Beyond the Provinces: Literary Canada at Century's End 9781487574376

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Beyond the Provinces Literary Canada at Century's End Beyond the Provinces takes stock of Canada's literary scene at the end of the twentieth century, revealing the astonishing developments that have occurred in the country's literary culture in the past decades and affirming the maturity of literary Canada. In the opening chapter David Staines examines the colonial mentality that pervaded turn-of-the-century literature, was later challenged, and has all but disappeared at century's end. In the second chapter he explores the unique Canadian presence in American fiction in order to examine the way iri which Canada found its literary independence from the United States. And in the final chapter he proposes that Canadian literary selfhood has been complemented by a still tentative but distinctive critical voice.

(F.E.L. Priestley Memorial Lectures in the History of Ideas) DAvm ST AINES is a professor in the Department of English, and Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ottawa.

Beyond the Provinces Literary Canada at Century's End DAVID STAINES

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1995 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada Reprinted in 2018

ISBN ~020-0652-3 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-8020-7606-9 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Staines, David, 1946Beyond the provinces : literary Canada at century's end ISBN ~020-0652-3 (bound) ISBN 978-0-8020-7606-9 (paper) 1. Canadian literature (English) - 20th century 2. Criticism - Canada. History and criticism.* I. Title.

Ps8o79.s83 1995

c810.9'005 PR91g8.6.S83 1995

Excerpt from 'The Immigrants' from The Journals of Susanna Moodie by Margaret Atwood. Copyright© Oxford University Press 1970. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council.

To the Memory of

NORTHROP FRYE (1912-1991)

and MARSHALL MCLUHAN

(19u-198o)

Contents

PREFACE

ix

ONE

The Old Countries Recede 3 'IWO

The Dispassionate Witness 31

THREE

The Critical Horizon 67

Preface The chapters of this book were originally presented as the F.E.L. Priestley Lectures in the History of Ideas at University College in the University of Toronto on 1, 2, and 3 March 1994. I am grateful for the privilege of having been the Priestley Lecturer. The invitation offered me a homecoming to the campus where I had been an undergraduate in the old Honours English Language and Literature program. F.E.L. Priestley has been a not inconstant presence in my scholarly career. His 1949 essay, 'Tennyson's Idylls,' was a reference point for my dissertation on the Idylls of the King, as was his 1973 book, Language and Structure in Tennyson's Poetry, for my own later book on Tennyson. In 1964, Priestley published a stocktaking of, as its title states, The Humanities in Canada. That investigation maps in exhaustive detail humanities studies across the country, yet its pages contain no observations on the study of Canadian literature. A detailed appendix on library resources shows that Canadian literature is an important component of almost every university and college library in the country. But campuses themselves seemed, at that time, to pay little or no attention to courses in Canadian literature. It was in the following year, as I recall, that the Honours English Language and Literature program at the University of Toronto introduced an optional course in Canadian literature in the fourth year. A would-be medievalist, I took the other option offered at the same hour, Middle English Language and Literature, and thus never had the opportunity to study this apparently new field. Three decades after the publication of The Humanities in Canada, Beyond the Provinces seeks to reveal the astonishing

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Preface

developments that have occurred in our literary culture in the past decades. It also suggests some dimensions of the literary scene which we scarcely recognized in the 196os. Deliberately written within a millennial perspective, this book looks back in order to understand the present. The opening chapter is an overview of Canada's movement away from the colonial mentality that pervaded turn-ofthe-century literature, that was challenged by mid-century literature, and that has all but disappeared at century's end. The second chapter focuses on Canada's finding literary independence from the United States. And the final chapter proposes that our literary selfhood has now been complemented by a still tentative but distinctive critical voice. I am grateful to Lynd Forguson, Principal of University College, for his invitation to be the Priestley Lecturer, and to John Leyerle - three decades ago my undergraduate Beowulf teacher, now teacher and friend- for his hospitality during the lectureship. In 1992, Kathleen Firth and Jacqueline Hurtley of the University of Barcelona invited me to give a plenary address at their conference, 'The End: Language and Literature in English at the Close of the 19th and 20th Centuries.' Their invitation first prompted me to look at Canadian literature in a millennial context, and my address, 'Impossible to Define,' became an early draft of this book's opening chapter. The dedication of this book acknowledges two shapers of and commentators on the Canadian imagination. Marshall McLuhan was my undergraduate professor; Northrop Frye was my colleague during his year as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University. Both were my teachers and friends. Without them this book would not exist.

Beyond the Provinces Literary Canada at Century's End

ONE

The Old Countries Recede

... as they step on shore the old countries recede, become perfect, thumbnail castles preserved like gallstones in a glass bottle, the towns dwindle upon the hillsides in a light paperweight-clear. Margaret Atwood 'The Immigrants'

The Old Countries Recede How old is Canadian literature? An exact birthdate is difficult to determine. Some find its beginnings in the early sixteenth-century Portuguese travel accounts that celebrated the luxurious fishing off the Grand Banks. Others find thematic origins in the Jesuit Relations of the seventeenth century, the fur-trading accounts of the eighteenth century, or the poetry and prose of the early nineteenth century, almost without exception written by outsiders to the country, settlers in an alien environment, who believed home to be elsewhere. By the time of Confederation, however, there were already calls for literary voices that would reflect the country, alternatives to the literature and painting that merely imposed the designs and traditions of other lands on a landscape whose essence eluded such impositions. As early as 1858, Thomas D'Arcy McGee, the most persuasive spokesperson for Confederation, was declaring the path open to a truly Canadian literature: We have the materials; - our position is favourable; northern latitudes like ours have been famed for the strength, variety and beauty of their literature; all we demand is, that free scope be allowed to the talent and enterprise of the country, instead of allowing an unhealthy foreign substitute to be presented to our people. 1 Despite Canada's pos1t10n as a colony, young writers, McGee exhorted in 1867, should rise above the imitation of foreign models. Canadians stand in need of a distinc-

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tive literature, he realized, which speaks directly to and about their own world: The books that are made elsewhere, even in England, are not always the best fitted for us; they do not always run on the same mental gauge, nor connect with our trains of thought; they do not take us up at the by-stages of cultivation at which we have arrived, and where we are emptied forth as on a barren, pathless, habitationless heath. They are books of another state of society, bearing traces of controversies, or directed against errors or evils which for us hardly exist, except in the pages of these exotic books. Observe, I do not object to such books, especially when truthfully written; but it seems to me we do much need several other books calculated to our own meridian, and hitting home to our own society, either where it is sluggish or priggish, or wholly defective in its present style of culture. 2 Canadian literature began with attempts to describe the unique landscape of the New World; such geographical delineation was a necessary prelude to the development of a distinctive literature. The immensity and power of the unpopulated land long remained a theme of the country's art - perhaps, more accurately, an obsessive theme. The question of locating was dominant, as Northrop Frye observed: Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question 'Who am I?' than by some such riddle as 'Where is here?' 3

The Old Countries Recede

7

'Where is here?' has been a preoccupation of Canadian writers since the beginnings of our literary culture about a century ago. Perhaps the question harkens back to the possible origin of the very word Canada, which may well come from the Portuguese word meaning 'Nobody here.' 'Where is here?' is a colonial preoccupation, and one that Canadians have found exceedingly difficult to leave behind. There must be the centre for the colonial mind, and here, unknown and undefined, remains a colonial and a critical preoccupation. And Canada has had such schooling in colonial status! First it was a colony of France until 1759, then a colony of England until 1867, and then, while holding on to its British ancestry (Morley Callaghan once remarked that Canada had an unreciprocated love affair with Great Britain), Canada failed to notice its slow emergence as an economic colony of the United States. In 1952, Marshall McLuhan wryly observed how Canada's colonial position survives its political and economic metamorphoses: At the beginning of the twentieth century Canada was just ceasing to be a colony of Great Britain. But two wars have destroyed the British economy and fostered such extensive trade between Canada and the United States that Canada is now becoming a colony of the United States. In fact, Canadians may soon be in demand to enlighten Englishmen in the art of being a colony. Canadians have had a long time to learn this peculiar art and even manage to be nonchalant about their skill.1 Two decades later, Frye was still able to describe Canada, only half-ironically, as 'practically the only country left in the world which is pure colony, colonial in psychology as well as in mercantile economics. ' 5

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'Where is here?' Literary responses to this question invite a division of twentieth-century Canadian literature into the early, middle, and late century. Early twentiethcentury attempts to probe the question led to mid-century denials of its relevance. Now, at century's end, the palpable absence of the question underscores a belated movement of Canada's literary identity from a clinging to the seeming periphery to a confident claim that the centre, however indefinable, is none the less unmistakably both here and nowhere and everywhere. In the early twentieth century, three Canadian writers captured Canadian and world attention: Ralph Connor, Lucy Maud Montgomery, and Stephen Leacock. The Reverend Charles Gordon, writing under the·pseudonym Ralph Connor, penned moral fables about rural eastern Ontario and the frontier West. From Prince Edward Island, Lucy Maud Montgomery enchanted readers with her tales of Anne of Green Gables and, later, of Emily of New Moon; the local or regional colour of these frequently idyllic books gave the impression of a rural paradise remote from any civilized centre. And Stephen Leacock's many volumes of comic sketches made him the most renowned humorist of his time both at home and abroad. Although they described Canadian scenes, all three writers believed that whatever here was, Canada was not it. Ralph Connor's first three novels, published at the turn of the century, sold within a few years of their publication a total of five million copies. Between 1917 and 1937, according to a brief in-house history of McClelland and Stewart, the most successful Canadian author was Connor, 'whose popularity was such that McClelland and Stewart used to order the latest title by the railway carload.' In Corporal Cameron of the North West Mounted Police: A Tal,e of the MacLeod Trail (1912), his ninth novel, Connor offers a

Canadian version of a saloon gunfight:

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9

'Come along, boys,' Mcivor had said, gripping them by their coat collars. 'I don't pay you good money for this sort of thing.' And so saying he had lifted them clear from their seats, upsetting the table, ignoring utterly the roaring oaths of the discomfited gamblers. What would have been the result none could say, for one of the gamblers had whipped out his gun and with sulphurous oaths was conducting a vigourous [sic] demonstration behind the unconscious back of Mcivor, when there strolled into the room and through the crowd of men scattering to cover, a tall slim youngster in the red jacket and pill-box cap of that world-famous body of military guardians of law and order, the North West Mounted Police. Not while he lived would Cameron forget the scene that followed. With an air of lazy nonchalance the youngster strode quietly up to the desperado flourishing his gun and asked in a tone that indicated curiosity more than anything else, 'What are you doing with that thing?' 'I'll show yeh!' roared the man in his face, continuing to pour forth a torrent of oaths. 'Put it down there!' said the youngster in a smooth and silky voice, pointing to a table near by. 'You don't need that in this country.' The man paused in his demonstration and for a moment or two stood in amazed silence. The audacity of the youngster appeared to paralyse his powers of speech and action. 'Put it down there, my man. Do you hear?' The voice was still smooth, but through the silky tones there ran a fibre of steel. Still the desperado stood gazing at him. 'Quick, do you hear?' There was a sudden sharp ring of imperious, of overwhelming authority, and, to the amazement of the crowd of

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men who stood breathless and silent about, there followed one of those phenomena which experts in psychology delight to explain, but which no man can understand. Without a word the gambler slowly laid upon the table his gun, upon whose handle were many notches, the tally of human lives it had accounted for in the hands of this same desperado. 'What is this for?' continued the young man, gently touching the belt of cartridges. 'Take it oill' The belt found its place beside the gun. 'Now, listen!' gravely continued the youngster. 'I give you twenty-four hours to leave this post, and if after twenty-four hours you are found here it will be bad for you. Get out!' The man, still silent, slunk out from the room. Irresistible authority seemed to go with the word that sent him forth, and rightly so, for behind that word lay the full weight of Great Britain's mighty empire. It was Cameron's first experience of the North West Mounted Police, that famous corps of frontier riders who for more than a quarter of a century have ridden the marches of Great Britain's territories in the far northwest land, keeping intact the Pax Britannica amid the wild turmoil of pioneer days. To the North West Mounted Police and to the pioneer missionary it is due that Canada has never had within her borders what is known as a 'wild and wicked West.' It was doubtless owing to the presence of that slim youngster in his scarlet jacket and pill-box cap that Mcivor got his men safely away without a hole in his back and that his gang were quietly finishing their morning meal this shining April day, in their camp by the Bow River in the shadow of the big white peaks that guard The Gap. 6

The Old Countries Recede

11

Canada is a British colony, its law enforcement an extension of Pax Britannica, and its colonial status a guarantee that the 'wild and wicked West' of the United States will never penetrate the Canadian border. In Connor's view, the integrity of the Canadian nation, one of the borderlands of empire, is preserved by the Pax Britannica, which displaces the American wild west and ensures that here remains somehow safely over there, nourished and protected by an imperial power that is reassuringly paternal. In 1912, too, Lucy Maud Montgomery published her fifth book, Chronides of Avonlea, which continues her account of Anne of Green Gables and her world. Avonlea is a blissfully self-contained world which welcomes few visitors from the outside, from Charlottetown and sometimes even off-Island. In the fifth chronicle of Avonlea, little Joscelyn returns to the Island for a concert. She is now 'Joscelyn Burnett, the famous contralto,' and Islanders are in awe, for her voice 'was delighting thousands out in the big world.' Although the 'big world' is anything beyond the Island, the United States has a special aura for Islanders. In the opening chronicle of Avonlea, Anne plots and schemes so that Ludovic Speed, who has been courting Theodora Dix for fifteen years 'in the same ruminating, unhastening fashion,' will ask her to marry him. To make Ludovic jealous, Anne enlists the aid of Arnold Sherman, an elderly widower from Boston who is spending part of the summer on the Island. She succeeds in her plans, for Ludovic becomes jealous of Sherman, often thinking of 'the "palatial residence" rumour ascribed to Arnold Sherman in Boston.' The elderly visitor, we are told, has 'all the glamour of "the States" hanging about him.' For Avonlea residents, the United States is the foreign, the exotic, the centre that makes them seem on the periphery. 7 For the third major figure of this early period, Stephen

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Beyond the Provinces

Leacock, Canada was 'a land of hope and sunshine where little towns spread their square streets and their trim maple trees beside placid lakes almost within echo of the primeval forest. ' 8 His finest book, Sunshine Sketches of a Littl,e Town, also from 1912, is his only one set resolutely and explicitly in Canada, specifically in the fictional Ontario town of Mariposa. The publishing company Bell and Cockburn initially imported 4,500 copies of the book from England, and sold 10,000 copies within ten months. Leacock's fictional townspeople are always conscious of the country to the south, specifically the metropolitan centre beyond their country's borders. The narrator of Sunshine Sketches introduces almost apologetically his home town of Mariposa: Busy - well, I should think so! Ask any of its inhabitants if Mariposa isn't a busy, hustling, thriving town. Ask Mullins, the manager. of the Exchange Bank, who comes hustling over to his office from the Mariposa House every day at 10.30 and has scarcely time all morning to go out and take a drink with the manager of the Commercial; or ask - well, for the matter of that, ask any of them if they ever knew a more rushing go-a-head town than Mariposa. Of course if you come to the place fresh from New York, you are deceived. Your standard of vision is all astray. You do think the place is quiet. You do imagine that Mr. Smith is asleep merely because he closes his eyes as he stands. But live in Mariposa for six months or a year and then you will begin to understand it better; the buildings get higher and higher; the Mariposa House grows more and more luxurious; McCarthy's block towers to the sky; the 'buses roar and hum to the station; the trains shriek; the traffic multiplies; the people move faster and faster; a dense

