Editor’s preface
Literature is one of the crucial places where a nation develops and comes to understand its own consciousness. Long before a country settles what it is, its writers will have been exploring these questions in writing, and consciousness will continue to develop and evolve alongside the literature it produces. What makes literature especially potent for consciousness forming is that it is among the truest records a people leaves of its inner life. That conviction is the premise of this journal, and David Telfer explores it in the essay below with rare seriousness.
Canadians have asked a version of the question for well over a century, usually disguised as a complaint about our fiction, almost always underneath a question about the country itself. Frye posed it in one idiom and the critics after him in others. Telfer poses it again. His quarrel, though, is not with the quality of what we have written; it is with the daring we have withheld, with what our imagination, for reasons he traces to the shape of the country, has never quite let itself do.
His essay does not stand at a scholarly remove from its subject. It is written to enact what it describes, and asks, in return, a reader willing to be carried some way on the strength of its sentences. Read it slowly. It was not written to be read otherwise.
Plac’d on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the stoic's pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
…
Chaos of thought and passion, all confus’d;
Still by himself abus’d, or disabus’d.
—Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, 1733
How to dominate reality? Love is one way;
imagination another. Sit here
beside me, sweet; take my hard hand in yours.
We'll mark the butterflies disappearing over the hedge
with tiny wristwatches on their wings:
our fingers touching the earth, like two Buddhas.
—Irving Layton, “The Fertile Muck,” 1956
I. A Brief History of Our Ambiguity
For all the immensities of the Precambrian Shield, the black soil prairie, the Great Lakes as inland oceans, the Arctic Archipelago of ice and islands, this country, Canada, by celestial measure one quarter the size of the Moon, is, in the comity of nations, the bumbling delegate who appears before an imperial congress bearing borrowed Tupperware of homemade yogurt. The hyperborean majesties confer upon their inheritors no proportionate dignity. The country is that mad north-north-west, overwhelming the senses, becalming the blood. Within that unreckoned dispensation lie climates of vegetal abyss and unmapped planet: the peach orchards of Niagara and the hoarfrost frieze of Arctic lichen, haloed under Corona Borealis. From such immensities follows the old compensatory impulse: what one cannot bear to comprehend, one seeks to master; one measures, one maps, one binds with cadastral lines—a bloodless fiction that, under the Great Seal of geography, passes as fact.
It may be the second largest country on earth, extending beneath the crown of the continent some five thousand kilometres from east to west, but most of its northern lands are sparsely lived on, and nine-tenths of the population spreads like a drag-stroke of printer's ink along the American border, or like the oleaginous tentacle of some vast, bathyal squid, horizontal and hidden. Along its attenuated littoral reach, the tentacle traces a pattern of settlement the shape of a river wrought by a railway. The nation's sense of self, pressed against the hemisphere's revolutionary seam, bends southward under that centripetal pull.
For Americans at the continental centre, the country above has, at rare times, in certain slants of light on aimless afternoons, served as a portent by which one might await some bright or bleak future. But such futures say more about the imaginer than the imagined, as Canada is pressed into service as a providential metaphor. For as Tacitus praised the uncorrupted Germanic tribes with oblique rebuke toward his own decadent Romans, so too does the occasional American project their anxieties northward, finding in Canada either a lost pastoral or a moral fable of decline. Though they regard the border less as a boundary and more as a yardstick, their unshakeable indifference remains, among Canadians, a shared psychosexual fixation. Inverted snobbery circulates, accordingly, as a kind of moral currency, and even Canadian polychrome banknotes—set against the American notes, which insist, with childish stubbornness, on remaining, alone in the world, in their chromatic austerity—betray the preoccupation. The mingled ressentiment of pride and apology runs through even the servile pageantry of our surrogate Crown. In keeping with Canada's abiding dualism, the likeness of the late sovereign, herself an emblem of ancient hauteur (her successor, the living head of state, his effigy yet to be struck), presides still over our most commonplace bill.
