An actor achieves immortality through his face, a singer through his voice. An author is able to live eternally through his writing, but for some, the finished words are not enough.

The critical notions surrounding authorship have been contentious since the 1960s, when developments in literary theory upset accepted notions about art. Critics such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault (two names sure to make any humanities graduate student cringe) dismantled the axiom that the author was the architect of a literary work’s interpretive possibilities. Barthes went so far as to declare “the death of the author,” urging scholars to seek out a text’s meaning in its language, rather than in the intentions of its author.

Despite Barthes’ obituary for the author, the cult of authorship persists. Publishers around the world are breathing fresh life into deceased famous authors by posthumously releasing their “lost” works. In 2009, new books by Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Lucy Maud Montgomery, and in a delicious twist of irony, Roland Barthes, hit the shelves. On the slate for the next couple of years are posthumous works by Ralph Ellison, Jack Kerouac, David Foster Wallace, and Roberto Bolaño. (Bolaño’s corpse is proving to be staggeringly prolific, with as many as four releases on the horizon.)

Meanwhile, J.D. Salinger’s recent death has sparked an enormous level of speculation over the wealth of writings he might have been hoarding. At the time of his death, the notoriously cagey author hadn’t published in over forty-five years. It’s long been reported that he wrote upwards of fifteen manuscripts during his self-imposed exile. Despite Salinger’s militant protection of his privacy and apparent desire not to see these writings in the public sphere, it seems all but inevitable that at least some of them will be snatched up and published in the years to come.

While the frenzy surrounding authorial necromancy is infectious, few of these publications live up to the hype. Take last November’s publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s The Original of Laura, which was heralded in some quarters as the literary event of the year. Before his death in 1977, Nabokov instructed that the unfinished novel was to be burned if he should die before it was completed. Going against his father’s instructions, Dmitri Nabokov chose instead to have it published. In his introduction to the book, the son explains that “despite its incompleteness…[the writing] was unprecedented in structure and style,” and as a result, he “could no longer even think of burning Laura.” He justifies his decision by reasoning, “[I do not think] that my father or my father’s shade would have opposed the release of Laura once Laura had survived the hum of time this long… Should I be damned or thanked?”

Dmitri soon got his answer. Despite the flashy packaging — the 138 index cards on which Vladimir composed the fragments are replicated and perforated for the reader’s punch-out pleasure — the book was a flop. Although critics recognized faint glimmers of the brilliance that defined such masterpieces as Lolita and Pale Fire, Laura was ultimately dismissed as uneven, disjointed, and muddled. Tellingly, the final card reads, “efface, expunge, delete, cut out, wipe out, obliterate.”

While readers and critics alike have condemned Dmitri Nabokov’s decision to disobey his father, this same community has been very forgiving of similar betrayals when the final product has been more to its liking. It has long been said that Virgil insisted that the unrevised manuscript of The Aeneid be burned upon his death; his trusted friend Varius chose to release it anyhow. Similarly, if Max Brod, Franz Kafka’s literary executor, had obeyed the writer’s instructions, The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika never would have seen the light of day.

It’s difficult to dispute the opportunistic nature of posthumous publishing. Dave Rosenthal of The Baltimore Sun suggests that the practice is, at its worst, “grave-robbing, crass exploitation to make a few bucks,” with publishers, executors, and academics seizing the chance to capitalize on unseen works by established names. Readers, too, have an almost mystical fascination with the novelty of posthumous literature. It is a means to engage with the dead, or partake in a kind of literary time travel — it is the chance to experience new work by writers who might have died before you were born, and whose voices now appear to be echoing from the mystic beyond.

Unfortunately, it’s rare that a posthumous publication dazzles its audience. Sure, you might argue John Kennedy Toole and Roberto Bolaño are primarily known for their excellent posthumous novels (A Confederacy of Dunces and 2666, respectively), but neither of them were established authors until after their deaths. Generally, it seems that when famous authors make deathbed warnings not to publish something they’ve written, there’s a good reason.

