beholder's senses in a most tangible way, the short story exploits the full potential of the indirectness and suggestiveness that result from its brevity, the principle undergirding a genre in which "small is plentiful" [START_REF] Tibi | La nouvelle, essai de compréhension d'un genre[END_REF]. It is therefore another paradox that the petroscape, the making visible of a small portion of human beings' interactions with oil, should have made its entry on the Canadian literary scene through the narrow door of the short story and other lesser genres such as the literary parody. In the texts under study, parody recurred as a favourite strategy to explore blind spots in conventional landscape aesthetics, not only the dirt the pastoral could not accommodate, but also what made the artialisation process derail. One will have to wait for the turning point of 2007 -"the year of the Great Melt" (Gillmor 2015, 319) -and the end of the Harper decade to witness the publication of novels -most prominently Will Ferguson's 419 (2012), Fred Stenson's Who by Fire (2014), andDon Gillmor's Long Change (2015) -in which the perspective of the end of oil calls for new arrangements in the visual regime of landscape. Bearing in mind the successive separations through which landscape emerged and evolved, first as a result of the secularisation of the Western gaze during the Renaissance, then as a consequence of the reinvention of nature in reaction to the technological, social and political upheavals of the "age of revolutions" (Rancière, 2020: 97), the slow rise of the petroscape would tend to confirm that landscape thrives in cultures of loss and melancholy (Wylie, 2007: 34, LeMenager 2011). With oil, however, loss is a double-edged question that obliges one to consider the consequences of the end of fossil fuels, but also what imperceptible losses their 15 I am indebted for this remark to Moritz Ingwersen. massive extraction and consumption brought about over time. These are questions for which writers and artists still have answers to proffer.

Works cited

"Carbon Is…" Centre for Ecoliteracy, https://www.ecoliteracy.org/article/carbon (accessed 27 October 2020).

  : 24) His analogy with the estate novel leaves little doubt as to what literary model Ghosh has in mind when distinguishing what can be conceived from what can be imagined. Whereas the conceivable can be accommodated within the scope of the realist novel, manifestations bordering on the irrational have been relegated to sub-genres the novel eclipsed as it rose to the firmament of the national literatures of the nineteenth century. The fragmentation, selection and distancing necessary to the composition of the realist novel has its analogue, Ghosh proposes, in the mental operations through which European cartographers, surveyors and architects set about to map and actively transform the territories colonized by imperial powers. His argument builds on Panofksy and Cosgrove who both showed that the optical inventions of the Renaissance made it possible to observe the world from afar and develop elaborate techniques of abstraction that evolved into symbolic forms.

Economist Harold Innis coined the phrase "staples trap" to qualify the dependency the exploitation of staple resources induced in colonial economies(Barney in Wilson et al, 2017: 90).

Brecht was reacting to a particularly unfortunate adaptation to the stage of an oil strike in Albania(Mathur, 2019: 48).

The underground pipeline, in particular, has played a decisive role guaranteeing a seemingly clean, safe, smooth transportation of hydrocarbons that leaves no visible trace on the regions it runs through(Simpson in Wilson et al, 2017: 287-318).

Serres, especially, critiqued the epistemological limits of analysis, the breaking of a greater whole into its components, from the Greek verb ἀναλύειν, to unloose, or undo (OED). His essays demonstrate that the logic of segmentation and exclusion based on the principle of tertium non datur is of little help when studying such objects as time and information. Their fluid, composite, heterogeneous properties require approaches that conceive of opposites as partially porous alterities, thereby taking the impure into the equation.

See "Niépce and the Invention of Photography" (n.p.).

As pictured, for instance, in Pieter Brueghel the Elder's Land of Cockaigne (1567).


"Guests, Hosts and Parasites: Deviant Hospitality in Katherena Vermette's The Break" In Vermette's novel, "the Break" designates a strip of land on which a high-voltage transmission line carries electricity from the generating stations south of the Canadian province of Manitoba into the north. 1 The line cuts through the North End of Winnipeg, the provincial capital city on Treaty One territory, and the setting of the eponymous novel. The Break is also the site where Emily Traverse, a thirteen-year-old Métis girl, is raped on a winter's night, within earshot of the neighbouring houses. The novel's choral composition brings together alternating viewpoints to throw light on the assault's circumstances, a combination of events that causes the line between victim and perpetrator to slowly blur. The crime is initially envisaged from the perspective of the Indigenous community, but the characters' lives are also replaced in the wider context of the colonial history that has shaken the foundations of home and homeland for Canada's First Nations. When seasonal visitors and partners in trade came to be replaced by settlers and the newcomers turned into permanent residents, the relation between hospitality and hostility evolved in response to the colonial dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that welcomed some population groups to stay while rejecting others regarded as threats to the national project (Coleman 2006: 21-24).

The Break begins with a spatial description that goes beyond the requirements of the standard exposition scene, namely the presentation of a setting in preparation for the plot that will quickly eclipse it. A familiar example is the anthropomorphic brook in the incipit of L.M.

Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables. The stream is endowed with attributes that blend the geographical with the human and announce the changes awaiting the young orphan girl about to receive hospitality from Avonlea:

Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies' eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde's Hollow, it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream. (2004: 53) If the Break also operates as a trope, its meaning is far from being as transparent as Montgomery's allegorical brook. Indeed, the toponym alludes to various forms of interruptions in the occupation of space, but also in the transmission of stories between 1 Manitoba's extensive lakes and rivers system is the reason why hydroelectricity took an early start in the province. Bateman's overview of the history of Manitoba Hydro includes a map of the provincial electric facilities and a photograph of the 230 kV north-central transmission line from Kelsey Generating Station which occupies a central part in the novel.

successive generations of residents. The metaphor thus condenses ruptures in the collective history of Manitobans with cycles of shattering, intergenerational violence and breakdowns in communication. This last aspect comes through in the elaborate description of the crackling sound that fills the air when snow starts falling on the neighbourhood:

In the winter, the Break is just a lake of wind and white, a field of cold and biting snow that blows up with the slightest gust. And when snow touches those raw Hydro wires they make this intrusive buzzing sound. It's constant and just quiet enough that you can ignore it, like a whisper you know is a voice but you can't hear the words. And even though they are more than three storeys high, when it snows, those wires feel close, low, and buzz a sound that is almost like music, just not as smooth. You can ignore it. It's just white noise, and some people can ignore things like that. Some people hear it but just get used to it. (Vermette 5,emphasis added) "White noise" blends sight with sound into the monochrome of a snowy landscape, enhancing the blunting of perception that permeates the novel's prologue.2 "White noise" is another phrase for static, i.e. the energy that dissipates along the way before electrical power reaches its destination. Similes compare the buzzing sound to unintelligible voice or music, the material medium (phone) that remains heterogeneous to the signification (logos) it supports (Dolar 2006: 15, 105). When electricity or information travels along transmission lines, static sends the disturbing signal that the energy lost in the process does not simply vanish. It leaves behind a remainder, the noisy evidence that communication is never immediate because it is unavoidably bound up with interception (Serres 1982: 44). White noise thus obscures the clarity of the message, the transmission of which it paradoxically accompanies and impedes. This unnerving duality lies at the core of Michel Serres's theory of the parasite, the organism that feeds on another without giving anything but words in return, which Serres takes up as a paradigm to analyse patterns of interference in the communication between strangers who occupy the same space without sharing it. Serres's insights will help throw light on the workings of hospitality in The Break, a novel in which the hospitable relation deviates into parasitism and hostility: "There are some black spots in language," Serres reminds us. "The field of the host is one such dark puddle. In the logic of exchange, or really instead of it, it manages to hide who the receiver is and who the sender is, which one wants war and which one wants peace and offers asylum" (Serres 1982: 16). The Break is indeed a most troubled and troubling text, a landmark novel for those who wish to understand what circumstances may cause parasites to turn into predators.

Models of Hospitality

The model of hospitality Serres analyses in The Parasite differs from Derrida's concern with hospitality as a law. Derrida starts from the reciprocity that defines xenia by conferring a status on the xenos, the foreigner or stranger who stands in opposition to the barbarian whose humanity is denied in classical Greece. This very distinction keeps the barbarian outside the city of Athens whereas the xenos will be allowed in upon certain conditions (Derrida & Dufourmantelle 2000: 23-24). To the limitations and contradictions of the "ethics of hospitality," Derrida opposes an unconditional "right to hospitality" that leaves no outlaw outside the gates of humanity (Derrida & Dufourmantelle 2000: 65). Serres does not begin with ethics but with biology, namely the relations of dependency that emerge with the development of life and evolve into the formation of collective bodies. In Serres's epistemology, the parasite embodies the logical conundrum of the excluded third that needs, by force, to be included for any system to operate in a satisfactory manner. For Derrida, on the contrary, the parasite must be removed from the equation: "Not all new arrivals are received as guests if they don't have the benefit of the right to hospitality or the right of asylum, etc. Without this right, a new arrival can only be introduced 'in my home,' in the host's 'at home,' as a parasite, a guest who is wrong, illegitimate, clandestine, liable to expulsion or arrest" (Derrida & Dufourmantelle 2000: 59-61). Serres's theory of hospitality diverges insofar as it takes dependency upon the milieu (or the medium) into account, whether dealing with biology, society or information (Serres 1982: 365). In all three domains, the parasite feeds on excesses that the social contract and laws of exchange have sought to streamline in the course of human history to avoid the equally damaging effects of scarcity and wasteful proliferation, surplus production and indebtedness. Relying on myth and fable, but also on the laws of thermodynamics and evolution, Serres shows that the parasite is a paradoxical index of health and hospitality. Because they are primarily drawn to robust organisms (first level: biology), parasites jostle to eat at the table of the most lavish hosts (second level: the collective as a complex of relations), and buzz along busy lines of transmission (third level: information). On all three levels, parasitic interference is a disturbing yet safe indication that systems work only insofar as they do not quite work. Serres is particularly mindful of the parasitic relation that develops when a gift does not receive an exact compensation, which causes the exchange to bifurcate into another relation, the deviation identified in the epigraph for this essay (Serres 1982: 33). Such is the case when the paradigmatic parasite converts the food it consumes at the host's table into stories, jokes and entertaining verbal jousts. In the conversion of the material into the logicial [sic], Serres reads a general theory of the evolution of modern human societies. 3By contrast, closed circuits, implacably rational and cost-effective systems tend to create suffocating, lethal environments. Because they are devised to avoid waste, whether in terms of material, energetic or information loss, they produce environments where parasites are forced to turn into predators in an attempt to survive (1982: 167-168). Owing to the entropic degradations that proliferate along with them, parasites are reminders that all relations are dependent upon the milieu that keeps them alive and thriving. In Serres's view, relations never operate in perfect autonomy, but suppose various levels of mediation, attachments and dependencies between their constitutive elements, whether the latter are simple biological life forms, or more complex economic, social and political bodies. A brief overview of the relations of dependency that gave birth to the Métis nation4 will illustrate this idea.