A country so trackless and forbidding, ensconced behind scoured granite and sodden muskeg, could be settled only in fragments. The earliest commercial footholds were isolated trading posts along the innumerable rivers and lake-chains, each drawing a military garrison, each garrison sheltering a scattered settlement. French by foundation, English by inheritance, and Indigenous, in its manifold, many-wintered tongues, for millennia before either, the land was disciplined by far-flung governments into orderly, colonial geometries. The country has, as the second Magus of the North, Northrop Frye, observed, no true Atlantic seaboard, no clean threshold of arrival. To enter America is to cross the ocean, to brave, alone and self-ordained, with harpoons levelled, Mocha Dick; to enter Canada is, as with Jonah, to be swallowed, silently, by the fathomless whale.
New France, with Governor Vaudreuil seated on Cap Diamant, seigneurs ranged along the river, priests and coureurs de bois in the roving wilderness beyond, held the St. Lawrence and the interior before falling to the tubercular General Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham. What followed was administrative consolidation: a succession of imperial edicts sought to bind disparate peoples into coherent governance, redrawing maps and resettling populations in repeated attempts to make durable what were provisional conquests. It was, from the first, a nation created in defiance of geography, an unnatural economic formation whose east-west axis was not discovered but painstakingly constructed, stapled from fish and pelt and lumber and wheat, the whole apparatus of Confederation meant to override what topography dictates: absorption, inevitable in its gravity, into the north-south flow of the continental interior.
That defiance was given a name and its own nationality, yet bore, as the sundered, self-orphaned republics of the New World would not, its patrimonial chain. Far too modest to be styled a “Kingdom,” as its first prime minister so wished, the nascent Dominion, its noun plucked from the Psalms, was confederated in 1867. Effective legislative independence came in 1931. Distinct citizenship followed in 1947. Newfoundland’s accession fixed the borders in 1949. From Westminster by way of an Ottawa kitchenette, the Constitution was patriated in 1982. With each accretive step came a half-principled assertion of sovereignty, and a half-terrified refusal of the neighbouring republic's insatiable energies, in favour of a flexible yet ever-ambiguous settlement that fused the vestigial splendour of the royal connection with the symbolic reinventions of a new credal patriotism.
The same ambiguity shapes and suffocates the history of Canadian literature. Any account of Canada’s prose tradition must begin with a complication that most other nations largely avoid: there is no single “national” literature from which grew a roughhewn local idiom into living communion with the universal canon, but two literary traditions, neither of which emerged organically, each a provincial spent ember of the metropole's mother flame. Literature in English Canada lacked the social and moral granularity that marked the English tradition; literature in French Canada lacked the intellectual and aesthetic licence, even licentiousness, that defined the French. What emerged culturally, then, was cautious and derivative. Not so much a literary art as a documentary of intractable terrain: travellers' narratives, clerical pamphleteering, and, in the marooned eye of the rare artist, cowed perception anesthetized by the annihilating monotony of rock and sky and tree.
II. A Realm of Received Transmission
The benighted colony, as Frye’s half-century of accumulated diagnoses attest (under whose bookish penumbra Canadian literature conducts its anxious self-examination still), was constituted in the seventeenth century by the rival imperiums of altar and throne, the sovereign mind not yet quickened in the colonial body. Southward, that same toiling colonial was given over to constitutive antinomies: the rebel son born to Enlightenment, the Loyalist daughter to darkness, as ever where the light is oblique. That deference, congenital, carried the north into the besieged romanticism of the nineteenth century, having elided those hundred years of rollicking self-invention that bequeathed American culture the fomented vernacular of the liberated self.