Unfinished novels are also problematic — they are inevitably compared to other works that their authors had the chance to revise and polish. The work-in-progress is frequently edited and modified after an author’s death in order to make it a cohesive product. This is a doubly troublesome, as it both dilutes the original text into a heavily edited shadow of a novel, and simultaneously deprives readers of the immersive experience that exploring an unfinished project can provide. Drafts, notes, and manuscripts are fascinating pieces of ephemera, like journals or correspondence. But like the personal papers of an author, unfinished writings are literary artifacts, not literary works; they lack the finality and the intent that define a finished product. Left untouched, they are valuable glimpses into the author’s writing process, but as artifacts, they should remain untouched and unedited: in no way should they be touted as examples of the author’s artistry.

One example of a published work-in-progress gone awry was Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth, published in 1999, five years after the writer’s death. The only novel Ellison published during his lifetime was 1952’s sprawling masterpiece, Invisible Man, and he spent the next forty-odd years toiling at his next novel. At the time of his death, he left 2,000 pages of his manuscript; Ellison’s literary executor, John F. Callahan, determined to publish his friend’s work, whittled the stack into a 368-page novel. His effort was met with tepid reviews. Michiko Kakutani wrote in the New York Times that Juneteenth “feels disappointingly provisional and incomplete,” and that Ellison’s executor had “effectively changed the book’s entire structure and modus operandi. Instead of the symphonic work Ellison envisioned, Callahan has given us a flawed linear novel, focused around one man’s emotional and political evolution.”

Now, eleven years after Juneteenth’s publication, Callahan is trying again. Last week, the scraps and versions of Ellison’s unfinished opus were published as an annotated, 1136-page work-in-progress entitled Three Days Before the Shooting… This release presents Ellison’s manuscript more or less the way he left it, offering the reader a non-traditional foray into the author’s mind. By contextualizing and accepting the text instead of attempting to finish it, Callahan is finally letting it live.

In the end, the controversy surrounding posthumous publication will endure as long as the publications themselves. Despite the hit-and-miss — mostly miss — nature of the practice, for every Original of Laura, there is a Confederacy of Dunces, a treasure that might have never been unearthed, and for that reason, life after death will continue for many authors who leave unfinished business.

But instead of pouncing on a work that will sell copies for its author’s reputation alone, publishers need to use discretion in terms of the strength of the work, independent of its byline. Continuing on our current path of fetishizing departed authors, we’ll soon see fancy editions of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s grocery lists, or leather-bound copies of Virginia Woolf’s to-do reminders. Needless, opportunistic posthumous publications such as those serve no one, least of all the author. In his Slate review of Laura, Aleksandar Hemon quotes Vladimir Nabokov as once having said, “In art, purpose and plan are nothing; only the results count.” By their own shortcomings, the published results of the author’s last, embryonic manuscript proved him right.

(Images courtesy of Random House)

Hawksley Workman has always been something of a Canadian secret. Over the past decade, the Juno Award–winning singer-songwriter has released ten critically acclaimed albums on which he played most, if not all, of the instruments. He has produced records for the likes of Tegan and Sara, Great Big Sea, and Serena Ryder, and plays shows to consistently packed houses across the country. Musically, the Huntsville, Ontario native transcends definition and expectation. On the same album, you might find soft acoustic ballads, sexually charged rock, and glam-cabaret numbers, all enhanced by Workman’s soaring voice and nuanced lyrical sensibility.

Despite his seemingly endless store of hummable tunes, Workman’s name has scarcely risen above a whisper south of the border, leaving his legions of Canadian fans simultaneously puzzled and eager to keep him to themselves. This month, however, the secret is out, as Workman has just released his ten-year-old debut  album, For Him and the Girls, in the States. Canadian fans needn’t feel cheated: Workman will soon release his eleventh and twelfth albums. Meat will be out on January 19, and Milk will be digitally released over a five-month period beginning in the new year. In addition, Workman will embark on a twenty-two-city national tour in the spring.

In the midst of preparing for his big year to come, Workman was kind enough to sit down with me and chat about his upcoming albums, the limitations of genre, growing up in rural Ontario, and more. What resulted was a fascinating glimpse into the mind of one of Canada’s most hardworking and gifted musical virtuosos.