Who are the Métis? 5 The term is used today to refer to a specific population group born in the Canadian hinterland out of the diplomatic and domestic relations Europeans established with the First Nations in the early days of the fur trade. Strictly speaking the ethnonym designates the descendants of French coureurs de bois and voyageurs who contracted marriages à la mode du pays with Anishinaabe women in the Western interior, particularly around the Red River settlement, the cradle of the Métis nation. Such alliances were made possible by the elaborate rituals of hospitality, including sexual hospitality, found in North America's traditional Indigenous societies (Havard 2016: 447-457). Their frequency also suggests that much was to be gained from the bonds that were formally established between the two parties. Indigenous women played a pivotal role as guides, interpreters and diplomacy agents for their European husbands. As for the latter, surviving a winter in the interior would have been near impossible without the strategic support of Indigenous wives and their relatives in regions remote from the company headquarters in the East (Friesen 1987: 68;Van Kirk 2018: 55-56).

In 1821, the Hudson's Bay Company absorbed its major competitors, the Nor'Westers, after years of fierce rivalry to control the Canadian fur trade. Now at the head of an immense network of commercial routes and trading posts, Governor George Simpson repudiated his Indigenous wives to marry his English cousin, Frances (Warkentin 1995: xviixviii). After HBC employees followed suit and sent for white wives from the home country, mixed marriages became frowned upon. Interethnic tension increased over the following decades, when HBC land was transferred into the hands of the new Dominion. Although the Métis people of Red River were part of the deal, they were not involved in the negotiations between the HBC and the federal government. Led by Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont, the Métis refused to be incorporated as second-class citizens into the newly formed Confederation, and subsequently rebelled against the federal government on two major occasions. By 1885, however, the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway made it possible to rush troops by train to Manitoba. The Northwest rebellion was crushed. Its Métis and Indigenous leaders 6 were either executed or sentenced to life-imprisonment (Thompson 1998: 57-9).

Over the next hundred years, people of mixed European and Indigenous ancestry were the victims of systemic racism, the result of prolonged efforts to extinguish native entitlement to land as well as rights secured through treaty diplomacy by forcing aboriginal people to assimilate into the Canadian population (King 2012: 73-74). Today the days of racial discrimination are far from over, and demographic indicators still point at the long-term effects of poverty, acculturation and disenfranchisement, but the pressure to "pass" has relented, and individuals have become less reluctant to acknowledge their Métis ancestry. The trend has received a fresh impetus in recent years after major court decisions reasserted treaty benefits and Indigenous land rights, which caused a surge of interest in Métis history with increasing numbers of people self-identifying as Métis in census counts. 7 In some western provinces, the proportion of aboriginal people has soared, making them a sizeable part of the electorate whose interests can no longer be disregarded or minimized. The results of the 2020 6 Louis Riel was executed in Regina on 16 November 1885. "The hangman who exulted that 'the son-of-a-bitch is gone at last' could not have guessed that Riel would live on in the ethnic conflict between French-Catholic Quebec and English-Protestant Ontario, or that he would be resurrected a century later, by the descendants of the white regionalists who hanged him, to serve as a symbol of Ottawa's oppression of the Prairie West" (Thompson 1998: 59) 7 This has prompted the recent phenomenon of "race shifting" [START_REF] Leroux | Distorted Descent: White Claims to Indigenous Identity[END_REF]. I am indebted to Alison Calder for this reference and her valuable insights on the same topic. census are expected to confirm the extent of these demographic changes along with their impact on public policies and mainstream culture. In 2017 the controversial celebration of "Canada 150" -the anniversary of the birth of the Canadian Confederation in 1867 -fostered a wealth of publications by Indigenous writers across the country in the many fields of fiction, life writing, history and political sciences. Published the previous year, Vermette's novel has certainly contributed to drawing international attention to the flourishing of Indigenous literatures that is currently taking place all over Canada.

One of the functions of the novel's three-page prologue is to introduce the historical and geographical coordinates that anchor the novel in place, in its threefold dimension as location, locale and reserve for signification (Agnew cited in Cresswell 2011:132):

The Break is a piece of land just west of McPhillips Street. A narrow field about four lots wide that interrupts all the closely knit houses on either side and cuts through every avenue from Selkirk to Leila, that whole edge of the North End. Some people call it nothing and very likely don't think about it at all. I never called it anything, just knew it was there. But when she moved next door, my Stella, she named it the Break, if only in her head. (Vermette 3) Although the name of "the affluent city south" is never uttered, toponyms and directions delineate a referential space that is allusive yet precise. On the threshold of the novel, the incipit does not welcome all readers in the same way. Hospitality has its own subtle rules.