America is the republic of the even centuries; Canada is the empire of the odd. For America, the even centuries were epochs of conquest. The eighteenth enthroned the individual as the regnant principle of political life. The twentieth raised industry, democracy, and spectacle to their highest expression, then sold the lot, with the milk of human kindness, from the pointed barrel of a gun. Indeed, the twenty-second is long since annexed in futuro by those for whom providence is a serene eschatology, the Enlightenment's incandescence hurled into the pitchy gloom of futurity. For Canada, the odd centuries were ages of conjecture. The seventeenth dispatched Cavelier and Champlain, deployed Hawkridge and Hudson and Hall, toward the silken shores of Cathay, and abandoned the lot, instead, to the frozen wastes of Ultima Thule. The eighteenth scarcely arrived at all. The nineteenth kindled only a bellicose and vicarious nationalism; the twenty-first is the age that has arrived, as McLuhan foresaw, at the Canadian condition, the Land of the DEW Line, hidden ground for big powers, a rudderless therapeutic technocracy.
And yet so grand a claim, so tidily made, we are bound in humility to concede, is beyond our station. Even in the odd centuries, the republic has the better of us. America’s twenty-first, with the confidence men, the mesmerists and messiahs, the speculative manias and unpoliced pharmacopoeia, is the nineteenth century reincarnate. One prays Canada may yet be so favoured as to observe its own Great Awakening, with frenzied sightings, by the thousand, of the ancient sea deities and their majestic tidal hosts rising off the cliffs of Haida Gwaii—the divine occasion to be consecrated with a nine-year environmental assessment to determine what was seen, by whom, how changing climatic conditions might have played a role (they almost certainly did), and, above all, under which order of government the apparitions properly fall; the Minister of Fisheries would then announce the preliminary findings, with all but the date excised, in a slow, twanging phonetic French.
Beyond the verdict of history lies the question of cardinal orientation. The northern nation is constituted along its lateral axis, by canal and telegraph line, portage and post road, survey chain and fence post, broadcast frequency and time zone: a latticework of systems whose imaginative current runs not outward to the finis terrae of the coasts but inward, systolic, into the omphalos of the central provinces. Where Canada runs centripetal, America—itself an east-west arrangement—is, in moral imagination, a north-south country of Puritan Heaven and antebellum Hell. Slavery flayed the newborn covenant; from the body politic the Civil War plucked every artery and laid bare the bone. Into that reeking and unhallowed charnel the haunted writer, like a necromancer, descended, drawn faithful to the rite, to tend the dead and raise, unbidden, the lilac and the daisy where they ought not bloom.
Why in Canada was there no such rite? Why, if under the same unrelinquishing soil, with no less unpurged atrocity in the blood-dimmed tide, were there so few writers of the mercenary summoner sort to unsalt the earth and let flower the Asphodel Meadows? Perhaps, in the circumvention of both phrase and time, for the Canadian writer the message is to be merely a recording medium; the all-too-wakeful frequencies, all-too-faithfully relayed. For in the tradition of the diagnostic, one might enlist Frye's garrison mentality alongside Pascale Casanova’s world republic of letters to locate the predicament precisely: the writer of the small nation, caught in the double bind of rootedness and exile, may find within their pen the vexation of Job and the thunder of God, yet is commanded, like a conscripted Moses, to write, before all else, for their people; and from that imperative follows the hyperconsciousness that hardens into humiliation and ever-deferred ambition.
The contemporary age has, besides, redrawn the literary Greenwich meridian: it runs no longer through the timepieces of Paris but through the chimes of Big Ben and the opal clock at Grand Central. And those wayward few within the garrison who turn their gaze beyond the thick-timbered fort toward the supranational capital of art are regarded as deserters, met with disdain from those on whose behalf they claim to speak.
To complete the triptych, one might draw in the inviolable room of Virginia Woolf: that even beautiful prose, when turned from its exquisite story toward private grievance, loses the integrity of the fully achieved work. The writer, then, must venture out past the fortress, as the poet-chronicler of the local and prophet-cartographer of the void, into the very void the garrison forbids, which is to say, into the only place where the levy and the grudge may be shed, and the work, at last, fully summoned.