You have two new albums coming out in 2010, and one of them, Milk, is set to digitally release all the music before the physical product actually comes out. Why did you choose that strategy?

Now that I’m without a major label (which is a blessing), we just decided that we would do things unconventionally. It’s hard to know how to play the game anymore — there are no rules. For a while, it was sort of our standard idea that [illegal] downloading was somehow helping [the indie musician's] cause. Now I’m not so sure. I’m starting to feel the pinch of it. But using the internet as a way to sell music is incredible.

You’ve always had a very distinctive, cryptic web presence. Your Twitter account and mass emails are full of riddles and ambiguities that really draw people in.

A lot of people I know have decided to embrace the internet in its entirety, and I don’t know if I could go quite there. So I meet in the middle and just do what I feel comfortable with. Twitter seemed like my kind of thing. It’s 140 characters, sort of like Polaroids.

That’s a great way of putting it, because I find that your music is characterized largely by its use of imagery and atmosphere. Your lyrics are much more rooted in poetry than narrative. Is that intentional? Do you generally find yourself gravitating toward depicting a series of images rather than a linear story?

I’m a horrible storyteller. It’s my nature to speak in images. I live in a rather cloudy, constant state of observation, which is a hassle for anybody who’s with me. What happens is a convoluted clump of images ends up being the song. It’s not very tidy. I used to beat myself up about it. I always wished I was a songwriter who could tell a story, but I think I’m more of a songwriter who paints a dozen or so pictures.

Along with being visual, your music is very whimsical. Do you find music to be an escape through which you can shape an idealized world?

I do, now that I think of it. My first couple of records were very idealized. I was a kid who never really experienced anything, so I was trying to write from a place of, “What if I had these experiences? What if I had these great lovers? What if I’d been to these great cities?” And what’s interesting is that when you live a little and you have these experiences, the fantasy kind of morphs into a complicated reality. You don’t realize when you’re young how horrible it can all be.

This growing awareness of the world’s harsh realities is especially apparent on 2006’s Treeful of Starling.

You’re right, Treeful was my big political record. I tried to be elegant about it, because a lot of the political songs that have been written post-Vietnam have not really lasted. “Born in the U.S.A.” has a real shelf life. I’d love there to be more political music. I wish people were speaking out more.

This month, you released your first album, For Him and the Girls, in the States. It came out domestically back in 1999.

Yeah. Weird.

Yeah! Why did you pick that album as your American debut?

I’m one of those artists who thinks the story of my career makes a little more sense if you read it in order. [Meat and Milk] would confuse a lot of people who thought they were coming to me for the first time. But I don’t know how I’m going to draw the parallel between what I was ten years ago and what I am now, because there’s just a lot of life between now and then. Nobody tells you that things are so difficult. They don’t teach you what you really need to know.

Do you still feel good about For Him and the Girls?

Oh, yeah. It’s a scary record for me to listen to. I hear a very young and naïve, very strange fellow on there, who had never been on an airplane, who had never been anywhere, who had never had a real relationship. It’s like time travelling. I don’t even know how I made that record. I broke a lot of rules, and I don’t even remember quite how I did it.

What else can we expect from the new albums?

Both records are cohesive, but they don’t sound anything alike. Milk is an electro Europop record produced officially by a Swedish dude, [Martin Trome,] which I’ve never done before. Thematically speaking, the records are funny because they were written between the end of a devastating relationship and the beginning of an absolutely brilliant relationship. I don’t know how to say that in code; I’m going to have to work on that. I usually try to avoid bringing that kind of stuff to my public life, but it’s kind of inevitable.

Especially when you’re doing something as personal as songwriting.

Somebody said the other day, “How well do people know you just based on your music?” They know me pretty good, because I find it pretty hard to fib in songwriting.

Well, in the early years of your career, you received a lot of press accusing you of developing a false persona. You published a series of personal ads in Toronto’s Now Magazine devoted to Isadora, your fictional underwater muse. [These ads were later collected into a book of poetry, Hawksley Burns for Isadora]. Then, there was a controversial biography on your website [which has been removed] in which you claimed to have tap-danced at a Dutch academy and made a living as a lake ice-cutter. Journalists raised quite a stir about these embellishments.