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13

crowd swirls to and fro in the post-office and the five and ten cent store - and amusements! well, now! lacrosse, baseball, excursions, dances, the Fireman's Ball every winter and the Catholic picnic every summer; and music - the town band in the park every Wednesday evening, and the Oddfellows' brass band on the street every other Friday; the Mariposa Quartette, the Salvation Army - why, after a few months' residence you begin to realize that the place is a mere mad round of gaiety. 9 Mariposans realize that the centre is south of the border; they love their world, but realize it is on the periphery. They present themselves and their town with a disarming, apologetic smile; Mariposa is an outpost, a suburb, a province, a colony. If you do not alter your standard of vision, the narrator warns, you will think Canada different, and difference seems to contain the connotation of inferiority. This sense of difference as inferiority persists in Canadian literature long after Mariposa. Most recently, Charis, one of the female trio who confront evil in Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride (1993), clings to the Mariposa outlook: The United States is just across the lake, of course, and on clear days you can almost see it - a sort of line, a sort of haze. Charis has even been there, on a high-school day trip to Niagara Falls, but that part of it looked disappointingly similar; not like the part Billy comes from, which must be very strange. Strange, and more dangerous - that much is clear and maybe because of that, superior. The things that happen there are said to matter in the world. Unlike the things that happen here. 10

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English by birth, Canadian by upbringing, Leacock was essentially American by empathy. In 1916 he found himself defining Canadian literature in relationship to England and the United States: Canadian literature - as far as there is such a thing Canadian journalism, and the education and culture of the mass of the people of Canada approximates more nearly to the type and standard of the United States than to those of Great Britain. Whatever accusations may be brought against the literature and education of the American republic may apply equally well - indeed very probably apply with even greater force - to the Dominion of Canada. 11 At the end of the 1920s, he would write: 'It seems to me, in short, that the attempt to mark off Canada as a little area all its own, listening to no one but itself, is as silly as it is ineffective.' 12 And in the 1930s he would again state that 'there is no such thing as Canadian literature today, meaning books written by Canadians in a Canadian way.'13 This early twentieth-century Canadian preoccupation with there, never acknowledging the possible centrality and independence of here, reaches its climax in the writings of Hugh MacLennan, whose first unpublished novel, 'So All Their Praises,' was set in Germany and the United States, and whose second unpublished novel, 'A Man Should Rejoice,' was set in Austria, the United States, and Nova Scotia. Only with publishers' negative reactions to these manuscripts did he turn to the national novel in the 1940s and write Barometer Rising (1941), Two Solitudes (1945), and The Precipice (1948), which may be viewed as a national trilogy exploring the growing self-consciousness of Cana-

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dian society. He saw his role as that of cartographer, mapping the terrain in order to define the society. MacLennan was, however, a product of his cultural environment and thought that the colonial understanding was the identity of his country. Canadians were, he often declared, a combination of the British and the American; they represented the best of both nationalities. To define Canada, MacLennan could use only other nations. There, in other words, was still the basis for any understanding of here.

In accepting the colonial understanding of place, MacLennan also accepted earlier Canadian writers' retreat to the local or regional for their literary setting. The local settings of Connor, Montgomery, and Leacock led not to a national novel but to the Halifax setting of Barometer Rising, the Montreal setting of Two Solitudes, and the Ontario town of The Precipice. The immensity of Canada seems to demand a literary home in a region, and it seemed the natural consequence of its geography that writers had to be regional rather than universal. But regionalism is in no way unique to Canada. All literature is basically regional, and Canada, still burdened by its colonial mentality, had yet to confront the complexities of its own regionalism and to define it as separate and distinct from provincialism. As MacLennan was writing his national novels and bringing to a close the first phase of Canada's colonial preoccupation with here in relationship to there, another novel was deliberately challenging such a preoccupation. Sheila Watson's The Double Hook, first conceived in the late 1940s, written in 1950 and the years immediately following, and finally published in 1959, asserted that here and not there was the true concern of a Canadian writer. Her work contradicts Northrop Frye's generalization:

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'There have been many fables about people who made long journeys to find some precious object. The moral is often that the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is in their own backyard. But this is not the Canadian moral. The Canadian identity is bound up with the feeling that the end of the rainbow never falls on Canada.' 14 Sheila Watson was concerned with her own 'backyard,' and for her, breaking with the colonial mentality made her country no longer a backyard but the only possible centre. Confronted with living on the seeming periphery, the colonial writer must create a work that will be acceptable to those reading at the seeming centre. Hugh MacLennan recalled his thoughts when planning Barometer

Rising;.

When I first thought of writing this novel, Canada was virtually an unknown country. It seemed to me then that if our literature was to be anything but purely regional in character, it must be directed to at least two audiences. One was the Canadian public, which took the Canadian scene for granted but had never defined its particular essence. The other was the international public, which had never thought about Canada at all, and knew nothing whatever about us. 15 Although MacLennan stopped shunning his own world as the setting for his fiction, he remained preoccupied, as did his generation, with making his world acceptable to a metropolitan centre perceived to lie elsewhere. Sheila Watson, writing about her native British Columbia, knew too well the dilemma of the colonial artist. British Columbia was emblematic of the land's colonialism; even its name denotes the colonial mentality. The

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province, remote from whatever may seem to be the centre of Canada, also shared Canada's own remoteness from the imperial centre. The British Columbia where Watson was born and educated was conscious of its status as province and colony, firm in its belief that whatever is significant takes place elsewhere. The Doub/,e Hook, often considered the beginning of modern fiction in Canada, is, more accurately, the beginning of the post-colonial voice in Canadian fiction. In writing her novel, Watson rejected regionalism, the seeming emancipatory force in the development of Canadian fiction, as confining or limiting: I began the writing of The Doub/,e Hook as an answer to a challenge ... a challenge that you could not write about particular places in Canada: that what you'd end up with was a regional novel of some kind. It was at the time, I suppose, when people were thinking that if you wrote a novel it had to be, in sorrie mysterious way, international. It had to be about what I would call something else. And so I thought, I don't see why: how do you ... how are you international if you're not international? if you're very provincial, very local, and very much a part of your own milieu. 16 Her novel became an anti-regional novel, rejecting the colonial implications of regionalism and denying any difference in the life lived in the local community and the life lived at the centre. Set in the then remote Cariboo area of central British Columbia, The Double Hook is, on the simplest level, a typical western, but a western that does reflect the communities where westerns are supposed to take place. Gone are the saloon gunfights of Ralph Connor's westerns. On

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the opening page of The Doubk Hook James's mother is killed: In the folds of the hills under Coyote's eye lived the old lady, mother of William of James and of Greta lived James and Greta lived William and Ara his wife lived the Widow Wagner the Widow's girl Lenchen the Widow's boy lived Felix Prosper and Angel lived Theophil and Kip

until one morning in July Greta was at the stove. Turning hotcakes. Reaching for the coffee beans. Grinding away James's voice. James was at the top of the stairs. His hand halfraised. His voice in the rafters. James was walking away. The old lady falling. There under the jaw of the roof. In the vault of the bed loft. Into the shadow of death. Pushed by James's will. By James's hand. By James's words: This is my day. You'll not fish today. 17

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19

In a language totally new to Canadian fiction, the novel explores the guilt and fears of a family and a community. And James, who finally flees his community, returns in the final chapter to that community, aware, like Watson herself, that one cannot avoid the centrality of one's own world. Taking one family's plight in one local community and recounting it uncompromisingly and unapologetically, observing fidelity to every detail to show how this particular world parallels the patterns of all worlds, Watson makes her rural British Columbia tale a haunting evocation of literary and human patterns traditionally associated with the world's centres and other palaces. By skilful use of language, by mythic reference, by subtle rewriting of western material, she creates a fathomless study of life, death, and rebirth in a remote area of British Columbia. Here is the end of colonial writing and the assertive beginning of post-colonial fiction; here is the first naturalized Canadian novel, the first novel that is unselfconsciously Canadian. The Doubl.e Hook is an implicit declaration that true Canadian regionalism must be an unapologetic employment of the regional as the universal. In the early 196os, Earle Birney, at that time head of the Creative Writing Program he himself established at the University of British Columbia, always assigned one text to his students, The Double Hook. For Robert Kroetsch, the major critic of contemporary Canadian literature and the seminal figure in the western Canadian literary landscape, The Double Hook enabled us to see our new country.1 8 Contemporaneous with - and complementary to - The Double Hook's post-colonial declaration of here as an entity in and of itself was the appearance in Canadian fiction of ethnic voices, not newcomers to the New World, but residents who found their here in those ethnic pockets of Canadian life which were asserting themselves as sections of the country's literary mosaic. Adele Wiseman's The

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Sacrifice (1956) reflects its author's Eastern European Jewish heritage as it rewrites the Abraham and Isaac story in the Jewish north end of Winnipeg. In the following year appeared John Marlyn's Under the Ribs of Death, an examination of the Hungarian immigrant community of Winnipeg. And Mordecai Richter marked off the urban Jewish ghetto of Montreal's Saint Urbain Street as his particular literary setting in his two novels Son of a Small,er Hero (1955) and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959). No sooner was here a seemingly defined entity than the entity itself was expanding to include ethnic cultures outside the hitherto accepted mainstream of Canadian life and fiction. As Frye observed: The writers of the last decade [the 1950s], at least, have begun to write in a world which is post-Canadian, as it is post-American, post-British, and post everything except the world itself. There are no provinces in the empire 9f aeroplane and television, and no physical separation from the centres of culture, such as they are. 19 This new confidence in the importance of here is acknowledged by and reflected in a new textual confidence in the importance of the past that was here. For many years Canada and its literature were preoccupied with the future; it is natural that a colony looks to the future, for that is the realm of its possible maturity. In 1904, Wilfrid Laurier, then prime minister, boasted: 'The nineteenth century was the century of the United States. I think we can claim that it is Canada that shall fill the twentieth century. ' 20 A similar future orientation dominates Canadian fiction prior to the 196os. For the characters of Ralph Connor's fiction, the future is the wished-for time after their novels' conclusions, when the settled land

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will be a real home. For the pioneering settlers in prairie fiction, the future offers a similar dream. Even for the characters of MacLennan's national novels of the 1940s, the future is important as the location of Canada's maturity. And the 1950s ended with Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, whose title looks forward to a time when apprenticeship has been served. With a new and self-confident acceptance of here, fiction writers embarked on an examination or exhumation of the Canadian past, and this development underlines the acceptance of cultural maturity and the consequent move from colonial to post-colonial. The new preoccupation with the past is a search for heritages and traditions a colonial mentality could not even imagine. Canada's history, for example, stands behind Margaret Atwood's The Journals of Susanna Moodie ( 1970) and Margaret Laurence's The Diviners (1974), where the uncovering of the personal and the public past is the narrators' and the authors' essential journey. As the narrators identify with nineteenth-century Ontario writers, they resuscitate the cultural traditions that preceded them. A complex portrait of the growth of a writer, The Diviners is a Bildungsroman, or, more accurately, a Kilnstkrroman, a novel that records the growth, education, and maturing of an individual who is a writer or another kind of artist, and by so doing validates the personal and cultural past that has produced the artist. And it is not uncommon, therefore, for this form of novel to contain a degree of autobiography. In a New World literature, the Kunst/,erroman becomes a further reflection of its literature's accepted selfhood. And Canada has been obsessed with the form since the early 196os. There are Leonard Cohen's The Favourite Game (1g63), which includes the author's own poetry now ascribed to his hero, Lawrence Breavman; Mordecai Rich-

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ler's Saint Urbain's Horseman (1971), his Kiinstkrroman of writer Jake Hersh's recollections of his formative years in Montreal's Jewish ghetto and his subsequent residence in England; and Alden Nowlan's short-story cycle, Various Persons Named Kevin O'Brien (1973). Even more significant at this time are the female reworkings of the Kiinstlerroman in Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women (1971), Sylvia Fraser's Pandora (1972), Laurence's The Diviners (1974), and Atwood's Lady Orade (1976), the only previous Canadian female Kiinstkrroman being Montgomery's Emily of New Moon (1923). Such portraits of the seed-soil of Canadian writers, so prevalent in the 1970s and continuing, of course, into the present, are a final testimony to the self-consciousness and maturity of Canadian fiction, which are possible only in a land that has embraced its post-colonial status through its new sense of a self-defined here. The Canadian Kiinstkrroman is distant from early twentieth-century Canadian fiction less in time than in its sense of place. Those early works made the natural and unchallenged assumption that there, the metropolitan centre, was the real world, and here, defined by its marginalized connection to there, was only a province or colony. In the 1950s, the emergence of ethnic voices and, more importantly, the explicit challenge to the metropolitan centre embodied in The Doub/,e Hook confirmed the previously marginalized as the definite and defined centre. As James Potter, the protagonist of The Doub/,e Hook, learned, and as Sheila Watson herself knew, life confronts us where we live it, and here is now where the fiction is. Canadian fiction's search into its own collective history and the self-conscious form of the Kiinstkrroman are further testimony to the maturity of a fiction that had begun only a few decades earlier. 'Even when a substantial body of texts has been written

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23

in the settler colony,' observe the authors of The Empire Writes Back, 'the task of compiling a national literary history has usually been an important element in the establishment of an independent cultural identity. Histories of this kind have, therefore, been important landmarks in the critical history of many of the settler colony literatures. ' 21 The year 1965 saw the appearance of the encyclopedic Literary History of Canada, a forty-chapter summation of Canada's literary accomplishments until 1960. It was in his famous conclusion to this mammoth compilation that Northrop Frye first observed that the Canadian sensibility is 'less perplexed by the question of "Who am I?" than by some such riddle as ''Where is here?"' But this Literary History closed its survey at the end of the 1950s, and the insightful accuracy of Frye's observation on earlier literature should not blind historians to the fact that the 1950s were the time when Canada's colonial literary mentality gave way to a post-colonial mentality no longer obsessed or even perplexed by the meaning of here. Canadian fiction's new understanding of here, an independent understanding not based on a comparison with there, found its symbolic embodiment in Expo 67. As he opened the fair, the then prime minister, Lester B. Pearson, defined its importance: 'The lasting impact of Expo 67 will be in the dramatic object lesson we see before our eyes today - that the genius of man knows no national boundaries, but is universal.' But Expo had a special significance for Canadians, as Pearson noted: 'Anyone who says we aren't a spectacular people should see this. We are witness today to the fulfillment of one of the most daring acts of faith in Canadian enterprise and ability ever undertaken. ' 22 The countries that used to be there were now coming here. Here, a defined space, was now home to there, the imperial nations now seeking exhibit space in their former colony.