Outsiders are greeted in with polite distance, whereas those with an insider's knowledge are invited to let themselves in through the repeated use of the definite article: "the North End," as in the citation above, followed by "the west side of the Red River," "the lake into the north" in following paragraphs . The deictic repeatedly points to a shared sense of place that encourages recognition from those who know their way around, while leaving newcomers with a slight sense of disorientation.

Inside v. outside. The pull between those two extremes also adumbrates the predicaments faced by the main characters: wanting in or out? Begging to be let in, but remaining locked out. Sneaking in, breaking into, being broken into. Getting locked up, or knocked up, or both. Breaking down. One terse particle stresses in these phrasal verbs the vulnerability of bodies and places to intrusions, external threats to the physical integrity of people and their homes. Before moving into the complexities of plot and character, as novels will, the prologue therefore imposes a pause to envision the place we are about to enter, and everything it comprises. Some of its components are only too visible, whereas less obtrusive elements call for closer attention:

It's Hydro land, was likely set aside in the days before anything was out there. When all that low land on the west side of the Red River was only tall grasses and rabbits […]. Someone once told me that North End houses were all made cheap and big, but the lots were narrow and short. That was when you had to own a certain amount of land to vote, and all those lots were made just inches smaller. (Vermette 3) The narrator scrutinizes the landscape for traces of the past that index the power relations embedded in the geography, their impact on land use, urban development, the entrenched poverty and disenfranchisement of the populations that have successively moved to this part of the city. The neighbourhood first housed the cheap labour force Manitoba recruited in Northern and Eastern Europe to boost the development of the young province. A century later, Indigenous people came to replace the European immigrants, when the former started to flock to Canadian cities, as a result of the suppression of the permit system (Vermette 4). The narrator's pervasive use of the passive voice makes the mentioning of decision-makers superfluous, which, again, puts those familiar with Métis history at a certain advantage. A detail such as those "narrow and short lots" is therefore more likely to resonate with the readers who will catch the allusion to Métis collective land use and the imprint strip farming has left on the landscape of the Red River Valley.

The same holds for the description of the high-voltage line whose metal towers are compared to an army of robots surveying (and surveilling) the unruly land: "They each have a square-like head and go out a bit at the bottom like someone standing at attention […]. They are a frozen army, standing guard, seeing everything" (Vermette 4, see also 68,85,143).

From one sentence to the next, what began as a comparison gradually swerves into a metaphor. Factual information bifurcates towards the figurative in asides, interpolations that angle away from the descriptive baseline, following the derivative logic of the parasite. The prologue is therefore informative, but only to a certain degree, as its content is also parasited with static, noise that hinders the clarity of the message, and makes it deviate towards what one may provisionally call a parabola. 8 Literary theorists have shown that this is precisely what makes literature a singular enterprise, namely its ability to veer [START_REF] Royle | A Theory of Literature[END_REF], take off at a tangent, and invite us to see through a glass darkly:

It was snowing when it happened. The sky was pink and swollen and the snow had finally started to fall. Even from inside her house, my Stella heard the buzzing, as sure as her own breath. She knows to expect it when the sky fills with clouds, but like everything she's been through, she has just learned to live with it. (Vermette 5) 8 The value of the "along side" embedded in the word parasite are also attached to the cognates of parabola in English: "the parole, [is] the word of honour which one gives in exchange for one's freedom, hence the judicial sense of being 'on parole', is a modification of Latin parabola. The parlour where one eats is the parlour, or parliament where one also, in parallel, speaks or palavers. The parable is a parabola, because it is a juxtaposition or throwing together, a process by which something curves or boomerangs back to itself" (Connor 2015: 9). Connor's essays on the prefix para-and the hard-soft (or material-logicial) continuum are fine introductions to Serres' epistemology.

What does learning "to live with it" exactly imply? The vagueness of the indefinite pronoun is made ominous by the hypallages that inexplicably transfer the attributes of a wound to the sky in addition to the insistent reference to white noise. Static signals disturbances in transmission -the opacity in the message, but also the error in the system, the glitch, the unexpected knock at the door, the unreciprocating guest, the enemy within. Such are the different types of parasitic interference Michel Serres explores when analysing "the relation of the aside, beside, or along side" [START_REF] Connor | Parables of the Para[END_REF]: 1) embedded in the word "parasite" originally meaning "to eat next to" (from the Greek para-, "next to," "aside," and sitos "corn," and therefore "food"), but also designating "static," the degradation of sound into noise that occurs when a message travels along channels of communication. The next section takes its cue from Serres's insights to throw light on the factors that impact hospitality in Vermette's novel and cause the relation to fail and deviate towards hostility.

