Of texts, and pretexts
JOHN BARBER
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March 7, 2009
The Decision: Why Wal-Mart is Good/Bad
By James R. McKenzie
and Order of the Board
OMB, 55 pages, $0
The non-specialist reader might well decide to throw this glutinous clot of a text against the wall after reading no more than four lines, which introduce two wealthy protagonists who "are desirous of redeveloping" a property that is "physically situated" in downtown Toronto. Should they resist the immediate impulse, author McKenzie goads them again in every tortured page of his puzzling text, a pretzel-logic "judgment" in the famous case of Wal-Mart v. Toronto.
The decision in the title refers to the culmination of a five-year process during which a developer, Smart Centres Inc., sought to build a shopping mall whose anchor tenant was widely rumoured to be Wal-Mart in the gentrifying Toronto neighbourhood of Leslieville, against the wishes of local politicians and residents.
Most readers will skip straight to the ending, as widely reported this week, in which Ontario Municipal Board vice-chair James McKenzie surprisingly sends the developer packing. But those who struggle through the preceding tickets will be rewarded.
Read as a tragicomic fiction of one honest man's hapless descent into the madness of the Toronto planning exercise, with the author posing in the classic postmodern guise of reluctant narrator, The Decision becomes something quite different: an indictment of oppressive social institutions, culminating with a whiz-bang surprise ending.
In the pages of The Decision, Nabokov's Charles Kinbote, alleged citizen of Zembla ("a distant northern land"), meets Kafkaesque arthropod Gregor Samsa in a bravura display of what John Barth so aptly labelled "the Literature of Exhaustion." Not highly readable, as it were. You could, in fact, put it down.
In Mr. McKenzie's hands, the narrator becomes an underpaid, mid-level functionary in a vast bureaucracy. The OMB is called by unaccountable fate to judge the proper height of fences. Somehow - we are not told how - it comes to sit in judgment of shopping centres.
Just as Kafka pointedly avoided saying how or why Gregor Samsa became a cockroach overnight, thus emphasizing the simple, unavoidable "fact" that it happened - shocking readers with a plain demonstration of merciless fate - Mr. McKenzie is not required to explain the Ontario Municipal Board. It just is. Context established, the narrator delves into a thicket of technical obscurities that purport to address the straightforward question of whether or not the City of Toronto, by unanimous votes of its elected council, has the right to protect designated employment lands from "retail contagion," i.e., Wal-Mart.
But appearances deceive: The persevering reader gradually comes to realize that these deep and fuzzy forays into old studies, policies and Acts threaten to disguise the narrator's views of the actions of Councillor Paula Fletcher (who, like all the leading characters of
The Decision, remains unnamed in its pages).
The narrator becomes almost obvious, even brazen as he moves from one obscurity to another, the only pattern being his fulsome approval of most evidence uttered by Wal-Mart's hired guns and his disapproval of the citizens and politicians who dared to uphold established city policy before his tin-pot tribunal.
Opposition is "knee-jerk reaction." Unanimous votes at council are "political whims" that insult the delusional functionary's absurdist dignity. Where normal people might see local politicians doing their jobs,
The Decision's Kinbote sees "ex-poste [sic] rationalization" of sinister conspiracies.
Just at the height of his tirade, within sight of the final paragraphs, the narrator abruptly shifts attention to a novel sub-clause no combatant had previously emphasized. In a final burst of energy, he loads little Policy 9.18 (b) into his sling and nails the big-box giant between the eyes.
This sudden switcheroo goes to the heart of the puzzle. One interpretation suggests that the narrator is lashing out as he reluctantly rules against Wal-Mart, despite his thoughts to the contrary. Another is that his mind suddenly became focused - as they say the gallows focuses the mind - after years of assault by paper policies. By the time the full meaning of the surprise ending becomes clear, you can almost hear the sound of Ms. Fletcher laughing.
jbarber@globeandmail.com