24

Beyond the Provinces

But where is Canadian fiction as the century nears its end? Harold Innis described Canadian history as the movement from colony to nation to colony. We might well describe the history of Canadian literature, especially as we see it in the twentieth century, as the movement from colony to nation to global village, a global village being a nation beyond nationalism, where the nation's voices are so multifaceted that the distinction between international and national is no longer valid. Take, for example, the four novels that have won the Governor General's Award thus far in the 1990s. What do they have in common besides winning the award and being, both before and after the award announcement, critical and popular successes? The winning novel for 1990 was Lives of the Saints, a first novel by Nino Ricci. Set in Valle del Sole, a tiny mountain village hidden away in the folds of the Italian Apennines, the novel is seven-year-old Vittorio Innocente's story of his mother, Cristina, who is bitten by a green snake in their barn while she is having a clandestine rendezvous with a mysterious blue-eyed stranger. Through Vittorio's personal reflections and confusions, we glimpse the hypocrisy and malice of the town, the superstitions that still haunt the seemingly devout and not-so-devout Catholics, and, above all, the defiance of his devoted mother. Born in southwestern Ontario in 1959, Ricci sets his entire novel in Italy, the tragic climax occurring on board a ship headed ultimately for 'a new part of America called Canada.' 23 There is some confusion in Cristina's mind about her ultimate destination; she longs only for the New World, the Promised Land where her husband is trying to make a living for his family. The jury for the Governor General's Award offered the following citation in its selection of this novel:

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25

Lives of the Saints is an exquisite novel, precise and wonderful in its evocative portrayal of the inhabitants of a village in the Italian Apennines. The central figure, Cristina, an independent woman out of place in a society that attempts to repress her, is unforgettable. A strong, new voice in Canadian literature.

The Governor General's Award for fiction for 1991 went to Rohinton Mistry's novel, Such a Longjourncy, which was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Born in Bombay in 1952, Mistry emigrated to Canada in 1975. Set in 1971 Bombay with its turbulent national politics complemented by worse tensions on the international level, Such a Long journey teems with the life of Bombay and the many Dickensian characters who travel its streets. The protagonist, Gustad Noble, a dedicated and somewhat innocent bank clerk, finds his familial and professional lives unravelling as his son eschews filial piety, his best friend involves him in political intrigue, and his own rationality and morality confront a world of change. The jury for the Governor General's Award praised Such a Long journey: 'The book's most remarkable achievements are its truthfulness of character, its sense of human connectedness and its largeness of vision.' Mistry's novel contains no reference to Canada. The Governor General's Award for fiction for 1992 went to Michael Ondaatje's third novel, The English Patient, which also won the Booker Prize. Born in Sri Lanka in 1943, Ondaatje emigrated to England in 1954 and moved eight years later to Canada. Set in the closing moments of the Second World War in a deserted villa in Tuscany, The English Patient is the story of Hana, a twenty-year-old nurse, who remains in the crumbling villa that once served as a temporary field hospital. In an upstairs room

Beyond the Provinces lies the English patient, capable of speech but not of movement. Despite the military evacuation of the villa, Hana refuses to leave, preferring to care for this one patient as a means, perhaps, of confronting the many deaths she has already seen in the war hospitals. Into this strangely exotic setting come two other figures, a former allied agent named Caravaggio, who knew Hana as a child in Toronto, and a young Sikh named Kip, who has come to clear the area of enemy mines. The stories of their pasts connect them in the present as they become witnesses to the end of the war. The jury for the Governor General's Award penned the following brief citation: 'Ondaatje's novel is remarkable for a pyrotechnics of language that takes us as travellers into the world of desert winds and imminent explosions.' And in 1993 the Governor General's Award went to Carol Shields's The Stone Diaries, also a nominee for the Booker Prize, the chronicle of a woman's life in Manitoba and Ontario, Indiana and Florida, and the Orkney Islands. Born in Illinois, Shields moved in 1957 to Canada, where she has distinguished herself as poet, critic, and fiction writer. 'A bold compounding of novelistic and autobiographical techniques distinguishes this impressive work,' the Governor General's jury wrote in commending The Stone Diaries. 'The book combines raw sorrow and simple pleasure, history, and the realized moment from birth to benediction.' Here are four honoured Canadian novels of the first years of the century's final decade. Like the fiction of Ralph Connor, Lucy Maud Montgomery, and Stephen Leacock of nearly a century ago, these novels have been published in Canada as well as in the United States and England. A major difference is that they found their first and major publication with Canadian firms, whereas the

The Old Countries Recede

27

earlier writers found their major publishers abroad, with their Canadian publishers buying copies from the American or British publisher or borrowing the original plates. Moreover, what distinguishes these novels is not simply their success but the critical reaction to them both abroad and, more importantly, at home. These novels are Canadian novels, and no critic has questioned this designation. A remote Italian village in the early 1g6os, Bombay in 1971, a nearly deserted Tuscan villa at the end of the Second World War, and the Canadian prairies and the American midwest in the last one hundred years: such are the settings of the four novels, and no one has commented on the relative absence of Canada from them.'Where is here?' Northrop Frye might well ask, but with a different and perhaps ironic tone. For the late twentieth-century Canadian writer, here is now an indefinable area, encompassing Canada and the world, an area with no centre and therefore no periphery, with neither the possibility nor even the need of definition. The twentieth century has been a relatively short but spectacular journey both for Canada and for its fiction. Through the colonial voices of Connor, Montgomery, and Leacock, each of them conscious of being on the circumference, and through the fiction of MacLennan, written both for the people on the circumference and, more importantly, for the people he envisioned at the supposed centre, Canadian fiction moved at mid-century to embrace a self-sufficiency in place, a here defined without reference to there. Now, at century's end, the here of Canadian fiction is not defined but indefinable. The earlier obsession with the question 'Where is here?' has faded into memory, a question no longer necessary, valid, or even appropriate.

NOTES

1 'Protection for Canadian Literature,' The New Era, 24 April 1858, [2] 2 'The Mental Outfit of the New Dominion,' 1825 - D'.Arcy McGee 1925: A CoUection of Speeches and Addresses, ed. Charles Murphy (Toronto: Macmillan 1937), 16--17 3 'Conclusion,' Literary HistO'ry of Canada, ed. Carl F. Klinck (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1965), 826 4 'Defrosting Canadian Culture,' American Mercury 74 (1952), 94 5 The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (Toronto: House of Anansi Press 1971), iii 6 Corporal Cameron of the North West MO'Unted Police: A Tal,e of the MacLeod Trail (Toronto: Westminster 1912), 3o6-8 7 Chronides of Avonl,ea (Boston: L.C. Page 1912), 126, 117, 2, 13, 12 8 Sunshine Sketches of a Littl,e Town (Toronto: Bell and Cockburn 1912), xii 9 Ibid., 4-5 10 The Robber Bride (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1993), 241 11 'Literature and Education in America,' Essays and Literary Studies (London:John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1916), 55 12 'The National Literature Problem in Canada,' Canadian Mercury 1 (December 1928), 9 13 The Greatest Pages of American Humor (Garden City, NY: Sun Dial Press 1936), 23 14 'View of Canada: Never a Believer in a Happy Ending,• TO'ronto Globe and Mai~ 6 April 1976, 7 15 'My First Book,' Canadian Author and Bookman 28 (Summer_ 1952), 3 16 'What I'm Going to Do,' open Letter3/1 (Winter 1974-5), 182 17 The Doubl,e Hook (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1959), 13 18 Robert Kroetsch, 'Hugh MacLennan: An Appreciation,' Hugh MacLennan: 1982, ed. Elspeth Cameron (Toronto: University College 1982), 135 19 'Conclusion,' 848 20 'First Annual Banquet [18January 1904],' Addresses Delivered Before

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29

the Canadian Club of Ottawa: 1903-1909, ed. Gerald H. Brown (Ottawa: The Mortimer Press 1910), 15 21 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffen, The Empire Writes Back (New York and London: Routledge 1989), 133 22 Time 89/18 (5 May 1g67), 48 23 Lives of the Saints (Dunvegan, ON: Cormorant Books 1990), 162

TWO

The Dispassionate Witness

... anti-environments are indispensable for making an environment understandable. Marshall McLuhan 'Canada: The Borderline Case'

The Dispassionate Witness A colonial Canadian literature had to separate itself from England and the United States as the country's literary selfhood asserted itself. The more complex of these separations involved Canada's relationship to the United States, once, like Canada, a colony of England, but, unlike Canada, a republic that had asserted itself through a revolution and a constitution. Two colonies, then, on one continent, one no longer a colony and the other struggling to emerge from a colonial mentality. Only seldom in the pages of American literature do Canada or Canadians play a role. It is my conviction, however, that this role is a significant one, in which the Canadian serves as a dispassionate witness. This role anticipates a major dimension of the Canadian literary voice as it later emancipates itself from its provincial past. While Sheila Watson was writing The Double Hook as a response to the prevailing colonial mentality in Canadian fiction in 1950, the five members of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, more commonly known as the Massey Commission after its chairman, Vincent Massey, were travelling across the country, assessing Canada's cultural life. Submitted on 1 June 1951, their Reportwas a taking of the nation's cultural pulse. In the area of radio broadcasting and the new medium of television, the Report is anti-American. 'In the early days of broadcasting,' it notes, 'Canada was in real danger of cultural annexation to the United States. Action taken on radio broadcasting by governments representing all parties made it possible for her to maintain her cultural identity.' So far Canadian broadcasting has 'met with tolerable success in combating commercialization and excessive

34

Beyond the Provinces

Americanization of Canadian programmes.' Again and again commercialization and Americanization become synonymous: 'only a national organization protects the nation from excessive commercialization and Americanization,' and one of the functions of the CBC is the 'successful resistance to the absorption of Canada into the general cultural pattern of the United States.'' Such conclusions, however, stand beside a series of abashed remarks about Canada's indebtedness to its southern neighbour. The Report salutes American financial investment in Canada's cultural life: We are thus deeply indebted to American generosity. Money has flowed across the border from such groups as the Carnegie Corporation, which has spent $7,346,188 in Canada since 1911 and the Rockefeller Foundation, to which we are indebted for the sum of $11,817,707 since 1914. There are other institutions from whose operations we benefit such as the Guggenheim· Foundation and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Through their generosity countless individuals have enjoyed opportunities for creative work or for further cultivation of their particular field of study. Applied with wisdom and imagination, these gifts have helped Canadians to live their own life and to develop a better Canadianism. 2 When the Report examines the National Gallery, it is in the light of specific American galleries. And the Report notes that the three best collections of Canadian books 'in the world are now in the United States, in the Library of Congress, in the New York Public Library and in the Library of Harvard University.' 3 The Massey Commission found itself trapped, then,

The Dispassionate Witness

35

between fear and envy of the United States: 'The urbane influences of Carnegie and Rockefeller have helped us to be ourselves; Hollywood refashions us in its own image. ' 4 Such self-contradicting ambivalence is always evident: American influences on Canadian life to say the least are impressive. There should be no thought of interfering with the liberty of all Canadians to enjoy them. Cultural exchanges are excellent in themselves. They widen the choice of the consumer and provide stimulating competition for the producer. It cannot be denied, however, that a vast and disproportionate amount of material coming from a single alien source may stifle rather than stimulate our own creative effort, and, passively accepted without any standard of comparison, this may weaken critical faculties. We are now spending millions to maintain a national independence which would be nothing but an empty shell without a vigorous and distinctive cultural life. We have seen that we have its elements in our traditions and in our history; we have made important progress, often aided by American generosity. We must not be blind, however, to the very present danger of permanent dependence. 5 Calling itself in its introduction 'this general picture of American influence on our cultural life, ' 6 the Massey Report reflects the ambivalence towards the United States, which permeated mid-century cultural nationalism. In its observations on literature, the Massey Report concludes that Canada has no 'national literature,' no writings that reflect 'the interests, the ideals and the character of the people.' By contrast, 'the literature of the United States, which in the last thirty years has acquired

Beyond the Provinces an increasing international reputation, exercises an impact which is beneficial in many respects no doubt, but which, at the same time, may be almost overpowering. ' 7 On the matter of overcoming the dreaded American influence, the Report refuses to take sides. American influence might be defeated 'by more energetic efforts to maintain those fundamental characteristics common to the literatures of Great Britain and France.' 8 At the same time, however, many Canadians 'deplore the respect paid to those principles and forms which come to us from Europe as literary survivals of the spirit of colonialism.' 9 In denying the existence of a Canadian literature, the Massey Report sees literature itself wholly in American terms of reference, rooting its understanding in an appreciation of the development of American literature as an expression of 'the interests, the ideals and the character' of the American people and, perhaps more importantly, in an appreciation of the current international stature of American literature. Had the commission been less colonial in its approach to the literary scene, and had it been more familiar with American literature, it might have detected a Canadian presence in that literature which anticipated the Canadian literary voice that was by the 1950s already defining itself. There are two dominant patterns in American literature's presentation of the Canadian. On the one hand, there is the Canadian as North American colonial, the inhabitant of an anachronistic world soon, perhaps, to awaken to its need to throw off its colonialism and embrace the republican independence of the United States. On the other hand, there is the subversive and more lasting pattern of the Canadian as North American other, the inhabitant of a unique world that provides a necessary perspective on, and an alternative to, its southern neighbour. The Canadian as North American other

The Dispassionate Witness

37

is a dispassionate witness, secure in his or her own world and capable of observing, with careful and caring objectivity, the dreams and the disintegration of the United States. In the early nineteenth century, the United States itself was still suffering the literary pangs of colonial status. In 1820, three-quarters of the books Americans bought were of British origin. 10 Two decades later, William Gilmore Simms looked back on the 1820s: 'At that period America had no literature.Just before this time, or about this time, it was the favourite sarcasm of the British Reviewers that such a thing as an American book was never read.' 11 Into this seeming literary void came James Fenimore Cooper, whose second novel, The Spy, was published in 1822 to popular success both at home and abroad, and was translated into French the same year. When his third novel, The Pioneers, the first of the Leatherstocking quintet, was published the following year, one critic defiantly asserted that the book would 'be read by tens of thousands even in Great Britain.' 12 The five Leatherstocking novels depict the United States from the mid-eighteenth century - before its independence from England - to the early nineteenth century. Transferred from the Old World to a new wilderness and cut off from the negative influences of the old country, their hero, Leatherstocking or Natty Bumppo, has the capacity to demonstrate his innate morality and goodness. Cooper's epic hero is 'the American Adam, who combines prelapsarian virtue with postlapsarian knowledge' in a wilderness far from Edenic. 13 While chronicling Natty's and America's - relentless march westward to tame and civilize a continent, Cooper rarely acknowledges the land to the north, though when he does, he shows a clear and consistent attitude. From the earliest description of Canada in The Leather-