The Enemy Within

The Break flirts with the whodunit. The first chapter begins at the crack of dawn, with two police officers recording Stella McGregor's statement after a fight outside her house drew her to the door during the night. The witness's testimony meets with contrasting responses. The most sympathetic officer is also the least experienced in the team: Tommy Scott is a young Métis who has just joined the force and feels personally committed to solving a case involving women that remind him achingly of his own mother. His senior partner, Officer Christie, stands as the very embodiment of the prejudice, distrust, and neglect undergirding the systemic racism that has been blocking the investigation of numerous crimes perpetrated against Indigenous women and girls all over Canada in recent years. 9 Throwing light on the circumstances that led to the rape therefore involves much more than the identification of a culprit or, for the reader, the consumption of another police procedural. The investigation edges on slowly, with Tommy Scott pushing back against Christie's eagerness to shut down a case he dismisses as another nasty consequence of native unruliness. Piecing together fragmented, contradictory evidence nevertheless takes time, for it requires listening to what the characters have to say, but also to what they choose to omit: 9 The Canadian government launched a national inquiry on December 2015 which led to the publication of The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) on June 30, 2019. It can be consulted, along with the transcripts of the fifteen community hearings, on the website of the national inquiry. In 2016 Vermette and MacPherson directed a 19-minute documentary film, This River, which pays homage to the volunteer group "Drag the Red" and their ongoing search for the bodies of the missing.

"No physical evidence from the victim" Tommy thinks of that list again. Bruises on the wrists and ankles suggested several persons held her down, possibly. Bruised left side of her face where she was probably punched. The other victim too, was punched in the face even worse. That was by girls though. Zegwan said that -she said it was girls. Emily didn't say it was anyone. Just four gangbangers. With long hair. (Vermette 228) The segueing of this end-of-chapter description to "Phoenix," the title of the next chapter, sends an unobtrusive signal to the reader two thirds of the way through the novel. The sequence suggests that the older girl may have exacted her revenge on Emily Traverse after Phoenix's ex-boyfriend took an interest in the thirteen-year-old. The hypothesis that Emily's rapist may have been another girl is thus silently held out to the reader who will nevertheless have to wait for another seventy pages to see it confirmed . By giving the reader a slight advantage on the team of investigators, Vermette is encouraging the former to be critical of the assumptions that make a suspect an ideal culprit in the eyes of the police on account of their gender or race. The two-thirds-down-the-way revelation is admittedly a classic of creative writing courses. But the partial disclosure has little to do with the formulaic twist that restores tension to a sagging narrative arc. Here, the suggestion is so troubling as to have the opposite effect. It could even be argued that it delays the unfolding of the plot by adding to the confusion of the evidence. The obfuscation finds its analogue in the static that muffles the voices coming from the officers' radio, a recurring indication of the degradation of sound into noise, the resistance a message meets even as it is conveyed (Vermette 8,127,225). In the novel's fourth part the narrative pace therefore slows down as the story delves into Phoenix's past and decades of neighbourhood relations. The implausible yet possible perpetrator gradually takes centre stage, eclipsing the figure of the silent victim, at least for a while.

Phoenix Anne Stranger. The three-part name balances two trochees with opposite connotations. The effect is one of unresolved tension as intimations of rebirth and exclusion flank an evocation of L.M. Montgomery's orphan girl -another Anne with an "e" whose way with words won her shelter and a better life. Phoenix, on the contrary, lacks the eloquence that earns the parasite a seat at the feast. Uninvited and unwelcomed, she remains a stranger whose ostracizing is narrated from successive points of view. The teenager is the main focalizer in chapters 3, 14, 21, and 27, one in each of the novel's four sections. Her physical stature looms increasing large at the same time as evidence of the many forms of rejection she has experienced accumulates. A geography of exclusion emerges when one retraces Phoenix's itinerary, from the "safe house" hotel where she was removed while in the custody of Manitoba Child and Family Services, to a stay in detention, followed by another in the psychiatric centre she escapes from on the night of the assault, and finally the Remand centre where she is awaiting trial after arrest (Paris 2019, 74-75). Each successive, institutional answer to Phoenix's situation stands in stark contrast to the vocabulary of hospitality used when social services step in to substitute for deficient parental care.10 A cycle of frustrated love and despair gradually superimposes itself on the bare facts the police investigation lines up. In the cast of characters, Phoenix occupies a pivotal position as victim and abuser in two causal chains -a long-term cycle of violence that has spared none of the characters and the short-term sequence of events that culminates with the assault on Emily. Standing at the intersection where the story's collective dimension impacts an individual life makes Phoenix a wild card in a story where she cumulates opposite roles as hospitable and hostile, friend and foe, victim and perpetrator.

Phoenix's ambivalence receives a striking expression when an ultrasound reveals that she is seven months pregnant. Even before a nurse finds out about her predicament, Phoenix's body is the focus of recurrent descriptions whenever she is shown avoiding looking at her own reflection, when she removes clothes that have become too tight, or puts on an extra layer to fight off the cold. When he first sets eyes on her, Officer Scott registers the presence of a "chubby" young girl where Phoenix cringes at the sight of "her gross, fat body": "she was just a fat freak" (Vermette 225;32;150 respectively). Such perceptions serve as a reminder of the destructiveness that goes hand-in-hand with a damaged self-esteem. But there is more than a psychological feature in the sustained attention paid to the heaviness the girl tries to hide, until the ultrasound detects another heartbeat in her protruding belly (Vermette 322). The revelation gives a twist to the dynamics of exclusion she has been caught in. Homeless Phoenix has become the host to another guest.