The garrison held. Yet it is sometimes the stranger within its gates who makes a nation most intelligible, seeing the thing that lies in plain sight but to which the inhabitants have grown blind. Edgar Z. Friedenberg was such a stranger. In protest against the Vietnam War, Friedenberg, an American sociologist, fled Buffalo for Halifax. There, despite his quarrel with Canada’s derogable civil liberties, he lived and taught and died, becoming, in some quarters, a dissident Tocqueville of his adopted country. He discerned, beneath the public performance of peace, order, and good government, a deeper taxonomy, wherein insubordination was itself a species of apostasy. Deference to authority is not merely a civic virtue but a condition of the imagination. A literature that conceives of authority as the dead measure against which the drama is judged, rather than a living antagonist within the tragedy, cannot stage the contest of unconquerable will on which art has, since Sophocles, been staked.
Where, then, is Sula on the escarpment above Hamilton? What Antigone cries out from the limestone caves of Canmore? Neither appears. The rebel, when Canadian letters admit him, is permitted no untamed resistance, no impious ambition to found, in rivalry, an opposite dominion. One thinks of Duddy Kravitz, whose revolt against powerlessness narrows, in the end, to forgery and friendlessness and a meagre Laurentian acre. Or of David Canaan, to whom celestial vision comes only in dying, as the snow of the Annapolis Valley gathers over timber and man. Or of Prince, the poet mutt of Fifteen Dogs, whose verse survives the murderous persecution of the pack, only to perish triumphantly, unheard, with his wondrous canine tongue. Seldom does authority move, like Athena or Dionysus, among the mortals. Where no god descends, nothing is at stake; the catastrophe, on Friedenberg's terms, is aesthetic. A people whose abiding condition is survival will take aesthetic ambition for a breach of precarious solidarity. The condition was, in French Canada, a circumscribed insubordination, defiant before the English, obedient before the Church: survivance. Loyalism, its English answer, would gladly have knelt before Rome were it spared the mummery of the sacraments, wanting nothing of the faith but absurd submission to a remote power.
A country whose Confederation, in thousands of kilometres to the last spike, was ransomed in ribbons of steel was, in some sense, bound to produce the great theorists of transmission. Harold Innis, the austere cartographer of territorial power, began as an obscure political economist of Canada’s export staples. He followed the brute commodities through the dusty archives of soot-black London and red-brick Toronto and down the Mackenzie by canoe to the Arctic, a dogged voyageur through history itself, reading the ledgers of the Hudson’s Bay Company and the sandbars of the sinuous river. The pattern he reconstructed revealed something larger: communication as a constitutive force of empire, and in papyrus, clay, and telecommunications lay the means by which power is monopolized. Marshall McLuhan, Innis’s heir in this if in little else, drew from the argument a whole metaphysics of perception: Narcissus as narcosis, the long hypnosis print, the sensory ratios of the oral age, the electric reversal in which anarchy is centralized and tyranny tribalized.
The mediated, hyperconscious Word was foundational to Canada before it became a fetish of postwar academe. Criticism came to dominate partly because it required only a well-annotated copy of Hamlet, a systematizing imagination, and the cultivated severity of a lifetime spent among beautiful things, each of which the British-modelled universities reliably supplied. As the academic Nick Mount has observed, and the critic George Woodcock earlier understood, before the 1960s there were novels written in Canada; only afterward were there, in the fuller sense, Canadian novels. That emergence required publishers and a reading public, which Canada had yet to build. The cultural life was, in this way, structurally second hand: the curriculum came from Britain, the radio and paperbacks from New York, and so a realm of received transmissions would naturally theorize transmission.
But to give the materialists half their due, the poverty of the local also encouraged this particular grandeur of thinking. For where the transplanted tradition possessed little cultural matter of its own from which to generalize, the Canadian intellectual must begin with the whole and reason backward. To Frye, who came of age in a New Brunswick still largely without roads or running water, the body of English literature arrived as an exquisite orrery of the complete cosmos—fixed in their courses, every wandering star—and if someone had to be its Astronomer Royal, Frye, with his formidable ego, was more than willing. Canada’s peculiar genius thus lay in the elevation of communication itself into a kind of state religion, as reliably unglamorous as it was indispensable to the maintenance of order; thus, writers played the role of officious proconsuls, and through their crude dictates, provide aprosodic words to superintend, and not to sing.