Beyond the Provinces stocking Taks as 'that polar region of royal sunshine' in contrast to 'this infant country' of America with its 'unfettered liberty of conscience, " 4 Cooper regards Canada, or, more accurately, New France and later the Canadas, as a colonial outpost which stands in pitiable contrast to its more enlightened and independent southern neighbour. Still, from his perspective as a post-revolutionary writer, Cooper shows little sense of difference between the two worlds that comprise the continent. There is a single continent, and 'Providence is clearing the way for the advancement of civilization across [it] .' 15 But there is a sense of freedom in the United States which is absent from a land still inhabited by colonists. And the northern land, at least in The Deerslayer (set in about 1740), The Pathfinder (in 1756), and The Last of the Mohicans (in 1757), is 'the country of the Frenchers,' 16 the home of the wicked Montcalm, who, in The Last of the Mohicans, instigates and oversees the slaughterous destruction of Fort William Henry. This 'chief of the Canadas' is a wily and cruel leader who will use 'his Indians' to his evil ends, 'a whooping, murdering set of varlets has he gathered together!' ' 7 Although there would seem to be little difference between 'the Canadian savages" 8 and the native people south of the border, Cooper paints the northern savages as more malign and less civilized than their southern counterparts. And his arch-villain, the sly and cunning Maqua of The Last of the Mohicans, is a renegade Huron, a Canadian: 'his Canada fathers came into the woods, and taught him to drink the fire-water, and he became a rascal.'' 9 But Maqua is more than a rascal; he is the most savage of all the savages. His 'dark form and malignant visage' intimidate and dominate everyone, including even Montcalm, so much so that 'the deep, guttural laugh of the savage, sounded ... like the hellish taunt of a demon. ' 20

The Dispassionate Witness

39

The 'Canadian savages,' so often in collusion with the French who rule Canada, have no opportunity to profit from the more civilized and civilizing world to their south. Canada itself remains a colonial outpost in need, too, of that southern enlightenment which, Cooper implies, would replace the colonialism of the north with the freedom of the south. In his early fiction, William Dean Howells continued the Cooper tradition that defined Canada as a colony, though now its value rests as a living anachronism catering to American tourists in search of an old and discarded European world on their own continent. His first novel, Their Wedding journey (1872), recounts the postponed honeymoon of a Boston couple who travel to New York by train; up the Hudson River by steamer to Albany; from Albany by train to Niagara Falls; and then home again via Kingston, Montreal, and Quebec City. Canada provides the honeymooners with a glimpse of the Old World. Kingston is 'a handsome place, substantial to the water's edge, and giving a sense of English solidity by the stone of which it is largely built. ' 21 Its residents are 'English or Irish or Scotch, with the beautiful blo·om of the Old World still upon their faces. ' 22 Such quaint people have not embraced the capitalistic ambitions of the Americans: It was observable of the officers and crew of the Banshee, that while they did not hold themselves aloof from the passengers in the disdainful American manner, they were of feeble mind, and not only did everything very slowly (in the usual Canadian fashion), but with an inefficiency that among us would have justified them in being insolent. 23 In Montreal, the American tourists care less for the modern splendour of the city 'than for the remnants of

40

Beyond the Provinces

its past, and for the features that identified it with another faith and another people than their own. ' 24 The narrator is led to wonder if the Canadians did not make it a matter of conscientious loyalty to out-English the English even in the matter of pale-ale and sherry, and in rotundity of person and freshness of face, just as they emulated them in the cut of their clothes and whiskers. Must they found even their health upon the health of the mother-country? 25 He can observe that 'the social heart of the colony clings fast to the mother-country, that is plain, whatever the political tendency may be; and the public monuments and inscriptions celebrate their affectionate union. ' 26 Here, in anglophone Montreal as in Kingston, 'was a people not cut off from its past, but holding, unbroken in life and death, the ties which exist for us only in history.' 27 This note of envy, however, is short-lived. Howells also reveals disdain for the colonial world: its overweening loyalty placed a great country like Canada in a very silly attitude, the attitude of an overgrown, unmanly boy, clinging to the maternal skirts, and though spoilt and willful, without any character of his own. The constant reference of local hopes to that remote centre beyond the seas, the test of success by the criterions of a necessarily different civilization, the social and intellectual dependence implied by traits that meet the most hurried glance in the Dominion, give an effect of meanness to the whole place. Doubtless it is a life of comfort, of peace, of irresponsibility they live there, but it lacks the grandeur which no sum of material prosperity can give; it

The Dispassionate Witness

41

is ignoble, like all voluntarily subordinate things. Somehow, one feels that it has no basis in the New World, and that till it is shaken loose from England it cannot have. 28 Yet the Old World is still attractive to the former colonists of the United States. In Quebec City, the narrator is forced to wonder: 'How often in the adored Old World, which we so love and disapprove, had they driven in through such gates at that morning houri ' 29 In his second novel, A Chance Acquaintance ( 1873), Howells returns for a second and final time to a Canadian setting. His extended use of Quebec City further presents the locale as a living anachronism, more fictional than real, a curiosity for the American visitor. The inhabitants of Quebec City were new, and yet oddly familiar, for she had long known them in the realm of romance. The peasantwomen who went by, in hats of felt or straw, some on foot with baskets, and some in their light marketcarts, were all, in their wrinkled and crooked age or their fresh-faced, strong-limbed youth, her friends since childhood in many a tale of France or Germany; and the black-robed priests, who mixed with the passers on the narrow wooden sidewalk, and now and then courteously gave way, or lifted their widerimmed hats in a grave, smiling salutation, were more recent acquaintances, but no less intimate. They were out of old romances about Italy and Spain. 30 The city is nothing more than 'a very pretty illusion of the Old World,' and one character confesses: 'It is like Europe ... It's quite the atmosphere of foreign travel, and you ought to be able to realize the feelings of a tourist.' 31

42

Beyond the Provinces

A tourist Mecca which promises Americans a comforting taste of the Old World, Canada is a constant reminder of the colonial world they have rejected. Yet Howells is ambivalent: the inhabitant of a former colony, he feels affection and disdain for Canada, though he does not envision or hope for its annexation to his own country:

It would be a pity, however, if it should be parted from the parent country merely to be joined to an unsympathetic half-brother like ourselves; and nothing, fortunately, seems to be further from the Canadian mind. There are some experiments no longer possible to us which could still be tried there to the advantage of civilization, and we were better two great nations side by side than a union of discordant traditions and ideas. 32 Many nineteenth-century American writers shared Howells's understanding of Canada as a colonial outpost, but they did not all subscribe to his conviction that the North American continent profited from the existence of two distinct nations. Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example, saw little distinction between the two countries, even though he realized that Canadians did not share his opinion. In his 1836 sketch 'An Ontario Steam-Boat,' he observes a Canadian family: There was good company, assuredly; - among others, a Canadian judge, with his two daughters, whose stately beauty and bright complexions made me proud to feel that they were my countrywomen; though I doubt whether these lovely girls would have acknowledged that their country was the same as mine. The inhabitants of the British provinces have not yet acquired the sentiment of brotherhood

The Dispassionate Witness

43

or sisterhood, towards their neighbours of the States. 33 Henry James, while admitting in 1871 that 'it is of good profit to us Americans to have near us, and of easy access, an ample something which is not our expansive selves,' echoed the annexationist sentiment: 'I suppose no patriotic American can look at all these things [the unique dimensions of Canada], however idly, without reflecting on the ultimate possibility of their becoming absorbed into his own huge state.' 34 And Walt Whitman's four-month stay in Canada in 1880 convinced him of the absence of national distinctions: 'From what I already see, I should say the young native population of Canada was growing up, forming a hardy, democratic, intelligent, radically sound, and just as American, good-natured and individualistic race, as the average range of best specimens among us.' In his buoyant continentalism, he concludes: 'It seems to me a certainty of time, sooner or later, that Canada shall form two or three grand States, equal and independent, with the rest of the American Union. The St Lawrence and the lakes are not for a frontier line, but a grand interior or mid-channel.' 35 Such attitudes are a natural extension and consequence of the nineteenth-century American conception of Canada as colonial outpost, if not threatening, at least anomalous to the former colony in its allegiance to the mother country. In contrast to the Canadian as North American colonial is the more significant and lasting pattern of the Canadian as North American other, the inhabitant of a unique world that is, initially, an alternative to, and sometimes better than, that of the United States. And from this pattern, which has persisted through contemporary American literature, emerges the figure of the Canadian as dispas-

44

Beyond the Provinces

sionate witness of the other culture that shares the continent. It was Longfellow's Evangeline, published in 1847, that constructed a romantic image of Canada: in the American imagination. It had been Hawthorne who was first invited 'to write a Story, based upon a legend of Acadie, and still current there; the legend of a girl, who in the dispersion of the Acadians, was separated from her lover, and passed her life in waiting and seeking for him, and only finding him dying in a hospital, when both were old.' Hawthorne declined, however, perhaps because he could not adapt a story that demanded the presentation of a North American world so different from his own land. Longfellow is then reported to have asked him: 'If you have really made up your mind not to use it for a story, will you give it to me for a poem?' 36 Against the backdrop of the deportation of the Acadians is the saintly figure of Evangeline, the embodiment of the innocence and long sufferings of her Acadian people at the hands of the cruel and heartless British imperialists. She 'stands clothed with the moral authority of the innocent sufferer, an Eve from Paradise lost through no proven original sin. Her story both gives and gains strengths from being recounted in the context of Acadian life. ' 37 Acadie is a prelapsarian world: 'Thus dwelt together in love these simple Acadian farmers, - / Dwelt in the love of God and man. Alike were they free from/ Fear, that reigns with the tyrant, and envy, the vice of republics. ' 38 Acadie, and by extension Canada itself, became Arcadia, an idyllic world that had long since disappeared from the industrialized and expansionist United States. The poem was an immediate success: in its first year, it sold out 5 editions, and in its first hundred years, it went through 270 editions and at least 130 translations, including - within the first decade of its publication - German,

The Dispassionate Witness

45

Polish, French, Danish, Swedish, Dutch, and Italian. Evangeline haunted even the heroine of Howells's A Chance Acquaintance, who described her reaction to Quebec City: 'I don't know whether I cared more for Quebec, or for the beautiful little villages in the country all about it. The whole landscape looks just like a dream of "Evangeline. '" 39 What did it matter if Longfellow had never been to Nova Scotia? (Nor would he ever go there.) What did it matter if his portrait of the Acadians was coloured by his own earlier article on the idyllic existence he had found among peasants in Sweden?40 Evangeline created a new tourist boom for Nova Scotia and a protracted debate about the poem's historical accuracy. More importantly, it gave Canada a romantic literary image, which provided an alternative, albeit an elegiac one, to Longfellow's own country. In Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncl,e Tom's Cabin, little Eva, the saintly daughter of Augustine St Clair, takes her name from Evangeline, and though her father is 'the son of a wealthy planter of Louisiana,' their 'family had its origin in Canada. ' 41 For Stowe, Canada is the alternative to the United States, a better land where freedom and prosperity are available to all races. More mythic than real, it functions as an ideal which underlines the social injustices of its southern neighbour. The purpose of the novel, its author states, 'is to awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race, as they exist among us.' 42 For this race, Canada is the New Jerusalem, the land of Canaan, as one character observes, the earthly embodiment of the freedom promised in the Bible. Eliza asks Uncle Tom to tell her husband, George, 'I'm going to try and find Canada.' 43 And later she confesses to Senator Bird's wife that she means to make her way to 'Canada, if I only knew where that was. Is it very far off, is Canada?' 44

Beyond the Provinces Eliza's husband understands in explicitly anti-American terms that Canada is the only land he can embrace: Do you call these the laws of my country? Sir, I have n't any country, any more than I have any father. But I'm going to have one. I don't want anything of your country, except to be let alone, - to go peaceably out of it; and when I get to Canada, where the laws will own me and protect me, that shall be my country, and its laws I will obey. 45 Fearful of his own possible death, he begs the kindly Mr Wilson to send a small pin to his wife, Eliza: 'Tell her one thing, ... it's my last wish, if she can get to Canada, to go there.' 46 George and Eliza are reunited, and they set up their new home in Montreal. But Canada, the New Jerusalem, does not satisfy them. 'But I have considered,' George writes to one of his friends, 'and counted the cost. I go to Liberia, not as to an Elysium of romance, but as to a field of work. ' 47 Like Longfellow and Howells, Stowe makes her mythic Canada 'an Elysium of romance,' and a forceful repudiation of her own country. Like Evangeline, Uncl,e Tom's Cabin was an immediate success. First published as a book in mid-1852, it sold 3,000 copies on the day of publication and 300,000 by the end of the year, and by the end of the decade it had been translated into twenty-two languages. Stowe confirmed the view of Canada as an alternative world to the United States, a better land whose differences served as a lesson to the less enlightened American people. In American literature, Canada has continued to function as such an alternative, beckoning citizens to the south to a different and better world. More recently, Chief Brom den in Ken Kesey' s One Fl,ew Over the Cuckoo's

The Dispassionate Witness

47

Nest ( l 962) dreams of finding his ultimate freedom north of the border. And, in an interesting variation on this pattern, Rick Deckard, the hero of Philip K. Dick's science-fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep 7 ( 1968), better known by the title of its cinematic version, Blade Runner, dreams of a flight north, 'the uninhabited desolation to the north. To the place where no living thing would go. Not unless it felt that the end had come.' 48 Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada ( 1976), though ostensibly set in the American South during the Civil War, breaks down temporal and spatial boundaries as its hero, Raven Quickskill, seeks in his flight to Canada an escape from slavery. 'I'm getting more and more interested in slavery as a metaphor for how blacks are treated in this civilization,' Reed observed. 'So I say to myself and the rest of us that we are going to get to our aesthetic Canada, no matter how many dogs they send after us.' 49 Reed's 'aesthetic Canada' is still Harriet Beecher Stowe's haven, though the real Canada falls far short of the ideal. Entering into an opening dialogue with Stowe herself, Reed's novel begins: 'Harriet caught some of it. She popularized the American novel and introduced it to Europe. Uncle Tom's Cabin. Writing is strange, though. That story caught up with her. The story she "borrowed"from]osiah Henson ... Harriet paid. Oh yes, Harriet paid. When you take a man's story, a story that doesn't belong to you, that story will get you. ' 50 Reappropriating the story, Reed satirizes contemporary Canada, the fallen ideal. 'Downtown St. Catherine's [sic], Ontario, looked like any American strip near any American airport; it could have been downtown San Mateo. Neon signs with clashing letters advertising hamburgers, used-car lots with the customary banners, coffee joints where you had to stand up and take your java from wax cups.' 51 'It's more barbarous in Toronto than darkest