For Michel Serres, the dependency of the foetus on its mother's womb illustrates the imbalance of the parasitic relation in which the guest feeds on the host without offering an exact compensation. The exchanges that subsequently develop between mother and infant stimulate the forming of bonds that are never a given, or a strictly biological process. In this sense, the mutual attachment between mother and child highlights a trait fundamental to parasitic relations, namely the conversion of matter into voice when signs are returned for food and attention. It is therefore no wonder that Serres should regard the maternal body as the figure of hospitality par excellence, one whose gifts do not require a counter-gift to foster a new life. Serres further argues that the parasite always "invents anew" because its intrusion alters the equilibrium of the organism in which it nestles: "Since he does not eat like everyone else, he builds a new logic. He crosses the exchange, makes it into a diagonal" (Serres 1982: 35). The parasitic relation therefore triangulates the opposition between the host and the guest, turning it into a fruitful relationship that benefits an included third, the initial exchange deviating towards something entirely new and unpredictable.

Inventing Anew

Phoenix's unborn child occupies the position of a parasite in the dynamic, productive sense Serres detects in the word. Not only does its conception alter the teenager's relationship to her own body, but the birth will be held in her favour when she is tried as a sexual offender.

At least this is what her lawyer wants her to believe (Vermette 319). The pregnancy is therefore full of ambivalent potential. Although it is likely to trigger a new cycle of child neglect and abuse, it could also encourage Phoenix to amend herself and make a fresh start.

Vermette's treatment of the scene when Phoenix's mother visits her daughter in prison balances the two options. While her mother warns that the baby will be taken into foster care, just like Phoenix and her sisters once were, the girl barely listens to the admonition, engrossed as she is in dreams of an idyllic future: They'd go to the store, and she'd put the milk in the bottom part under the stroller seat. She would have to pull the stroller up all the stairs to their apartment, but Phoenix didn't mind doing all that stuff. She liked it, really. It made her feel important. Needed. The fantasy of the good, nurturing mother basking in the approval of the neighbouring houses stands in stark contrast against the previous occasions when Phoenix is denied an invitation and has to sneak into her uncle's house to find shelter (Vermette 24,238). When the police come to arrest her, they corner her in her uncle's bathroom where the nailed-shut window makes it impossible for her to wiggle out and run. The scene therefore suggests a disturbing parallel between personal hygiene and the policing that maintains the wholesome integrity of the collective body. Phoenix, however, cannot be modestly hidden from view then evacuated as part of the "social scum" 11 modern societies reject on their fringes. She stubbornly returns where she belongs, even if her proper place within the community remains moot. 12 11 "Social scum" is one of the English translations for the term Lumpenproletariat introduced in Chapter 1 of The Manifesto of the Communist Party. Engels derived the word Proletariat from the Latin proleps (what comes after, and by extension one's offspring) to designate those "who having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live." In this narrow sense, the qualifier applies to Phoenix who owns nothing, except a handful of black and white photographs of her closest kin. 12 For Serres, cleanliness, with its rituals of exclusion and purification, is not the primary way of achieving the "proper" quality that translates into private property. For animals and human beings alike, territory frequently Phoenix is shown twice participating in rituals that interrogate the way she fits in. The first scene takes place in the early morning, when the party is winding down. Phoenix is passed on the stub of a joint with a burning filter glowing "[l]ike a tiny city at night, houses lit up through a thousand windows, a neighbourhood sitting on the side of a steep, black hill.

Phoenix wonders what this would be like, houses on a hill. She's never seen them except on TV or in the movies, but she thinks it would sort of look like that" (Vermette 141, emphasis added). In the horizontal geography of the Prairies, social relations spread across space in a manner that contrasts with the stereotype of the cosy neighbourhood disseminated by the film industry. The image Phoenix associates with stability suggests that her experience of constant drifting has made it impossible for her to feel safe in her own environment. Her thoughts follow a similar train while she is awaiting trial in the Remand Centre:

They taught her about medicines and what they do and how to burn them for ceremony. The smoke is supposed to cleanse you, they said; when she first broke up the sage it reminded her of breaking up weed. She felt embarrassed. She thought the Elder would know what she was thinking about and ban her from doing it or something. But he didn't. […] She smudged a lot in the months she was there.

She never felt cleansed though. (Vermette 151) As the profane ritual contaminates the sacred, it dissolves the protective, purifying effects of the smudge. Whether after a night of partying or during a spiritual ceremony the character feels the same urge and impossibility to find a place among her people.

But starved-off Phoenix will not give up. The girl stubbornly comes back, although the likeliness of her being let in diminishes with each new attempt, either as a guest respectful of hospitable usage, or as a parasite abusing the kindness of her host. Not only does her uncle, Phoenix's transgressive model and last resort, throw her out, but even when the girl insinuates herself back into his house, the place barely contains the slightest scrap of food or attention she may divert for herself. Commenting on La Fontaine's fable "The Monkey and the Cat,"

Michel Serres writes:

The cat lets the mice go if there is cheese left for him. He becomes a predator only if he can no longer parasite someone. Everyone knows that: in order for a cat to be a rat-catcher, he must be starved.