Diagnosis, however, is not poiesis. Canada was perhaps the slowest among its colonial peers to grasp modernity’s power, a condition all the more tragic because behind that epochal movement in art lay a perennial mode of imaginative consciousness. For in its esemplastic operation, modernism is a civilizational fire, and beneath the merely legible burns a mythic and irrational patterning, a chiaroscural flame. To fracture the chronology of plot, to privilege the simultaneous image over inherited sequence, presupposes a civilization (green and pleasant England, say) tacitly confident enough in its perfected forms to risk their destruction and discover in their wake, or in dreams, an uninhibited consciousness.
III. For Want of a Canon
Robert Kroetsch, the raucous Bard of Alberta, once observed that Canadian literature evolved directly from Victorian into Postmodern, all but bypassing the modernist rupture. His puckish jest contains a truth: transgression is only possible, and darkly intoxicating, when there is something deeply consecrated—the Romanesque basilicas, the tales, the songs, the anointed kings arrayed in a delirium of jewels—against which to transgress. Canada’s institutions were too tenuously rooted to profane. The brute Dionysian energies that European modernism demanded found, in the provinces, no liberating climate, for what stalks the burgeoning novelist is a creeping hypothermia at their fingertips. (However, one ought not, to be sure, grow too comfortable in this diagnosis. There is another aggrieved periphery of the Crown, cast under the same serrated shadow, that managed, rather inconveniently, to bear an impecunious, half-blind exile who, with the poems of Symbolism and the prose of Naturalism tossed into the fiery alembic of his verbal art, created the grandest literary work of, conservatively, the last two hundred years; Ireland suggests that the colonial wound need not fester into neurotic grievance.)
To give the decolonialists their full due, the Euro-settler literary establishment was sufficiently racist to regard the Indigenous peoples it encountered as useful auxiliaries. It drew freely on their wayfinding while refusing to take seriously their arts, regarding them as too primitive to contain the vast achievements of visionary imagination present in their oral cosmologies. What it failed to recognize, perhaps, was that the glacial lakes and slopes of the Rockies held, among the Blackfoot, immemorial reservoirs of story as inexhaustible as Arthur and the Grail. To inhabit a place is also to assume, however humbly, an obligation toward the accumulated past, even where no ancestral claim exists.
Yet the answer to that historic injustice cannot be to make the materials of myth an exclusive hereditary property. Indigenous cultures are not the settler’s by descent, but Indigenous presence is inseparable from the history of the territories both now inhabit. Imagination claims no right of blood and no warrant of conquest; its title, such as it has, is earned through the recreative act of free transfiguration. The older and graver error was to suppose these stories belonged to peoples unworthy of serious attention; the newer, if lesser, error would be to forbid the imagination from crossing the cordon of lineage. The novelist is necessarily a bricoleur of inherited and engendered figurations. Culture lives first in those who carry its stories as a living tradition, and thereafter through the strange and marvellous renewals by which one vision is alloyed with another and, in the alchemy of wisdom and genius, transfigured.
The novelist in Canada writes what one might term the merely excellent—the scrupulous and well-assembled labour, tender in its sympathies and correcting in its conscience—and, if one permits the pretension in full bloom, artworks forsaken by the daemon. What Canada has never produced is the novel that breaks open the tradition, the Bible of Hell that takes the rebel angels’ part. There have been attempts. Consider the craggy mythopoesis of Tay John, the stark oracular spell of The Double Hook (an Imagist Pedro Páramo), the trickster grandeur of Solomon Gursky Was Here (what Mordecai Richler himself called the first South American North American novel). Consider also Surfacing, which makes animate the animal predicament of the sublime, and L'Avalée des avalés, the more troublesome case, in which Réjean Ducharme cannibalizes clerical French and reanimates the remains as a private language. But whether because of the crude mechanics of consecration, our genius for the short story—that perfect rodent art of whittling—or the necessity that a canon, true to the Greek kanon, remain a measuring rod, discriminating in scope and therefore exclusive by design, the world has found none indispensable, and is all the poorer for it.