Beyond the Provinces Africa,' one character complains. 52 In its decline Canada has been Americanized: Of the ten top Canadian corporations, four are dominated by American interests. Americans control fiftyfive percent of sales of manufactured goods and make sixty-three percent of the profits. They receive fiftyfive percent of mining sales and forty percent of paper sales. Man, Americans own Canada. They just permit Canadians to operate it for them. 511 For Reed and his characters, Canada no longer embodies the ideal alternative that beckoned the slaves of Uncl.e Tom's Cabin. Quickskill tells his girlfriend as they see the distant lights of Niagara Falls, Ontario: 'Ever since I was a kid, the old people talked about Canada. I have to have my Canada.' When he discovers the Americanized Canada, he falls into despair: 'All my life I had hopes about it, that whatever went wrong I would always have Canada to go to. ' 54 The novel ends with a rejection of the real Canada and a flight to the 'aesthetic Canada' which must continue to haunt and inspire the Black American imagination: 'Well, I guess Canada, like freedom, is a state of mind.' 55

Although late twentieth-century Canada, in its Americanized state, may have lost some of its otherness, the land still beckons, even if the image of Canada as an alternative is more metaphorical than real. As North American other, Canada provides both an alternative to and a commentary on the United States. Such a dimension is already evident in Uncl.e Tom's Cabin, where the avarice and cruelty of slave owners contrast all too clearly with the welcoming hospitality afforded the runaway fugitives north of the border. And as the expansionist fever of the nineteenth-century United States gave way to a reflective self-analysis in the twentieth century,

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American literature continued to turn to Canada and its unique ability to provide that necessary and detached perspective on its southern neighbour. In his earliest extant letters, F. Scott Fitzgerald, almost eleven years of age, wrote to his mother: 'I don't think you would like the accommodations as it is only a small town and no good hotels. There are some very nice boarding houses but about the only fare is lamb and beef. Please send me a dollar because there are a lot of little odds and ends I need. I will spend it cautiously. ' 56 The 'small town' is Orillia, Ontario, where Fitzgerald spent at least one summer during the decade that his parents lived in Buffalo and Syracuse. 57 In March 1917, Fitzgerald, then a student at Princeton University, wrote a letter to Stephen Leacock, Orillia's most famous summer resident: My Dear Mr. Leacock: As imitation is the sincerest flattery I thought you might be interested in something you inspired. The Nassau Literary Magazine here at Princeton of which I'm an editor got out a 'Chaopolitan number', as a burlesque of 'America's greatest magazine'. The two stories I wrote 'Jemina, a story of the Blue Ridge Mountains, by John Phlox Jr' and 'The Usual Thing' by 'Robert W. Shamless' are of the 'Leacock school' of humour - in factJemina is rather a steal in places from 'Hannah of the Highlands' I'm taking the liberty of sending you a copy needless to say it increased our circulation & standing in undergraduate eyes. Hope you'll get one smile out of it for every dozen laughs I got from the Snoopapaths Very appreciatively yours F. Scott Fizgerald58

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Beyond the Provinces

In admitting his indebtedness to Leacock, he acknowledges a familiarity with Leacock's writings, including possibly Sunshine Sketches of a Litt/,e Town, published a few years earlier. The young Fitzgerald, then, was familiar with Canada through his ten-year residence on the southern shores of Lake Ontario, through his summer or summers in Orillia, and through his knowledge of Leacock's humour. Although Fitzgerald's fiction does not abound with Canadian references, there are a few. In The Great Gatsuy ( 1925), for example, rumours persist about Gatsby's background: 'Contemporary legends such as the "underground pipe-line to Canada" attached themselves to him. ' 59 When his suspicious world begins to collapse, Nick Carraway, our guide into Gatsby's world, suggests to his neighbour: 'Go to Atlantic City for a week, or up to Montreal. •6o Though . not a Canadian but a Midwesterner, Nick Carraway is the kind of witness Canada can be to the United States. At the end of the novel, he offers his own version of the American dream. He is at once halfenchanted and half-appalled by the vastness, the vulgarity, and the meritriciousness of his neighbour, much as Canada has been caught between admiration and dismay in regarding its southern neighbour. Nick Carraway is an observer, a careful, indeed caring, witness to events. Like Fitzgerald, he explores and often exposes as failure the American dream of material success and happiness. He is a somewhat dispassionate witness whose degree of sympathy often threatens to undercut his detachment from Gatsby's world: 'I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.' 61 The Canadian as dispassionate witness is fully realized, however, in the fiction of William Faulkner. At the end of Absalmn, Absalmn! ( 1936) is a genealogy. The final entry reads:

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SHREVLIN MCCANNON.

Born, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, 1890. Attended Harvard, 1909-1914. Captain, Royal Army Medical Corps, Canadian Expeditionary Forces, France, 19141918. Now a practising surgeon, Edmonton, Alberta. 62 Shrevlin Mccannon, otherwise known as Shreve, Quentin Compson's Harvard College room-mate, the person who listens to Quentin's stories of the South, is an outsider to the Compson family and its world. Shreve is the only person listed in the genealogy who is not dead or whose whereabouts is not unknown. The entire cast of characters has disappeared, except for Shreve, the listener, the witness, the practising surgeon now engaged in his own work. In Faulkner's earlier novel The Sound and the Fury ( 1929), Shreve is already the questioner or, to use Marshall McLuhan's term, the 'prober.' Both he and Quentin are about the same age, sharing together the Harvard experience, to which both are outsiders. Almost a conscience to Quentin, Shreve raises the practical queS-:tions, prods his delinquent room-mate, and passes sympathetic judgment on his errant ways. In Absalom, Absalom!, Shreve has the pivotal role of listener to Quentin, who himself has been the listener to others. The many historical accounts of Faulkner's South come together in the person of Quentin: Faulkner seems to have decided ... to allow the separate narratives not only to retain but to proclaim their individuality, to have them told in self-contained units and in specifically regional and often dialectical voices, and to tie them together in terms of their common and no doubt cumulative impact upon the sensitive imagination and educated mind of Quentin Compson, who was at once (like Faulkner himself)

52

Beyond the Provinces ineluctably of the South and yet capable of seeing it, or of trying to see it, in wider, nonregional perspectives.63

Yet beside and behind Quentin stands his own listener, the observing and questioning Shreve, who tries to make sense both of the history and of Quentin's reaction to and place in it. Faulkner himself described Shreve as 'the commentator that held the thing to something of reality. If Quentin had been let alone to tell it, it would have become completely unreal. It had to have a solvent to keep it real, keep it believable, creditable, otherwise it would have vanished into smoke and fury.' 61 It had to have, in other words, a non-Southerner, a Northerner (as Shreve is so often described), a non-American Northerner, who gives Quentin a perspective on himself and his world. 'In this tomblike room in Massachusetts in 1910 ... The room was indeed tomblike: a quality stale and static and moribund beyond any mere vivid and living cold, '65 Shreve and Quentin face each other: Shreve, the Canadian, the child of blizzards and of cold in a bathrobe with an overcoat above it, the collar turned up about his ears; Quentin, the Southerner, the morose and delicate offspring of rain and steamy heat in the thin suitable clothing which he had brought from Mississippi. 66 The novel becomes their confrontation: the two of them not moving except to breathe, both young, both born within the same year: the one in Alberta, the other in Mississippi; born half a continent apart yet joined, connected after a fashion in a

The Dispassionate Witness

53

sort of geographical transubstantiation by that Continental Trough, that River which runs not only through the physical land of which it is the geologic umbilical, not only runs through the spiritual lives of the beings within its scope, but is very Environment itself which laughs at degrees of latitude and temperature, though some of these beings, like Shreve, have never seen it - the two of them who four months ago had never laid eyes on one another yet who since had slept in the same room and eaten side by side of the same food and used the same books from which to prepare to recite in the same freshman courses, facing one another across the lamplit table on which lay the fragile pandora's box of scrawled paper which had filled with violent and unratiocinactive djinns and demons this snug monastic coign, this dreamy and heatless alcove of what we call the best of thought. 'Just dont bother,' Shreve said. 'Just get on with it.'67 Shreve is the persistent questioner, refusing Quentin the luxury of avoiding confrontation with himself, his family, and his familial past; he is the constant factchecker, forcing Quentin to locate his story as accurately as possible in its time and place. Dispassionate, 'with thoughtful and intense curiosity,' he is, in his 'curious repressed calm voice,' the witness to Quentin's world, forced to watch it 'from the beginning with intent detached speculation and curiosity, to watch him still from behind his (Shreve's) expression of cherubic and erudite amazement which the spectacles intensified or perhaps actually created. ' 68 Canada is different from the United States, and, at last, Shreve makes Quentin face this fact, though, of course, he is the witness to the American scene, not a proselytizer for his own:

54

Beyond the Provinces

I would sure hate to have come from the South. Maybe I wouldn't come from the South anyway, even if I could stay there. Wait. Listen. I'm not trying to be funny, smart. I just want to understand it if I can and I dont know how to say it better. Because it's something my people haven't got. Or if we have got it, it all happened long ago across the water and so now there aint anything to look at every day to remind us of it. We dont live among defeated grandfathers and freed slaves (or have I got it backward and was it your folks that are free and the niggers that lost?) and bullets in the dining room table arid such, to be always reminding us to never forget. What is it? something you live and breathe in· like air? a kind of vacuum filled with wraithlike and indomitable anger and pride and glory at and in happenings that occurred and ceased fifty years ago? 69 Freed by this outburst, Shreve can confront Quentin with the final question: 'Now I want you to tell me just one thing more. Why do you hate the South?' 'I dont hate it,' Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; 'I dont hate it,' he said. I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it! 70 And so the novel ends, with Quentin's impassioned response to Shreve's dispassionate question. Absalom, Absalom! is, Faulkner admitted, 'incidentally the story of Quentin Compson's hatred of the bad qualities in the country he loves.' 71 And Shreve, Faulkner added, 'had a much truer picture' of this southern world 'from what Quentin told him than Quentin himself did. ' 72 In his dispassionateness, a dispassionateness born of distance,

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55

Shreve attains a perspective, an understanding, a comprehension that he can impart to his foreign subject and audience. In 'The Southern Quality,' his 1947 essay on the writers of the South, Marshall McLuhan, like his fellow Albertan Shreve Mccannon, showed his understanding of Faulkner's fictional universe: 'In a world of private lives, sceptical ambitions, and cynical egotisms, the aristocrat or the man of passion is helpless. In a world of merely material appetites his role is to suffer. That is why the world portrayed in the novels of the South is one of violence, passion, and death. ' 73 In the early 1950s, Flannery O'Connor was struggling to formulate her conception of the nature of fiction. And in 1954, she happened upon McLuhan's essay. 'I think H.M. McLuhan's piece in the Southern Vanguard is one good one,' she wrote to a friend. 'It possibly takes a Canadian to throw a sharper light on things here. ' 71 O'Connor was also one of the first to appreciate McLuhan's unique writing. Two years later she described The Mechanical Bride: ... it isn't comic or meant to be and it isn't sociology or written by a sociologist. To be understood, it has to be read completely and slowly, as McLuhan has a packed style. I will admit that occasionally he says something crudely funny - as when he calls the hero of the ad 'Big Barnsmell' - this seems just right to me I must admit but it's not why I appreciate the book. Also you can omit the little captions by the pictures. The meat is in the text and has to be read carefully. McLuhan teaches English at some Canadian Catholic college or used to, the last I heard. A friend of mine was telling me that there is a fictional portrait of him in Wyndham Lewis' novel, Seif-Condemned. Apparently McLuhan was very kind to Lewis when

Beyond the Provinces Lewis was in Canada during the war. I first came across McLuhan in an article on Southern writers in the Southern Vanguard and was taken by it. 75 McLuhan himself, in one of his final essays, his only extended essay on Canada, commented on his country's unique ability to help the United States understand itself: 'Sharing the American way, without commitment to American goals and responsibilities, makes the Canadian intellectually detached and observant as an interpreter of the American destiny.' 76 The Canadian, the observer, the witness; here is a role, first defined by American writers, which belongs to the Canadian imagination. The North American as other is a privileged position, different from, apart from, sometimes better than North America's seeming centre. The dispassionate Shreve McCannon holds up a mirror to his American room-mate and refuses to move it away. The North American as other becomes, to use Faulkner's term, the 'commentator' on the American experience. And the North American as other, anticipated in the pages of American literature, was an initial position - and has remained a continuing presence -in Canadian literature's selfhood. For the colonial writer, the United States remained a major presence dominating the northern land. Even in 1936, when he retired from McGill U niversity, Stephen Leacock informed a British editor that he would not retire back in England. No, he replied, 'I'll stay in Canada,' and one of the reasons is the inspiring and revered neighbour to the south: There's another reason for not wanting to leave Canada for England. I'd hate to be so far away from the United States. You see, with us it's second nature, part of our lives, to be near them. Every Sunday

The Dispassionate Witness

57

morning we read New York funny papers, and all week we read about politics in Alabama and Louisiana, and whether they caught the bandits that stole the vault of the national bank, and - well, you know American news - there's no other like it ... And in the same way we admire the Americans for the way they shovel up mountains and shift rivercourses and throw the map all round the place. We sit in the club, fascinated, and listen to an American saying, 'The proposal is to dam up the Arkansas River and make it run backward over the Rockies.' That's the stuffi That's conversation. 77 In contrast to the colonial - albeit ironic - stance of the retired Leacock is the new voice in the 1920s that found its distinction in being North American as other rather than North American as colonial. In his pseudo-autobiographical novel, A Searchfar America (1927), Frederick Philip Grove writes: When I came from Europe, I came as an individual; when I settled down in America, at the end of my wanderings, I was a social man. My view of life, if now, at the end, I may use this word once more, had been, in Europe, historical, it had become, in America, ethical; America regards the future. America is an ideal and as such has to be striven for; it has to be realized in partial victories. 78 Appended to this statement is a footnote: 'I have since come to the conclusion that the ideal as I saw and still see it had been abandoned by the U.S.A. That is one reason why I became and remained a Canadian.' Here is, in Robert Kroetsch's words, 'that imagined secret moment when F.P. Grove realized he could cease to be a European