In the early days, I felt uninteresting to myself. I was a kid who grew up in rural Ontario. I never really fit into my surroundings, but I also really fit in. I grew up a hick and I still am one, but I also had a certain desire for refined things. Journalists definitely felt like I was trying to pull one over on them…People were saying, “Hey, we know you’re a rural kid who grew up pushing cars out of snow banks. You’re not pulling one over on us, you faux feather boa wearing…” But people are completely willing to buy into the artifice of David Bowie or Bob Dylan or any of the great artificials. There’s a certain unproductive nature to it, and I think our culture can use all the help it can get at the moment. That kind of glib dismissal just for the sake of hearing one’s own voice is a bit sad.

You’ve done a lot of collaborative work to boost the careers of other Canadian musicians: you’ve produced albums for Tegan and Sara, Sarah Slean, and most recently, Hey! Rosetta. Do you feel that this collaborative initiative is an important part of Canada’s music culture?

I’ve always wanted that. I’ve always felt like I was a good hub on a wheel that had a lot of very interesting spokes on it. Everyone I’ve worked with has had a remarkable amount of staying power, and I’ve been a part of their careers at a very early time. To think of the people I’ve been able to make records with is a bit of a mind-blow to me. Working with somebody like Slean, for instance. She’s absolutely brilliant. Tegan and Sara, they were eighteen when we made their first record together, so they were so energetic and ready for anything. With Hey! Rosetta, my job with them was to stay out of the way and keep reminding them how good they are. Most of my collaborations now are songwriting, which is, in a way, the most exciting. I realize that I’m getting older and more funny-looking, so my chances of being on MuchMusic are getting slimmer, but it’s interesting for me to write songs for these kids who are doing that.

This communal aspect of Canadian music seems to be something you’re deeply invested in, from the collaborations to your frequent participation in folk festivals.

It’s everything. I think it’s because I grew up in the church. I learned so much of the nuance of writing music and performing music by going to church, realizing that the best part of it was singing and the sandwiches afterwards. When I was in my early teens, I thought I’d go either way — that I’d either be a musician or a preacher. They both involve music and community, which spoke to me at a very young age.

Do you feel influenced by the Canadian folk tradition?

Absolutely. If you’re including Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, Bruce Cockburn, and Neil Young into that, our folk traditions have inspired and influenced the whole world…It’s because of our observational nature. Americans shoot first and ask questions later, and that’s not the best way to write great music. Canada is all nuance and survival, because it’s too easy to die here. The seasons will kill you. The winter will kill you. The mountains will kill you. Consequently, we’re on our creative toes to keep us warm and safe. I think we sit inside and look out at what’s going on. Then, we have a big, loud teenage brother to the south that does things that embarrass us. Our cultural disposition is very strange, but it has allowed us to develop a refined ability to make songs.

It seems that one of the more limiting aspects of the music business is the idea of genre, and any article that’s written about you will classify you differently. How do you feel about being put into these categories?

Genre is something I’m fascinated by, in that it usually comes with a hairstyle and fashion attire. On the CBC’s website [recently], they described me as hip hop, and I thought, “Well, that’s interesting.” I mean, hip hop is what I listen to almost exclusively now, but I don’t know if I’m a hip-hop artist. When I was young, I was just under the impression that there was good and bad, not that there was a need to define it.

Which of your songs are you most proud of?

If I made the list it would be embarrassing. There are some I’ve written that I think are intimidating, like “Don’t Be Crushed” or “Ice Age.” They’re really good, and I don’t know how to do that. There’s a certain astrological alignment that has to happen. I can write a good song any old day of the week, but something that has that kind of weight to it, that’s not just me. That’s having something a little more special.

You’re participating in the CBC’s Great Canadian SongQuest, for which you wrote a song about Algonquin Park. Are you happy with how it turned out?