Preying and hunting need more energy and finesse than sponging. Thus the latter is more probable. (Serres 1982: 165) Phoenix becomes a predator after hospitality has failed her in different guises. Flashbacks and narrative delay give the reader time to ponder this realization, which does not make her crime less ugly, but certainly more complex. As readers, however, we are not placed in a vicarious position to judge, since Phoenix's trial is left outside the limits of the narrative. Although its plot moves ahead with tragic implacability, The Break does not resort to the scapegoating and depends on a strategic use of bodily emissions -visual, olfactory and noise pollution that cause disgust and force outsiders to take their distance and renounce appropriation (Serres 1982: 142).

rituals of purgation that traditionally restore balance after exclusion has cleared the way for reconciliation and the emergence of a new order. Instead of a formulaic unfolding, the novel opts for a course of action that enhances the characters' ability "to live with it," the indefinite pronoun having proved remarkably inclusive since the phrase was first introduced in the prologue. By the end of the novel, the scope of living with "it" has indeed widened to express a form of resolve that should not be confused with an expression of resignation. This distinction will be the object of the essay's concluding section.

Living with It

The Break could have ended with the ceremonial sweat friends organise for the Traverses in the bush . But it does not, or not quite. The women leave their male relatives tending to the family traplines on the novel's last page, while their small group drives back to the city and its challenges. The ending thus fans out into various prospects including traditional care for the land as well as resolutions for the future, before culminating on an ambiguous expression of gratitude that contains an equal measure of acquiescence and reservation: "These are the moments she loves the most, the ones that feel good all the way, no matter what" (Vermette 350,emphasis added). Although the blow dealt by an insider did not shatter the group's cohesion, the struggle against disintegration has come with a cost, the repercussions of Emily's rape on the community. This internal damage remains perceptible after the conflicts and suspense that drive the plot have been resolved, suggesting that no narrative closure may assuage a wounding that revives the violence experienced over the past.

Emily's rape initially causes the family women to hold their male partners, even the gentlest ones, in a suspicion rooted in the abuse they faced in their youth .

The crime thus brings back the memory of individual losses, and of the addictions some developed to numb the pain while others opted for distance and married outside the community to try and survive grief. Stella went through all of the above, after her own mother died in violent, unexplained circumstances. 13 On the morning following her call to the police, her first reaction is to remind herself that what transpired during the night is none of her concern, urged as she is by her husband's words:

"I mean it's not like anything happened to us or anything."

13 I made the strategic choice not to discuss the ghostly presence of Stella's mother in the narrative, an aspect that should be connected with the Métis oral tradition as well as replaced in the wider context of the postcolonial gothic. I would nevertheless like to include the following remark from one of the vetting reports, and thank the perceptive reviewer for noting that "the mysterious narrative voice of the prologues to each part, who might be the protective ghost of Stella's mother […] has a strong link with the themes both of the break and the parasite."

Stella tries to remind herself of this too. Nothing actually happened to her. She wasn't hurt, her family wasn't hurt, not at all. […] Her head is clear. There is no droning, no white noise between her ears. It's going to be a clear day. That means it will be cold. (Vermette 160,emphasis added) The mounting denials betray the character's efforts to affect detachment in order to keep her life on a separate course, and avoid the contagion of violence. This instant of cold clarity and absolute silence is quite unique in the novel. The seeming lull has paralysing effects that dissipate once Stella leaves the conjugal home to seek the hospitality of her grandmother's bustling house, to grieve and mend in the old woman's soothing presence (Vermette 273).

Stella's story initially gives the impression of being a subsidiary thread running aside the plotline that connects Emily to Phoenix. The chapters' successive viewpoints nevertheless reveal that Phoenix's mother was a close friend of Stella's. The two women shared parts of their childhood and adolescence with its load of brutal ordeals, but there is no causal link between the events that befell them. Their respective stories do not intersect or overlap, but remain close enough as to produce the kind of parasitic interference thematised as static in the novel. Phoenix was conceived during a party when her mother initiated sexual contact with several men: "Stella never did find out […] why any of it had happened at all. There were big, blank spaces where all the answers should be" (Vermette 205). Stella's own mother died in circumstances that remain just as inexplicable until Stella painstakingly orders her mother's last whereabouts into a temporal sequence: "The bar. The hospital. The street. The back lane.

It wasn't a night out anymore. It was a timeline. Her mom wasn't a person anymore. She was a story.

[…] Her mom was dead and it was all her own fault" (Vermette 272). Storying affords a grasp on events when their circumstances can be arranged into a rational development, an unfolding of causes into consequences that produces coherence and clarity.

But the logic that emerges in the present case brings no understanding or relief, as it rests on a syntax that attributes to the victim the role of primary agent in her own destruction. The death of Stella's mother and Phoenix's conception do not correlate or comment on each other, but their individual stories do strike a parallel: they redouble the evidence that guilt, when it bleeds into the next generation, leaves corrosive traces on those who, indeed, have no choice but to live with it. It is therefore no wonder that Emily's ordeal should find a resonance in Stella: "All those big and small half-stories that make up a life. A pattern, she thinks of the word -like something that makes something else. Pattern. […] One by one the scenes echo in her head, almost every day" (Vermette 84, original emphasis; see also 85). When it designates a model used to duplicate or imitate, the word "pattern" adequately describes the sterile repetitiveness that crushes the victims of intergenerational trauma. Relevant as this meaning may be to the novel, Stella underlines that the same word also has a generative signification when multiple iterations of the same produce a distinct motif -the transformation of the same into "something else." Here lies the creative dimension to which The Break bears evidence.