Beyond the Provinces writer and declare himself to be not merely a North American but actually and originally a Canadian writer. ' 79 Two years later, in his essay 'Nationhood,' Grove developed his distinction between Canada and the United States: South of our borders lives a mighty nation which is reaching out with its tentacles over the globe - with a view towards the Americanisation, as it is commonly called, of that globe ... The very word Americanisation is a challenge to us; for though we are Canadians, we also live in America. Are we going to allow ourselves to be identified with that tendency of our neighbours to the south which bids fair to recast the established values of life? The fight is on between the ancient ideals of Europe and those of this new America which is asserting itself from day to day.Bo For Grove, Americanization means standardization, the deliberate attempt to mould immigrants into a homogenized social fabric rather than to leave them in a federation which he associates with Europe. Moreover, Americanization means the replacement of the divinity of the European tradition with a new divinity, 'a Standard of Living.' 81 In Canada, Grove 'discovered a continuation of this old European tradition. ' 82 Although he still clung to a revered Europe, his assertion of a Canada distinct from the United States allowed him to be an observer of that southern land. While Grove was celebrating in his fiction the unique landscape and people of Canada's prairies and other rural regions, his contemporary, Morley Callaghan, turned to urban life and provided an even more dramatic assertion of Canada's identity as a non-American inhabitant of North America. Unlike Grove, he felt little kinship with

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59

England's literary tradition: 'The whole emphasis in college literature was on British literature when I went to the University of Toronto, and I discovered that the professors didn't know the Americans at all. But when I discovered American literature on my own, I suddenly felt at ease. ' 83 Canadians, Callaghan recalled, 'had rather absurdly let the United States claim full title for North America; and I resented it. I thought of myself as essentially a North American writer, not a European writer.' 84 Here was not Grove's delight in the apparent continuation of a European tradition in Canada but an understanding of a new and unfettered presence on the North American continent. In his fiction of the 1930s, Callaghan set himself apart from his American contemporaries when he studied the effects of the Depression on the lives of his characters. He was uniquely non-American: the anxieties of his characters 'are felt more than recorded or exploited.' 85 The situations and themes of American fiction are present in Callaghan, but they 'are neither planted nor exploited for their ideological import. ' 86 Callaghan himself is the depersonalized author, transparent in his narrative, entering dispassionately into his characters and becoming a witness to their lives. The first writer to have a short story published in The New Yorker - and the author of the first book (the novel They Shall Inherit the Earth, in 1935) to be published as an original in the Random House Modern Library Series - he was a dispassionate witness of the American scene by presenting a different perspective from that of his American contemporaries on urban life in and after the Depression. Callaghan's 1963 memoir, That Summer in Paris, reflects vividly the role of the Canadian as dispassionate witness. In his evocation of 'Tangled Friendships with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Some Others,' Callaghan avoids the ten-

6o

Beyond the Provinces

dency to become sentimental or nostalgic; the narrator in the present rarely intrudes upon his old self, preferring to stand back transparently and witness a remarkable summer with its remarkable people. Most significantly, this book is written by an outsider to its subject, a participant who prefers to be a witness, detached and freed now by Hemingway's death to write the book: But while I watched I was pondering over the paradoxical relationships between men. I asked myself, Why doesn't Scott speak to Ernest himself? Why pick on me? I had been assuming that Scott was Ernest's intimate friend. I did not feel that I was in the little circle of Hemingway's close friends: there would have to be others he saw in Paris, close old friends he would go to for companionship when he was in trouble. Who these people were I didn't know. I had thought Scott for sure was one of them. What if there wasn't such a group?87 As a fiction writer, Callaghan was a detached witness to the human scene; as a Canadian writer, he was a dispassionate witness to the American scene and the literary figures who tried to express its dreams and failures. The dispassionate witness glancing south has become a constant dimension of the Canadian literary voice. Timothy Findley's The Butterfly Plague (1969) looks at the Hollywood film world on the eve of the Second World War. Robert Kroetsch explores and explodes the American dream of manifest destiny by having the hero of Gone Indian (1973), Jeremy Sadness, who 'believed that his whole life was shaped and governed by some deep American need to seek out the frontier,' 88 travel to Edmonton in search of an academic job; this northern outpost deconstructs the American dream as the Canadian frontier becomes the last Eden.

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By extension too the dispassionate witness encompasses a writer like Jack Kerouac, an American of French-Canadian descent, whose On the Road (1957) is an epic feat of contemplating and ultimately rewriting the American destiny. And Kerouac's drive westward reappears in Jacques Poulin's Volkswagen Blues (1986), a more contemporary On the Road from a native Quebecer's perspective. The most dramatic presentation by a Canadian of the Canadian as dispassionate witness is Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985), which provides an appropriate closing to a study of the Canadian as North American other. The setting of the novel is the United States; the time, the late twentieth century. The president has been shot, Congress machine-gunned, the constitution suspended, newspapers censored or closed down. 'There wasn't even any rioting in the streets,' the narrator observes. 'People stayed at home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on. ' 89 The United States is now the Republic of Gilead, the concrete embodiment of its fundamentalist, right-wing regime. Men are lords, women but servants for procreation. Subservience and obedience pass for freedom. Love is an obscenity, a fatal and disappearing vestige of prerevolutionary days. Society has returned to the repressive existence of Puritan New England. The moral majority has triumphed. The Bible is the only law, and its interpretation is fundamentalist. In creating this dystopia, Atwood has kept her clinical eye firmly focused on the more disturbing aspects of our time, more accurately on the more disturbing aspects of American society. Perhaps only a Canadian, a neighbour and an outsider to the United States, could create such an unsettling vision of the American destiny, a future finally not possible in Canada, a cautious and careful country not

Beyond the Provinces given to the fads and foibles, the excitement and daring of its southern neighbour. Atwood's dystopic vision finds its roots, not in Canadian literature, but in the Puritan literature of early New England, more specifically in the seminal critical study of that literature, Errand in the Wilderness (1957), written by Perry Miller, the famed Americanist at Harvard University, whose final seminar, 'Romanticism in American Literature,' was taken by Margaret Atwood. To Perry Miller, she appropriately co-dedicated The Handmaid's Tai£. The setting of The Handmaid's Ta/,e is the site of the former Harvard University, the setting of the confrontation between Quentin and Shreve. And the mood of this world is the 'grim mausoleum air of Puritan righteousness' that Quentin found in Southern history.!)() In the Republic of Gilead is the Underground Femaleroad which smuggles handmaids to the freedom of Canada, just as Harriet Beecher Stowe, 134 years earlier, depicted the first Underground Railroad which transported slaves to a similar freedom north of the border. The only difference is that now it is the Canadian writer as dispassionate witness, who is depicting - and providing the perspective on - the American world. And it is in this dispassionate position as co-inhabitant of North America that Canada acknowledged its distinction from the United States, and Canadian literature discovered its path to literary selfhood within North America. 'It possibly takes a Canadian,' Flannery O'Connor wisely observed, 'to throw a sharper light on things here.'

NOTES

l

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 IO II

12

13 14 15 l6 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Report: Royal Commission on National Develapment in the Arts, Letters and Sciences 1949-1951 (Ottawa: Edmond Cloutier 1951), 28o, 29, 58,40 Ibid., 13 Ibid., 103 Ibid., 50 Ibid., 18 Ibid., 15 Ibid., 222, 225 Ibid., 225 Ibid James D. Hart, The Popular Book: A History of American Literary Taste (New York: Oxford University Press 1950), 68 'The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper,' Views and Reviews in American Literature History and Fiction, ed. C. Hugh Holman (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press 1g62), 265 Nil.es' Weekly Register, 22 March 1823, quoted in Fenimore Coaper and His Critics, ed. Marcel Clave) (Aix-en-Provence: lmprimerie universitaire de Provence 1938), 147 Joel Porte, The Romance in America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press 1969), 27 The Pioneers, in The Leatherstocking Tai.es, vol. l (New York: Modem Library of America, 1985), 30, 201, 13 'Preface,' The Pathfinder, in The Leatherstocking Tai.es, vol. 2 (New York: Modem Library of America 1g85), 4 The Last of the Mohicans, in The Leatherstocking Tai.es, vol. l, 7 l 7 Ibid., 665, 694, 725 Ibid., 491 Ibid., 587 Ibid., 772 Their Wedding Journey (Boston: James R. Osgood 1872), 177 Ibid., 177-8 Ibid., 189 Ibid., 1g6

Beyond the Provinces 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Ibid., 216 Ibid., 200-1 Ibid., 201 Ibid., 218 Ibid., 230 A Chance Acquaintance (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1873), g6 Ibid., 107, 109 Their Wedding journey, 218-19 Hawthorne's American Travel Sketches, ed. Alfred Weber, Beth L. Lueck, and Dennis Berthold (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England 1g89), 50 34 'Quebec. 1871,' Portraits of Places (London: Macmillan 1883), 362-3 35 Specimen Days in America, ed. Gavin Ewart (London: The Folio Society, 1979), 207-8. For an account of responses to Canada by nineteenth-century American writers, especially travel writers, see James Doyle, North of America: Images of Canada in the Literature of the United States, 1775-1900 (Toronto: ECW Press 1g83), and the anthology Yankees in Canada: A CoUection of Nineteenth-Century Travel Narratives, ed. James Doyle (Toronto: ECW Press, 1g8o) 36 Manning Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, The Origin and Development of Longfellow's 'Evangeline' (Portland, ME: The Anthoensen Press 1947), 12 37 Naomi Griffiths, 'Longfellow's Evangeline. The Birth and Acceptance of a Legend,' Acadiensis 11/2 (Spring 1g82), 29 38 Evangeline, A TafR of Acadie (Boston: William D. Ticknor 1847), 12 39 A Chance Acquaintance, 33 40 The Origin and Development of Longfellow's 'Evangeline,' 17 41 UncfR Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (Boston: John Jewett 1852), l, 221 42 Ibid., 1, vi 43 Ibid., 1, 65 44 Ibid., 1, 129 45 Ibid., l, 167 46 Ibid., l, 171 47 Ibid., 2, 303 48 Do Androids Dream ofEfRctric Sheep? (Garden City, NY: Doubleday 1g68); reprinted as Blade Runner (New York: Ballantine 1g82), 201

The Dispassionate Witness 49 'Ishmael Reed,' The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers, ed. Joe David Bellamy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1974), 138 50 Flight to Canada (New York: Random House 1976), 8 51 Ibid., 16o 52 Ibid., 57 53 Ibid., 16o-1 54 Ibid., 161 55 Ibid., 178 56 The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Andrew Turnbull (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons 1g63), 449 57 According to F. Scott Fitzgerald's Ledger: A FacsimUe, intro. by Matthew J. Bruccoli (Washington, DC: NCR/Microcard Editions 1972), 161, Fitzgerald spent at least one summer, that of 1907, at Camp Chatham in Orillia, Ontario 58 Leacock Memorial Home and Museum Archives 59 The Great Gatsby (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons 1925), 117 6o Ibid., 177 61 Ibid., 43 62 Absawm, Absawm! (New York: Random House 1936), 384 63 Michael Millgate, '"A Cosmos of My Own": The Evolution of Yoknapatawpha,' Fifty Years of Yoknapatawpha: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha 1979, ed. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie Uackson: University Press of Mississippi 198o), 32. In William Faulliner's 'Absawm, Absawm!': A Critical Casebook (New York: Garland 1984), Elizabeth Muhlenfield notes that Faulkner may have found initial inspiration for the novel by rereading in the fall of 1933 his 1931 short story 'Evangeline': 'having reread "Evangeline," Faulkner toyed with the idea of developing it into a novel. Fragments of two precis found among the Rowanoak papers discovered in 1971 sketch what seems to be a novel-length work patterned very precisely on "Evangeline"' (xvi) 64 Fau!Aner in the University: Cl.ass Conferences at the University of Virginia, ed. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner (New York: Vintage Books 1g65), 75 65 Absawm, Absawm! 336, 345 66 Ibid., 346 67 Ibid., 258

66

Beyond the Provinces

68 Ibid., 218, 256 6g Ibid., 361 70 Ibid., 378 71 Faul,kner in the University: Class umferences at the University of Virginia, 71 72 Ibid., 274 73 'The Southern Quality,' The Sewanee Review 53/3 (Summer 1947), 370 74 The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, ed. and with an intro. by Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1979), 70. 'The Southern Quality' was reprinted in A Southern Vanguard: The John Peal£ Bishop Memorial Volume, ed. Allen Tate (New York: Prentice-Hall 1947), 100-21 75 The Habit of Being, 173-4 76 'Canada: The Borderline Case,' The Canadian Imagination: Dimensions of a Literary Culture, ed. David Staines (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1977), 227 77 'I'll Stay in Canada,' This Week, 8 March 1936, and reprinted in Funny Pieces: A Book of Random Sketches (New York: Dodd, Mead 1936), 288--9 78 A Search for America (Ottawa: The Graphic Publishers 1927), 436 79 'Hugh MacLennan: An Appreciation,' Hugh MacLennan: 1982, ed. Elspeth Cameron (Toronto: University College 1982), 13~ 8o 'Nationhood,' It Needs to Be Said (Toronto: Macmillan 1929), 142-3 81 Ibid., 145 82 Ibid., 157 83 Interview, Qµill and Qµire, July 1983, 16 84 Ibid. 85 Daniel Aaron, 'Morley Callaghan and the Great Depression,' The Callaghan Symposium, ed. David Staines (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press 1g81), 24 86 Ibid. 87 That Summer in Paris (Toronto: Macmillan 1g63), 164 88 Gone Indian (Toronto: New Press 1973), 5 89 The Handmaid's Taf£ (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1g85), 183 go Absalom, Absalom!, 6o

THREE

The Critical Horizon

... the centre of reality is wherever one happens to be, and its circumference is whatever one's imagination can make sense of. Northrop Frye 'Letters in Canada [ 1 g6o]'

The Critical Horizon In the first chapter, I returned to 1950 as a starting-point, to The Doubl,e Hook as the beginning of a truly Canadian literary voice, no longer apologetic, defensive, or provincial. In the second chapter, the report by the Massey Commission served as a useful point of departure for an examination of the unique selfhood of Canadian literature in light of the Canadian presence in American literature and the role of the Canadian as dispassionate witness, first in the pages of American fiction, then in its quiet assertion in Canadian literature. In the development of Canadian criticism, 1950 was an interesting year, too. In December of that year, Ottawa's Carleton College, now Carleton University, introduced a special Tuesday evening course, through the Extension Courses program, titled 'Canadian Writers of the Past and Present.' The course was described by the student newspaper as one that 'should be especially interesting to those concerned with the recognition and promotion of Canadian literature." The theme of one session was the question 'Is a Canadian Critic Possible?' The question itself is an interesting commentary on the colonial mentality in criticism, and Carleton's series prompted the country's then pre-eminent literary critic, E.K. Brown, to observe: 'It is certainly possible to be a critic in Canada.' But he followed this optimistic assessment with the remark that 'when there is complaint about the quality of Canadian criticism, what is meant is not that there is little good critical writing in Canada but - a much narrower charge - that there is little good critical writing about Canadian literature. ' 2 Written in the last months of his life - he died of cancer three