Yeah, it’s pretty kooky, but it’s fun. You only are who you are when you write. If you’re going through personal crisis, that’s what ends up on the record; if you’re disengaged with your career, that’s what goes on the record, and it becomes such a human experiment. So unfortunately — or fortunately — I was sick and a bit depressed when I wrote that Algonquin Park song. Maybe that bleeds into it. It wasn’t the song I was expecting to write, but it’s what got written.

(Photo by Ivan Otis)

On October 2, the CBC and National Post announced a surprising new content-sharing agreement. The deal, effective immediately, grants the public broadcaster access to the Post’s financial stories for its website, while the CanWest-owned Post will publish the public broadcaster’s sports coverage online and occasionally in print. (Although unable to disclose the terms of the deal, CBC head of media relations Jeff Keay made clear in a telephone conversation that the agreement was modeled on revenue-sharing rather than licensing.) Although such story-swapping seems like a fairly innocuous announcement, it reflects an overwhelming trend in news media towards homogeneous journalism and the monopolization of the press.

“They make strange bedfellows ideologically,” observes Andrew Coyne, national editor at Maclean’s and former National Post columnist. He has a point—the CBC has long been accused of left-leaning bias, while the Post is known for its conservative editorial stance. Their divergent politics have led them to publicly lock horns on more than one occasion. From 2003–2004, the Post ran “CBC Watch,” a recurring op-ed feature that provided a forum for readers to lambaste the Ceeb’s supposedly liberal agenda, while numerous articles in the Post and other CanWest-owned dailies have called for the CBC’s privatization, a sentiment echoed by CanWest founder Israel Asper in 2002.

The CBC hasn’t kept silent, either. In a 2004 letter to the Post’s editor, then editor-in-chief of CBC News Tony Burman wrote, “The CBC does not need the Post to assure its journalistic accountability to Canadians. Unlike the Post, the CBC has a comprehensive and publicly available set of journalistic standards and practices which are unmatched in their rigour.”

Now, after years of animosity, it seems the former adversaries have banded together in the hopes that content-sharing might generate profit-sharing. Both news giants are struggling financially—last week, CanWest filed for bankruptcy protection, and in 2009, the CBC was forced to cut around 800 jobs to make up for a $171 million budget shortfall. In this unyielding economy, the CBC and the Post have gone from enemies to frenemies.

“We approached each other,” explains Jonathan Harris, vice president of digital media for the National Post. “We both saw a good synergy there.” When asked about the one-time animosity between the Post and the CBC, both Harris and Jeff Keay seem unconcerned. “We draw a distinction between news content and opinion content,” Keay says. Harris dismisses the tension as ancient history. “It was quite a few years ago,” he remarks. “We’re in an age of partnership.”

We certainly are. Although the unexpected announcement raised a lot of issues—the nature of privately versus publicly funded news sources, the dwarfing of print by web-based media, and the internet as a grey area between regulated broadcasting and unregulated press, to name a few—what is most compelling are the implications of what Harris calls the “age of partnership.” The growth of concentrated media ownership, also known as corporate journalism, describes the control of the news media by only a handful of conglomerate chains—in short, a monopoly of ideas.

Not a new development by any means, the corporatization of Canadian journalism gained speed in the 1950s and ’60s, and was first seriously identified as a point of concern in 1970 by the Special Senate Committee on Mass Media, spearheaded by senator Keith Davey. The Committee’s report succinctly summarized the argument against corporate media ownership, stating, “This country should no longer tolerate a situation where the public interest in so vital a field as information [is] dependent on the greed or goodwill of an extremely privileged group of businessmen.” The report recommended the development of a review board to approve all mergers and acquisitions of print media, a proposal that was largely ignored by the provincial and federal governments.

Throughout the ’70s, the media continued to funnel into fewer and fewer hands. In 1981, former journalist Tom Kent was assigned to lead a new commission into the state of Canadian newspapers. He and his commissioners saw the situation as dire and advocated legislation to limit the number of newspapers any one chain could own. The Kent Commission’s findings provoked livid reactions from both the public and the journalistic community. Both groups feared that empowering the government to pull the strings of the Fourth Estate would be even more catastrophic than allowing it to remaining under corporate control. As a result, the proposal was tabled.

