How is your writing Canadian?

This is a wonderful topic. It is impossible to answer, yet full of possibilities, a topic that is both ironic and dreamlike. In his book Space and Place, Yi-Fu Tuan said that spaces give us our identity, but that we shape spaces into our own image. The history that takes place in a place changes its identity forever. In a sense, this echoes Hippolyte Taine, who spoke of race, time and space as being the elements that influence history and the human beings that create and live the moment. 

Robertson Davies said our nation is torn between a ‘northern, rather extraordinary, mystical spirit which it fears and the desire to present itself to the world as a Scotch banker.’ For him, Canada was simultaneously staid and poetic. This view was not limited to Anglophones.  We need only think of Gilles Vigneault whose refrain described ‘la blanche cérémonie où la neige au vent se marie [the white ceremony in which the snow and the wind were married],’ to feel the cold and the beauty simultaneously. Even Champlain and de Meules wrote about the scrubby trees (les arbres chétifs) unfit for masts while Longfellow looked at the same groves and saw, ‘the forest primeval with murmuring pines bearded with moss as the druids of old….’

U.S. poet, Wallace Stevens wrote about the land to the south in a poem entitled, “Description Without a Place.”  In Canada we have a place.  We continually try to describe it.  We find it a place with or without myth.  Northrop Frye quoted, for example, E. Birney, in “Haunted by a Lack of Ghosts.” Douglas Le Pan was famous for his line, “A Country Without a Mythology.”  Jan Morris, the travel writer, described Ottawa as a “half-imaginary metropolis of the great lone land.”  More recently, Charles Taylor spoke of the conflict between myth and reality in A Secular Age. 

Canada has been described as a place with and without a story or narrative, as a place without people and a place with a special population, as a place in nature and a place which turns its back on nature.  If we destroy the environment we will have to ask, as did Herménégile Chiasson, “[translation] What does that mean, to come from nowhere?”

If we discover a place, we discover ourselves.  This is not a new truth.  It was pointed out and illustrated by Roland Barthes in L’Empire des signes.  When we describe our place, our environment, we describe ourselves.  It is both interesting and ironic.  We continually define ourselves as a land we do not know and a myth we have never seen (and which may not even be as described, unless we remember truly and the description mirrors that which is described).

The country is more than the land; it is the people who are most often defined by the past, the place from whence they came.  Northrop Frye wrote that early Canadian literature portrays Canada as “a kind of non-penal colony designed for remittance men and Irish housemaids.”  Arthur Kroeger wrote of his Mennonite ancestors in Russia and David Azrieli wrote of his European journey which ended here.

If we look to the present, we see people as described perpetually in motion, moving across the nation and around the world.  They write, like Desbiens of Sudbury, located somewhere between Vancouver and the Gaspé peninsula  Andrew Parkin internationalizes the journey and writes of “spread-eagling” in his poem, “Postcard to Happy Valley,” in which he describes a maple leaf in Hong Kong.

We also see the self as individual and as a member of a group.  F.R. Scott described flying over Canada in an airplane and noting that every country beneath him “is an I land.”  The land belongs to the viewer, the settler, the traveler who possesses it if only for a brief moment. John Ralston Saul in A Fair Country. Telling Truths About Canada, brings up the question of aboriginal ownership not only of the land but of the social fabric.

The land is also described in terms of minds and words, because it is human beings who create myths, whether they are gods of thunder or of volcanoes or of Niagara. Acadian writer G. Le Blanc said it best when he said that identity is a word first, then a place.

The Canadian identity is defined in literature through time, space and place and the interface between the individual/culture and education.  It is a topic which is necessarily evolving and incomplete and which is captured in the title of Andrew Cohen’s response to Michael Adams’ Fire and Ice, The Unfinished Canadian.

Our speakers today both treat the North, the land and their interactions with Others. For Serge Bouchard, the earth is a place for identity, it is the ruler and the people are its subjects. For Noah Richler the land is where he discovered himself as a youth and where he finds inspiration along with the panoply of authors he presents in This is My Country. What’s Yours. A Literary Atlas of Canada.