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months later, at age forty-five - this sad reflection is Brown's final judgment on what was then the state of Canadian literary criticism. E.K Brown was a 1926 graduate of University College in the University of Toronto, professor of English there for ten years (1929-35, 1937-41),joint editor of the University of Toronto Quarterly from 1932 to 1941, and the person largely responsible for the creation of the annual survey of Canadian letters which first appeared in the Quarterly in 1936. And though he never realized the significance of his achievement, Brown established a distinctive Canadian literary criticism. When Brown first examined contemporary attitudes to Canadian literature, he was struck by the two competing and unsatisfactory positions occupied by Canadian critics and reviewers: on the one hand, thoughtless and unqualified praise and, on the other, disdainful debunking - he found no middle ground. He complains, for example, about Bliss Carman's description of Wilson Macdonald's new collection, Comber Cove: 'On the cover Bliss Carman is quoted as having said that this collection is "the greatest satire since the days of Juvenal," an example of the bad old kind of critical opinion from which we are slowly escaping. ' 3 Such thoughtless praisers are truculent: A colleague of mine, addressing one such group a year or two ago, ventured to suggest that our lyric poets, of the last generation, Carman, Lampman, and Roberts, were not quite the equals of the masters of the English romantic poetry in whose school they learned most of their best lessons. He was taken to task as a traitor. 4 On the other hand, Brown detects a patronizing attitude which dismisses a Canadian work simply because it is

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Canadian. This second group, condescending cosmopolites, equally retarded the development of Canadian criticism. There is, Brown complains, the attitude of the small but precious group of Canadians of cosmopolitan culture. These people are to be found in small numbers in almost every city or large town in Canada and in somewhat larger numbers in our musical, dramatic, political, and educational centres ... These citizens of the world care for good books; they read them as closely as they are read in London or New York; they are, many of them, excellent judges of literary values ... There is, perhaps, a drop or two of hostility in their attitude to Canadian literature. So often at the suggestion of enthusiastic friends have they wasted an evening with a mediocre Canadian novel or volume of versel 5 Sailing between the Scylla of provincial self-aggrandizemen t and the Charybdis of cosmopolitan condescension, Brown charted a new course for Canadian criticism. As a critic, Brown was schooled in Matthew Arnold. 'Far more than any comparable figure,' Douglas Bush, Brown's close friend, observed many decades later, Arnold 'dominated, in both England and America, the last third of the nineteenth century and the earlier part of the twentieth.' 6 No literary figure, I would add, has had a more lasting effect on Canadian criticism, even to the present day, than did Arnold, whose understanding of the function of the critic dominated and limited Canada's development of its own literary criticism. To be more specific, Arnold's 1865 essay, 'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,' was a landmark document that would determine the nature of Canadian criticism. When Arnold affirmed that 'criticism, real criticism ... obeys an instinct prompt-

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ing it to try to know the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespectively of practice, politics, and everything of the kind, and to value knowledge and thought as they approach this best, without the intrusion of any other considerations whatever,' 7 he initiated a pattern that would impede appropriate criticism of any New World literature. His premise of 'the best that is known and thought in the world' led directly to the fallacious dichotomy between international and national standards, between the lofty standards determined by the authority of a central imperial nation and the seemingly lower cultural standards sufficient to the needs of its marginal, provincial offshoots. As a colony, Canada has suffered needlessly under its chronic indebtedness to the Arnoldian tradition, too often confining criticism to one or another of two alternatives, either a non-evaluative celebration of the Canadian literary object or an evaluative debunking of that object in light of supposedly international standards. Such an imposed binary opposition is, at the same time, relentlessly un-Canadian in its blindness to any kind of compromise. And the pervasiveness of such an opposition in Canadian criticism emerges to this day, first, in a discouraging colonialism in some critical assessments of the early traditions of Canadian literature as well as of the distinctive achievements of later literary worlds, and, second, in the persistent opposition of international and provincial, world-class and Canadian, that still haunts critical attitudes towards our literary culture. There has been, in this century, no critic or scholar, not even Lionel Trilling, more conversant with Arnold's writings than E.K. Brown. He did his minor thesis in 1929, at the Sorbonne, 'Studies in the Text of Matthew Arnold's Prose,' which appeared as a book six years later; he edited two selections of Arnold's prose and one of his poetry; he

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published ten essays and reviews on Arnold, and his 1948 book, Matthew Arnold, which is the most striking example in Canadian writing, critical or creative, of 'the burden of the past,' to use W. Jackson Bate's phrase,8 or in Harold Bloom's later and itself anxious phrase, 'the anxiety of influence.' 9 Brown's book is nothing less than a deconstruction of the Victorian critic who was Brown's own model. Appropriately subtitled 'A Study in Conflict,' the book foregrounds the conflicts inherent, according to Brown, in Arnold's methodology. But these conflicts are also the struggles Brown himself had to confront as he modified and rejected his Arnoldian inheritance. From his earliest years as a student, Brown found himself attracted simultaneously to the Old World writings of Arnold and to the exciting New World literatures of the United States and Canada. Although his minor thesis was on Arnold, his major thesis examined the fiction of Edith Wharton. When he learned that terminal cancer would abruptly end his career, he turned his attention to a new edition of Arnold's poetry, he finished a selection of the poetry of his friend Duncan Campbell Scott (with an introductory memoir), and he tried to complete a biography of Willa Cather, which was later finished by his friend Leon Edel. For Brown, the 'burden' of Arnold's criticism is his central doctrine of disinterestedness. 'And how is criticism to show disinterestedness?' Arnold asked: By keeping aloof from practice: by resolutely following the law of its own nature, which is to be a free play of the mind on all subjects which it touches; by steadily refusing to lend itself to any of those ulterior, political, practical considerations about ideas which plenty of people will be sure to attach to them, which perhaps ought often to be attached to them, which in

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this country at any rate are certain to be attached to them quite sufficiently, but which criticism has really nothing to do with. Its business is, as I have said, simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world. 10 Brown's critique of Arnold centres on the varieties of disinterestedness and the impossibility, ultimately, of achieving this only seemingly ideal position. As Brown observes, Arnold himself abandoned his own precept in his practice: in his later literary essays, Arnold is, at times, 'wholly the disinterested critic; at times, as in Literature and Dogma, wholly the practical critic. He never attains to rest; no final solution was possible for him.' 11 It was the literatures of the New Worlds, however, that finally forced Brown to separate himself from Arnold and find his own post-colonial critical ground. His seminal book, On Canadian Poetry (1943), opens with an exploration of the weakness of Arnold's critical stance: 'Towards the end of his life Matthew Arnold expressed his disapproval of a tendency in the United States to speak of an American literature.' 12 Indeed Arnold's disinterested commitment to 'the best that is known and thought in the world' segregated literatures into the valuable literature of the centre and the hollow literatures of the peripheries. Arnold himself observed: The provincial spirit, again, exaggerates the value of its ideas, for want of a high standard at hand by which to try them. Or, rather, for want of such a standard, it gives one idea too much prominence at the expense of others; it orders its ideas amiss; it is hurried away by fancies; it likes and dislikes too passionately, too exclusively. Its admiration weeps hysterical tears, and its disapprobation foams at the mouth

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... For, not having the lucidity of a large and centrally placed intelligence, the provincial spirit has not its graciousness; it does not persuade, it makes war; it has not urbanity, the tone of the city, of the centre, the tone which always aims at a spiritual and intellectual effect, and, not excluding the use of banter, never disjoins banter itself from politeness, from felicity. ' 3 Such a provincial spirit, with its critical extremes of hysterical admiration and foaming disapprobation, did, in fact, reflect the two camps of Canadian criticism. Yet for Brown, who was so deeply committed to the literatures of the New Worlds, Arnold's vision of literature being located only at the urban centre was untenable, for it denied any validity to such new literatures. Arnoldian by training and yet deeply rooted in his own Canadian world, Brown had to reject the assumptions behind Arnold's criticism: 'I think the time has come when to doubt the value of the concept of a Canadian literature, or an Australian, is to be a crank. " 1 Arnold's 'disinterestedness' is, for Douglas Bush, 'a discriminating quest of truth and wisdom in which he is guided by the past and present toward the future." 5 Disinterestedness, then, is always concomitant with reverence for 'the best that is known and thought in the world.' Forced, therefore, to reject disinterestedness as a critical principle, Brown substituted what I would term 'dispassionateness,' an impartiality that strives for a calm understanding and appreciation of literature. Evaluation or judgment is present, but in a distinctly secondary position: If in the exercise of his interpretative function a critic writes chiefly of what is genuine in a poem, what is

Beyond the Provinces notable, what is there, rather than of what is spurious, what is negligible, what is not there, his doing so need not mean that he is abandoning another of his functions, the making of judgments. Careful interpretation, conducted with insight and a measure of sympathy, must precede judgment, and in writing of recent or contemporary poets it is much wiser to make sure that one's interpretation is adequate than to press on to judgment. The history of criticism is strewn with examples of how the slighting of the critic's interpretative function has led to false and absurd judgments. 16 Dispassionateness, then, aims at impartiality tempered by 'a measure of sympathy,' and Brown's rejection of disinterestedness reflects, finally, his critical commitment to American and Canadian literatures, which, he realized, challenged Arnold's central critical principles. As the pioneer in Canadian literary criticism, Brown began, as Laura Smyth Groening observes, 'to define tradition and originality in a New World context. Relying as they do on foreign standards, critics are unable to recognize the value of the original and the native; without such critical appreciation, the original and the native can never flourish sufficiently to contribute to the building of a tradition.' 17 Before Brown appeared on the critical scene, critics and reviewers - his predecessors - fitted to some degree into the two polarities of extravagant praise and shallow debunking he avoided. He, on the other hand, was the pioneer. As Northrop Frye observed: E.K. Brown was the first critic to bring Canadian literature into its proper context. Before him, the main question asked was 'Is there a Canadian literature?' After him, the question was rather 'What is

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Canadian literature like?' He started out with an interest in contemporary literature, which in his generation marked a quite unusual originality, and he worked at first mainly on American authors, including Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. Thus, when he came to Canadian literature, he was able to see it, not simply as a local product growing in the surrounding woods like a hepatica, but as a literary development within, first, its North American context, and, secondly, in its international context. He was aware of the British and colonial affinities of earlier Canadian literature, but did not exaggerate their importance as earlier critics had tended to do. 18 To the question 'Is a Canadian Critic Possible?' Brown's brief critical career is the answer. With Canadian literary criticism finding a unique voice in Brown's dispassionateness, his successors, in their various ways, followed in his path. Frye, who succeeded Brown as the annual reviewer of Canadian poetry for the University of Toronto Quarterly, is remarkably similar to Brown in his emphasis on interpretation or recognition as the primary function of criticism, value:judgments again assuming a necessarily secondary place: 'I realized early in my critical life that evaluation was a minor and subordinate function of the critical process, at best an incidental by-product." 9 As A.C. Hamilton shows,2° Frye's criticism in the 1950s is a strong reaction against the evaluative criticism of such figures as F.R. Leavis: 'we find even famous critics attaching so much importance to admiring some writers and repudiating others,' Frye reflected, 'that their criticism begins to impress us as a kind of misapplied moral energy rather than actual criticism. ' 21 'Arriving at value:judgments is not, as it is so often

Beyond the Provinces said to be, part of the immediate tactic of criticism, ' 22 Frye argued, and he described criticism as an act not 'of judgement but of recognition. ' 23 In his final review for the University of Toronto Quarterly in 1960, he defined the critic in terms that clearly recall Brown's apologi,a in the same journal of a decade or more earlier: The reviewer must take poetry as he finds it, must constantly struggle for the standards of good and bad in all types of poetry, must always remember that a preference for any one kind of poetry over another kind is, for him, laziness and incompetence ... The reviewer is not concerned with the vague relativities of 'greatness,' but with the positive merits of what is before him. And every genuine poet is entitled to be read with the maximum sympathy and concentration. 21 Like Brown, Frye refers to the need for sympathy on the part of the reviewer, the sympathy that tempers impartiality and ensures dispassionateness. In 1965, in his 'Conclusion' to the Literary History of Canada, Frye echoed Brown's rejection of 'the best that is known and thought in the world' as the essence of criticism, and shared Brown's sense that Arnold's vision prevented any proper criticism of a new literature: The book is a tribute to the maturity of Canadian literary scholarship and criticism, whatever one thinks of the literature. Its authors have completely outgrown the view that evaluation is the end of criticism, instead of its incidental by-product. Had evaluation been their guiding principle, this book would, if written at all, have been only a huge debunking project,

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leaving Canadian literature a poor naked alouette plucked of every feather of decency and dignity. True, the book gives evidence, on practically every one of its eight hundred odd pages, that what is really remarkable is not how little but how much good writing has been produced in Canada. But this would not affect the rigorous evaluator. The evaluative view is based on the conception of criticism as concerned mainly to define and canonize the genuine classics of literature. 25 Yet, in spite of this testimony to the abundance of Canadian literature, it is notable that of the forty chapters that comprise the first edition of the Literary History, not one is devoted to literary criticism itself. There is a chapter on literary scholarship, but even here literary criticism of Canadian writings receives only passing comment. Eleven years later, however, the second edition of the Literary History added fifteen new chapters, of which three are largely devoted to Canadian literary criticism. And the most frequently cited and discussed writer in the new edition is Northrop Frye. What dominated this critical period was the emergence of thematic or systems criticism. Erroneously labelled the progeny of Frye in part because a few of them had been his students, the thematic critics were, unlike Frye himself, wholly non-evaluative in their search for themes that seemed to pervade our literature. Such books as D.G. Jones's Butterfly on Rock (1970), John Moss's Patterns of Isolation ( 1974), and, most notably, Margaret Atwood's Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972) are less a unique form of criticism than an extension of the post-colonial need to compile a national literary history in order to affirm an independent cultural identity. 'Then, you may ask, if my book does not survey, evaluate, provide

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histories or biographies or offer original and brilliant insights, what does it do?' Atwood wonders. It attempts one simple thing. It outlines a number of key patterns which I hope will function like the field markings in bird-books: they will help you distinguish this species from all others, Canadian literature from the other literatures with which it is often compared or confused. Each key pattern must occur often enough in Canadian literature as a whole to make it significant. These key patterns, taken together, constitute the shape of Canadian literature insofar as it is Canadian literature, and that shape is also a reflection of a national habit of mind. 26 Essentially an explication of the national character, thematic criticism is the continuation of the cultural stocktaking of the 1950s and 1g6os, a necessary and natural extension of the kind of encyclopedic Canadian studies that included the Literary History of Canada. By the later 1970s, thematic criticism was coming under attack in Canada, its detractors asserting that it rarely stopped to see if the patterns that emerged in Canadian literature were any different from those in other literatures. By its nature, Canadian thematic criticism was insular at a time when insularity affirmed the selfhood of post-colonial Canada. 'Any conception of culture as a phenomenon continuous beyond our borders, of continuity from our own literature to another, made us feel unspeakably colonial,' John Moss reflected. 'We therefore in a cultural revolution of extreme but subtle importance severed our own tradition from those which threatened to overwhelm i t.'27 Yet we should not underestimate the importance of

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thematic criticism in the development of the selfhood of Canadian literature. Thematic criticism, whatever its limitations, forced us to look at Canadian literature as a distinct and a distinctly Canadian cultural achievement and urged upon us the need to respond critically to that achievement. Moreover, thematic criticism was experiencing a revival in international circles. By the mid-198os, Thomas Pavel writes: formalism, whether new-critical, semiotic, or poststructuralist, was under attack, and attention to the thematic content of the literary texts revived. The change was brought about by a coalition of critics politically committed to feminism, Afro-American culture, ethnic and sexual minorities, and the postcolonial Third World. Political criticism needed a more concrete grasp of literary content than narrative grammars, semiotic squares, and self-subverting meanings could offer. 28 What must be concluded, then, about Canadian thematic criticism is that its relative simplicity of treatment - it too easily assumed that particularities in Canadian writing were peculiarities - did not prevent it from serving a major function in its time. About the same time as the advent of Canadian thematic criticism, the novelist Robert Kroetsch was quietly assuming the roles of critic and commentator. In 1972 he co-founded the critical journal Boundary 2: A Journal of Post-Modern Literature, and his own essays and reviews bring to bear on his native concerns a wide-ranging understanding of foreign critical movements, his own writings being the centre of deconstructive activity in Canadian criticism, and his own career as critic setting what continues to be a standard of critical openness.