Perhaps the gravest provincialism is the ruinous and servile habit of comparison, for across the besetting self-consciousness of Canadian letters, our literature made of America its perpetual reckoning. But did not America stage the same reckoning with Britain? Was it not under Monroe that the arbiters of art could ask who, in the four quarters of the globe, reads an American book? And was it not under Van Buren that Emerson declared the republic’s “long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands” was drawing to a close? And was it not then Melville who grappled with Shakespeare as Jacob with the angel, wrested from rivalry an ancestral blessing, and forged from borrowed fire a reprise of Ecclesiastes, his own fine-hammered steel of woe? Canada has never quite permitted itself that ordeal of self-creation, for ours has long been an apophatic nationality of the via negativa: neither England’s rule nor America’s rebellion, a country approaching itself as some Rhineland mystic approaches God, by unsaying all that it is. Even the enduring equivocation of Mackenzie King, “not necessarily conscription, but conscription if necessary,” moves by the same privative reflex. In approaching God by negation, one still bounds, through beggared language, the divine—and, once applied to art, it condemns the work to the indignity of reductive definition.
Canada’s thematic criticism performed a necessary historical intervention in asking what our books disclosed about the country, and Frye’s elaborately scaffolded scientia remains forever indispensable insofar as it kindles to incandescence the vocabulary by which a work may be understood. But an inductive method outlives its purpose when it turns freely given gifts of beauty into schoolroom obligations, and to ask “is this sufficiently Canadian?” must yield to the more exacting “is this sufficiently good?” One then must ask “does this work exceed the permitted doctrines of the day?” “Do these characters sink to the bottom of the whirlpool and still come up swimming?” “Is there, finally, a monstrous virtuosity of language that seems to exhaust expression itself?” There is, indeed, a peculiar irony in demanding that art here answer to the categories of criticism, for one of modernism’s originating intuitions came precisely when the Canadian prairie, the bare denominator of land and sky, rendered the inherited categories inadequate.
In 1906, after abandoning his studies, the critic and poet T. E. Hulme worked his way across Western Canada, earning his keep as a labourer and lumberjack. He was twenty-two and would supply modernism with much of its theoretical spine; through his conversations with Ezra Pound, he helped seed Imagism, and through Imagism, the refounding of the language. By a bitter symmetry, he would be killed by a German shell in Flanders in 1917 and buried in the soil enshrined in Canada’s most famous poem. Two years after crossing the prairie, he said in a lecture: “Speaking of personal matters, the first time I ever felt the necessity or inevitableness of verse, was in the desire to reproduce the peculiar quality of feeling which is induced by the flat spaces and wide horizons of the virgin prairie of western Canada.”
In his notebook Cinders, he wrote more starkly: “the flats of Canada are incomprehensible on any single theory.” The very ground the novelist and thinker in Canada has so conscientiously documented and theorized struck a well-born Englishman as something the machinery of Victorian verse could not contain. The irony is instructive: Canadian literature would largely bypass the modernist freedom that landscape had helped disclose. There need be no importation of imaginative licence if one of its first sparks was struck here; we need not remain the dread empire of the uncreating Word. What remains is to reclaim that originating licence, to permit inherited categories to break, and, from their fragments, to cut teeming tesserae of livid prose. The Canadian novelist, then, must care not nothing, but little, for geography and negate the negation: to forge from an unbounded consciousness a book whose ink, sooted back to lampblack, relit and liquescent, fevers the Arctic and roils the frozen sea.
David Telfer writes from Calgary.