The flatlined efforts of these two endeavours effectively gave corporations a free pass to continue merging without regulation. Over the past few decades, companies like CanWest, Torstar, CTVglobemedia, and Quebecor have been steadily gaining control over the majority of independent Canadian news sources. The results are alarming; since 1990, the number of independently owned newspapers reportedly plummeted from 17.3 percent to less than 1 percent, and by 2007, over 70 percent of daily newspaper circulation in Canada was under the thumb of four corporations.

In the short term, the appeal of corporate journalism is irresistible to executives. When a company like CanWest or Torstar controls a website, broadcasting network, and several daily newspapers, content can be generously shared among all levels of that corporation’s holdings. A story that runs in the National Post can be reproduced in the Vancouver Sun or Ottawa Citizen on the cheap, while also being broadcast on Global TV and/or streamed on Canada.com. Like magic, the corporation is able to reach an enormous audience and collect more revenues with fewer expenditures.

But the monopolization of Canadian news by corporate chains sounds a death knell for the industry on an ideological level. Ideally, news reportage is a discourse. Audiences benefit from a wide spectrum of editorial positions and journalistic voices unfettered by the commercial interests of a larger conglomerate. The current state of affairs is silencing these independent voices in favour of homogeneous content, leaving many journalists and editors out of work and thinning the industry’s talent pool.

Many of those remaining feel that their work must conform to the political and ideological persuasions of the controlling conglomerates. As a result, fewer divergent perspectives are voiced. For example, after resigning, former Post staffer (and recent Walrus contributor) Patricia Pearson wrote openly about having to censor her own liberal sympathies under the oppressive control of the Asper family. Although wire services such as The Canadian Press and Reuters also disperse homogeneous content, they are slightly less problematic. Like most news agencies, which supply news services rather than publish to a readership, both tend to be fact-based with little editorializing. In addition, Reuters enforces a strict objectivity policy, while CP is a not-for-profit cooperative, which nullifies the corporate influence held over most other media outlets.

In concentrating the media under a few corporate umbrellas, journalistic democracy is compromised, and the disconnect between the needs of the public and the word of the news product grows wider with every new acquisition. Content-sharing between the CBC and National Post is symptomatic of this trend, and draws the publicly funded CBC into the privatized media machine.

The New Yorker’s A.J. Leibling once famously quipped, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Fewer owners, then, translates to a greatly diminished free press. But let’s not drum up the funeral march just yet. For one, CanWest’s recent announcement that it will be restructuring under credit protection signals the prospect of one of the biggest media sales in Canadian history. Although rumours persist that National Post CEO Paul Godfrey has secured backers for a buyout of the chain, there is still a chance that the sale could eventually lead to the purchase of the papers by a variety of owners, increasing the number of controlling parties.

According to Andrew Coyne, another possible saving grace could be the government relaxing restrictions on foreign ownership of media. Canadian law currently prohibits foreign control of our cultural industries. Dismantling this legislation might encourage competition and a broader range of influence. “I think we’ve artificially encouraged monopoly in this country because of the ban on foreign ownership,” said Coyne. “We’re content with cozy duopolies and monopolies when we should be opening up the market and making [the corporations] compete.”

Intriguing, yes, but Coyne’s suggestion could be dangerous—rather than diversifying our media voices, opening up Canadian journalism to foreign ownership could very well throw the industry to the proverbial wolves. In theory, foreign ownership might be a step towards opening up the system, but the possibility of the Rupert Murdochs and Sam Zells of the world grasping Canadian media properties in their clutches seems too frightening to risk.

It’s difficult to predict whether the de-corporatization of journalism is possible, or whether the current ebb in independent news voices will become permanent. In the meantime, the death of journalism has been greatly exaggerated. Sure, the industry is changeable, controversial, and constantly in flux. But news itself hasn’t gone anywhere, and if it ever does, you can bet someone will be there to write about it. While deals such as the CBC/Post alliance may seem like harbingers of doom, hope still springs eternal in the human press.

(Photo by Thomas S. Denison)