Beyond the Provinces As a cnt1c, Kroetsch never hesitates to employ nonCanadian critical theories, but their employment always complements his Canadian perspective. Informing his essays is a dispassionate voice more interested in recognition than in judgment, and this voice places him in the Brown-Frye tradition. As a young man, Kroetsch was, by his own admission, 'vehemently anti-colonial. The spent narrative of empire (at least of the British Empire) haggled in my bones, and I longed for absolute frontiers.' In Frye's criticism he found himself, his story, and his guide for the future: Frye, in his decent and quiet and radical way, tells the Canadian poet to be anti-colonial. We are a nation made of the waste of the narrative of empire, a nation made of wars won and lost, of peace treaties and their humiliations and their prophecies, of retreating people tempted to glorify their retreat, of the acquisitions of land and resources under the disguise of pastoral utopias. To resist, to aspire toward a condition now described as post-colonial, asks for a radical act of imagination. Frye, in his offering of 'myth as a shaping principle', offers a place to locate and to release that imaginative energy. 29 Kroetsch perhaps comes as close as any cnt1c can to achieving the impossible but necessary goal: the development of a critical voice that is responsive to contemporary movements in the intellectual world at large and at the same time maintains its own Canadian tradition of dispassionateness. Like Kroetsch, Linda Hutcheon exemplifies the kind of critic whose knowledge of contemporary critical theories complements her natural place in the Canadian critical

The Critical Horizon tradition. A leading spokesperson for the elucidation of postmodernism in Canadian literature, she prefaces The Canadian Postmodern (1988) with the admission: 'Although I am a Canadian (and, more specifically, a Torontonian, I fear), this book is for me not a "painful patriotic duty", but rather a means of getting my "bearings", to use Northrop Frye's terms.' And her critical commitment to interpretation (to use E.K. Brown's term) or recognition (to use Frye's term) as her primary goal does not exclude some degree of natural and necessary value:judgment. In her preface she, unconsciously I suspect, further aligns herself with a now entrenched Canadian critical tradition: 'In this book, as in the classroom, I have always tried not to "officiate" in evaluative or consecrating terms, but I also see that even the choice of which books to mention is both an evaluative and a consecrating act, whether I like it or not. And I openly admit that I do enjoy and consider successful the fiction I am writing about here. ' 30 Such a mapping of a distinctly and distinctively Canadian criticism does not mean that the balance between contemporary non-Canadian critical movements and Canadian dispassionateness is a goal achieved; rather, it is a goal always to be achieved. The Canadian critical tradition continues to define itself in a necessarily never-ending struggle. Vestiges of colonialism, however, will haunt Canadian criticism so long as we continue to situate ourselves in other traditions rather than accept the characteristic contours of our own criticism. A recent literary history refers to contemporary poets in whose writings 'outside influences have been assimilated, transformed into a new and distinctive combination. This poised balance between British and American models will ultimately be recognized as a quintessentially Canadian - and independent stance. It is, moreover, an accurate reflection of the pat-

Beyond the Provinces tern derived from our newly discovered sense of history. ' 31 While recalling Hugh MacLennan's colonial belief that Canada would come to unite the best of the British and the best of the American, such a statement ignores the critical tradition that has been created here in clear opposition to earlier and other critical voices from across an ocean or a border. The balance is no longer 'between British and American models' but between Canadian and other models. A more insidious vestige of colonialism is Canadian criticism's obsessive need to confer classic status with unseemly haste. In his 1941 essay 'Who Canonizes the Classics?' Stephen Leacock raised for the first time in Canadian writing the designation of classic status: According to the practice of our oldest church, it takes about four hundred years to make a saint. That is to say, during that period one can't be just sure whether he's a saint or not. But if at the end of four hundred years his apparent saintliness has withstood the wear and tear of time, then a saint he is, indubitably and forever. Many of us no doubt received a pleasant shock of surprise, a year or two ago, when the venerable victim of Henry VIII, beheaded in 1535 and known in our school-books as Sir Thomas More, became henceforth Saint Thomas. I say a pkasant surprise - as helping to emphasize the continuity and permanence of society, a thing grievously in doubt just now. If therefore in the Spiritual Kingdom there are saints that last, there must be in the Republic of Letters authors whose work remains. But in this case we have no definite process of canonization. 32 For Leacock, the canonizing process in literature demands

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at least a century and the verdict of the people. To his academic colleagues who believe themselves to be the arbiters of a canon, he is reproving: I don't think for a moment that professors make the classics. Indeed it is the other way round. In the field of letters, as apart from medicine and science, professors do not lead but follow. Their wisdom is always that of a post mortem. They made political economy after the industrial revolution, not before it. They explained democracy after the people created it, and it is not till the people have read a book for a hundred years that the professors can explain why. In other words the cart doesn't go before the horse. Not at all. The horse, the mass of human intelligence, draws along the cart of history in which stands the professor, looking backward and explaining the scenery. This is not said unkindly. If he looked forward he wouldn't see any more than the horse does; and the horse sees nothing. 33 Like Leacock, Frye saw the test of time as crucial to the designation of classics, which are, Frye concluded, 'works of literature that show an ability to communicate with other ages over the widest barriers of time, space, and language.' 34 And, I might add, ocean and border. Our age, however, craves affirmation of classics as though such affirmation is a sign of maturity. Frank Davey sounds like a latter-day Arnold when he proposes as the final apotheosis of books 'their eventual re-publication as educational texts or "classics".' 35 And John Metcalf, who has made a career of debunking Canadian literature, now confuses himself with Leacock's horse, prefacing a volume entitled Canadian Classics: An Anthology of Short Stories (1993) with the statement, 'Without classics a literature

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has no foundation. ' 36 On such an absurd premise he declares ten short-story writers, himself included, to be classics. The mania for instant classics coincides, not by accident, with an international concern with literary canons, and, lest Canadians be found deficient in this practice, a number of critics have now begun to deconstruct the canons they think they have discovered in a literature that was scarcely being acknowledged a few decades earlier. Canonology, as I would term this study, must be scholarship, not criticism. If canonology can be applied to young literatures, then it must aspire to detailed scholarly investigations into our cultural and publishing past. Many of the essays in the collection Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value (1991) 37 contain so many facile impressions, factual inaccuracies, and ad hominem and ad feminam name-calling that they recall nothing so much as Frye's conviction that the critic bent on canonizing is 'choosing a canon out of literature and so making literature a single gigantic allegory of his own anxieties. ' 38 The instant classic is a sad symptom of the colonial need for approbation through imported terms of reference; it is the hasty and unnatural imprimatur imposed upon a literature whose authors no longer need or crave foreign approval. Such classic status complements the sad tendency - more evident among reviewers than among critics - to find the approbation of our literature in foreign climes. Canada's literary stature continues to be seriously undercut by colonial concern about foreign reactions to our literature. Perhaps some reviewers, like some critics, are still looking over their shoulders, seeking external approval for their literature and even, alas, for some validation of their role as reviewers. Looking back on the year's work in literature for 1985,

The Critical Horizon William French concluded that, among the year's fiction writers, the big winner ... was Robertson Davies, whose time had clearly come. His new novel, What's Bred In The Bone, received major reviews in Time, Newsweek and The New York Times, and showed up on the Times' bestseller list. It seemed obvious, in fact, that Canadian writers were at long last making a breakthrough into the awareness of Americans ... It will be interesting to note the reception accorded Atwood's provocative cautionary novel, The Handmaid's Tak, when it is published in the Cnited States in February.39 Here was 1985 in Canadian fiction! Did Davies's novel capture no critical attention in Canada? Had Atwood's novel not already appeared in Canada? The same overthe-shoulder glance occurs in French's review a year later of Alice Munro's The Progress of Love: In recent years Munro has become well known to C .S. readers - five of these stories, for example, first appeared in The New Yorker and four were published in other well-known C.S. magazines. Those readers must get the impression that Canada is a country of suffocating small towns and unsophisticated people who pray frequently and disapprove of drink, dancing and card-playing ... Granted, rural Canada was like that once, and there may still be isolated pockets beyond the metropolis. And it's true that Munro is often writing about these communities as they were half a century ago. But it's too bad we don't have a writer as talented

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Beyond the Provinces and in demand as she is to portray our contemporary urban society. It might help the tourist trade. 40

Still Canada as colony or, more accurately, Canada as theme-park. Foreign approbation is unnecessary to a post-colonial society; indeed, the need for it is an affront to that society and the final vestige of a colonial mentality. Foreign reviews no longer validate Canadian literature; they only complement, not confirm, our appreciation and understanding of ourselves. As the century ends, these dying traces of critical colonialism impede the awareness and acceptance of the distinctive voice of Canadian criticism and inhibit its stable maturity. By regarding evaluation as the sole function of criticism, they dismiss or ignore the critic as dispassionate witness, the distinctly Canadian position. At the same time, however, our young critical tradition, rooted in evaluation as secondary to interpretation, has a tendency to devalue evaluation itself in response to such alien pressures as the solely evaluative craving for classic status. This seems regrettable in turn. Contemporary Canadian critics should question that tendency and perhaps adjust the always uneasy balance between interpretation and evaluation. It is time that we acknowledge that the balance that is Canadian literature is no longer, as the colonial critics once imagined, a balance between the best of the British and the best of the American. It is rather a balancing of voices in a global village whose citizens and their works are at once native and naturalized. The history of Canadian literary criticism has been the history of finding a balance, too: first between the authoritarian standards of the imperial powers at the centre and the seemingly non-authoritative standards of the prov-

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inces, then between the critical debunking of the cosmopolites and the unquestioning enthusiasms of the provincials. The middle ground for Canadian criticism is the dispassionate witnessing that tempers impartiality with sympathy, thereby balancing interpretation and evaluation. Such dispassionate witnessing is the naturalization of Canadian literary criticism in a global village where international and provincial themselves have dissolved.

NOTES

1 The Carleton 6/6 (9 November 1950), ~ 2 'Is a Canadian Critic Possible?' Winnipeg Free Press, 13January 1951, 17; reprinted in E.K. Brown, Responses and Evaluations: Essays on Canada, ed. David Staines (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1977), 313-14 3 'Letters in Canada: Poetry,' University of Toronto Q:µarterly 7 (April 1938), 342; reprinted in Responses and Evaluations, 163 4 'The Immediate Present in Canadian Literature,' The Sewanee Review 41 (October-December 1933), 431; reprinted in Responses and Evaluations, 44 5 Ibid., 430-1; reprinted in Responses and Evaluations, 43-4 6 Matthew Arno/,d: A Survey of His Poetry and Prose (New York: Macmillan 1971), xix. For Arnold's major influence on the Massey Commission and its Reporl, see Paul Litt, The Muses, the Masses, and the Massey Commission (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1992), 99-103 7 'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,' Essays in Criticism (Boston: Ticknor and Fields 1865), 15-16 8 The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press 1970) 9 The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press 1973) 10 'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,' 17 11 Matthew Arno/,d: A Study in Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1948), 141 12 On Canadian Poetry (Toronto: The Ryerson Press 1943), 1 13 'The Literary Influence of Academies,' Essays in Criticism, 6o-1 14 On Canadian Poetry, 2 15 Matthew Arno/,d: A Survey of His Poetry and Prose, 128 16 'Letters in Canada: Poetry,' University of Toronto Q:µarterly 18 (April 1949), 255; reprinted in Responses and Evaluations, 273-4 17 E.K. Brown: A Study in Conflict (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1993), 97 18 Letter to David Staines, 30 March 1976

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19 The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (Toronto: Academic Press Canada 1982), xvi 20 Northrap Frye: Anatomy of His Criticism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1990), 21-5, 45-6 21 The Well-Tempered Critic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1g63), 123-4 22 'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,' University of Toronto Quarterly, 19 (October 1949), 12 23 'The Responsibilities of the Critic,' Modem Language Notes 91 (October 1976), 810 24 'Letters in Canada: Poetry,' University of Toronto Quarterly 29 Uuly 1g6o), 459; reprinted in TheBush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (Toronto: House of Anansi Press 1971), 125-6 25 'Conclusion,' Literary History of Canada, 821 26 (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1972), 13 27 'Bushed in the Sacred Wood,' The Human Elements, second series, ed. David Helwig (Ottawa: Oberon Press 1981), 162 28 'Thematics and Historical Evidence,' The Return of Thematic Criticism, ed. Werner Sollors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1993), 124 29 'Leaming the Hero from Northrop Frye,' The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New (Toronto: Oxford University Press 1989), 152, 159 30 'Preface,' The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contempora·ry English-Canadian Fiction (Toronto: Oxford University Press 1988), viii, X

31 WJ. Keith, Canadian Literature in English (London and New York: Longman 1985), 116 32 Answers Uuly 1941), 2; reprinted in My Remarkable Uncle and Other Sketches (New York: Dodd, Mead 1942), 85 33 Ibid.; reprinted, 87-8 34 'The Expanding World of Metaphor,' Journal of the American Academy of Religion 53 (December 1985), 595; reprinted in Northrop Frye, Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays, 1974-1988, ed. Robert D. Denham (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia 1990), 119 35 'English-Canadian Literature Periodicals: Text, Personality, and Dissent,' open Letter, eighth series, 5-6 (Winter-Spring 1993), 6g 36 Canadian Classics: An Anthology of Short Stories, ed. John Metcalf

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andJ.R. (Tim) Struthers (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson 1993), vii

37 Ed. Robert Leeker (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1991) 38 The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1971), 127 39 'Book break-ins and zesty thrills,' Toronto Globe and Mai~ 28 December 1985, D21 40 'Less is much more in the short story,' Toronto Globe and Mail, 20 September 1g86, F19