SOURCE: Bök, Christian. “The Secular Opiate: Marxism as an Ersatz Religion in Three Canadian Texts.” Canadian Literature 147 (winter 1995): 11-22.

In the following essay, Bök notes that the three Canadian texts under discussion present a problem for Marxist critics seeking works that offer an analytical representation of Marxist failure.

Proletarian literature in Canada often produces ideological misgivings in Marxist critics, particularly Robin Mathews in “The Socio-Political Novel” (146), Bruce Nesbitt in “The Political Prose” (175), and Clint Burnham in “The Dialectics of Form” (101), all of whom suggest that few noteworthy Canadian texts, if any, present Marxism in a way thematically palatable to a revolutionary consciousness, and even writers with leftist reputations often portray Marxism in a context that can easily undermine the political philosophy to which the writer purports to subscribe: for example, Down the Long Table by Earle Birney, What Is To Be Done? by Mavis Gallant, and...