Not all attempts at transforming patterns of violence are met with success in the novel.

A case in point is the itinerary of Sun Dancer struggling to conciliate the demand to be good with the imperative to be loyal. In response to these conflicting pressures, the character's position evolves from abiding son and loving brother to that of a revenge-seeker and potential gang member. Other examples nevertheless indicate that patterns of mimetic violence can be defused. Cheryl, the painter, "revive[s] an old series of paintings" in which her sister and daughters are portrayed as shape-shifters, "small, beautiful wolves, each looking just like their mother but in a different way" (Vermette 47). In the series, the iteration of the same never amounts to an exact duplication, but leads to infinitesimal differences, the variations that come together into an oeuvre and define its unique style. The Wolf Women series (Vermette 48,118,254,262,345) therefore offers a visual expression of the logic of the aside that informs the novel's composition. It also finds a poetic analogue in the significations the word "break" aggregates through successive iterations. The verb is used to diagnose collective damage ("They're already so broken, could they even break any more?" Vermette 344), but it also recurs, the same and different, when referring to the high-voltage line which is also a pathway, a breakthrough -in other words a traverse. The family name "Traverse" has its origin in Métis land occupation, as in the toponym "La Traverse à Gabriel (Gabriel's Crossing), named after Métis leader Gabriel Dumont who used to operate [a] ferry service" (St-Onge 2012: 158). But the word also fuses the notions of spatial displacement and psychological resilience with respect to what the characters are forced to go through before they can move on. In this sense, "traverse" comes very close to the idea of a "breakthrough" combining the dual and opposite ideas of an obstacle which is also a passageway.

The pattern of the break as a breakthrough goes through further iterations in the parallel dreams that visit Stella and her grandmother on the night when the elder peacefully dies. Their descriptions reorient the metonymic associations that initially tied the gash in the land to Emily's wound and Métis collective history. Stella's dream revisits a space which now contains an exit out of the solitary grieving that once entrapped her: "In the dream, the Break is land like any other land, just a place covered with snow.

[…] Stella walks on and knows she can take this path all the way north. She can go until she reaches the end of the city where she will see the sky and snow stretch out full and empty" (Vermette 273, emphasis added).

The oxymoron is suggestive of a tension between opposite poles that turns the Break into an opening instead of an interruption, an interval alive with currents of energy. The grandmother's death-vision confirms this change in perspective when it soars into a bird's eye view of the city and the high-voltage transmission line:

I am flying again. I am high above the pointy housetops and scratchy trees and somewhere in the stars. I go higher and see the streets lined up in squares below me. Square after square, the city like a patchwork quilt, all stitched together in different shades of yellow and grey. Then I go further, that long chunk of field where the Hydro towers sit, twisted like a thick white river, the land cuts right through everything. (Vermette 337,emphasis added) Comparing the fields to a patchwork quilt is quite in character given the elder's role as a homemaker confronting dispersal, pulling around her the many members of her extended everything" reverses the idea of the break as a rupture into a poetic acknowledgement of the power of the land which leaves its imprint, its signature as it were, on those who have remained intimately attached to it.

  family over the years. Less conventional are the associations that crop up when the Break suddenly comes into view in a succession of paratactic clauses. The comma splice gives pause as it precedes a simile that has no explicit referent in what comes before it. The anteposition "[…], twisted like a thick white river, the land cuts right through everything" makes visible what the eye cannot see in the high-voltage cables, the frothing waters that continue their course to the north once they have been transformed into energy. The elliptic trope captures the pulse of the land in the inert infrastructure of wire and metal that distributes electricity across immense distances. The final, emphatic assertion "the land cuts right through

The atmospheric aspect prevails over the racial connotations the same phrase acquires, for instance, in Sherman Alexie's short story "Family Portrait" in which white noise indexes the intrusion of the white man's world through the television sitting in a Coeur d'Alène living room.

"The exchange of the logicial for the material is a parasitic invention. The parasitic is there, at the very beginning of exchange and gift-giving, of gift-giving and damages; it switches the changes between what is not equivalent"(Serres 1982: 150). The translators opted for "logicial" to translate the French "logiciel" and thus retained its etymological connection to logos, that is language and information, for which "software" does not offer an equivalent.

"The ubiquity of national categories [in colonial America] was linked to an old definition of 'nation,' borrowed from biblical and legal texts, as a 'people, located in a relatively fixed spatial and cultural terrain, that was conceived of geographically and ethnographically (as well as ethnocentrically)'"(Vidal 2019: 445).

The contextualization that follows does not purport to settle this question. For a concise presentation of the intense debates surrounding it, see Calder 2019.

References to Phoenix's sisters' foster mother signal that such attempts can occasionally meet success(Vermette 314 and 316). For a nuanced overview of the fraught history of Aboriginal child welfare in Canada, see[START_REF] Hanson | First Nations and Indigenous Studies[END_REF]