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What Is Canadian
Literature?
By Mike Doyle
A piece by Ken McGoogan
in a recent Globe and Mail (August 8), is the latest
contribution to an old chestnut, the ‘What is Canadian Literature?’
debate. I wonder how many other ‘literatures’ have
people hovering on the sidelines wondering ‘What’
they are? One thing, notice that the very phrase ‘Canadian
literature’ has an academic whiff about it. What we are
talking about is Canadian writing. By now, starting a list with,
say, Margaret Atwood, Marie Clair Blais, Anne Hebert and Alice
Munro, we can add the names of several score more topflight Canadian
writers and these constitute what the academics call a ‘canon’
of Canadian literature. (It becomes ‘literature’ at
this level of discourse!)
In debating his own
rather nervous, perhaps redundant, question, McGoogan raises a
further one: ‘When does an immigrant writer become a Canadian
writer?’ Implicit in this is the correct notion that an
individual may become a Canadian citizen and yet not necessarily
become a Canadian writer. McGoogan suggests that a book whose
content is Canadian might be considered Canadian and might qualify
it as an item of Canadian literature. Maybe, but that is a stretch
and still does not make its author a Canadian writer.
The crucial sentence
in McGoogan’s piece reads: ‘If a novel is written
by someone who came of age in this country, and so was psychologically
shaped by this place, his or her creations can only be Canadian.’
That ‘only’ is vaguely problematic, but McGoogan has
the main point. If your writing must belong somewhere then it
belongs to the place where you were psychologically shaped. This
does not entirely settle the question, as I discovered first hand.
Born in England, I grew up there, left Europe very early in my
twenties, psychologically shaped to that point by Irish ethnicity
and the Irish mindset of the people around me. My destination
was New Zealand where I began to realise my true vocation. My
original shaping was English in circumstance, Irish by extended
family ethos, thus partly European, even though back then there
was no European Union.
I have lived in Canada
over forty years, delighted to call Canada my home and that (certainly
by McGoogan’s criterion) my children are Canadian. McGoogan
begins to confuse the issue with lists of immigrants some of whom
are acceptably Canadian because they live here and ‘produce
some of its [i.e., Canadian literature’s] most exciting
work.’. A case by case examination of the work and ‘psycho-logical
shaping’ of some of the writers he mentions would really
cloud the issue. Some important writers, Dionne Brand comes to
mind, are bi-nationals, for a start.
I’ve spoken before
of Pico Iyer’s perspective (mentioned by McGoogan), the
one in which shaken loose you become a citizen of the world, and
I see Iyer’s position but don’t really agree with
it. As a writer, I write from what is within me and realise that
I came to Canada when I was already psychologically shaped (albeit
in two stages). I am glad to be a Canadian, glad to be in Canada,
and glad to be a writer, but have never aspired to being a Canadian
writer as such. In terms of this nationalist way of categor-izing
things, I am a displaced person. In terms of my own perspective,
I am here (in the world, in that part of it known as Canada) and
now.
There are writers who
come to a new country and set about making it their own (Frederick
Philip Grove may be an example), but more common would be a James
Joyce, who lived in several European countries whereas Ireland,
his country of origin, always remained his focus. A more recent
example would be Milan Kundera, who has lived in Paris for decades,
but writes of his birth country Czechoslovakia. Then there is
Joseph Conrad, who wrote in English, Anglicized his name, is undoubtedly
part of English literature though he did not necessarily write
about England, and was unmistakably Polish.
Canadian literature, in the first instance, is good writing published
by people whose lives were shaped by Canada from an early age,
say 14 at the latest (on this criterion I would call Michael Ondaatje
Canadian even though some of his preoccupation stems from an ethnic
bachground in Sri Lanka, in which sense he, too, is bi-national.)
I am not trying to solve the question, ‘What is Canadian
literature?', simply adding a thought or two to the debate, though
I think one response to the question is: ‘Who wants to know?’
The Polish-Indian-Jewish
writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala once (1979) lectured on ‘Disinheritance’,
describing herself as a ‘writer without any ground of being
out of which to write’ (see Guardian Review, 19 March 2005).
Born in Germany in 1927, (though in old age she looks Indian),
her father a Polish Jew victimised by the Nazis, she escaped to
England in 1939 ; after the war she married an Indian and lived
in India for ten years. For over forty years she worked on movie
productions with James Ivory and Ismael Merchant. They all lived
in Manhattan, but the Jhabvalas wintered in Delhi. Ruth Jhabvala
sees herself as a refugee and, as such, says ‘you don’t
give your whole allegiance to a place’ . Her status almost
diminishes her to ‘nothing’, makes her feel a ‘chameleon’
or ‘cuckoo’, but she says, “I like it that way’.
In her own view, Jhabvala writes in the mode of the country where
she is living. In the movie Shakespeare Wallah (1965), an ‘end
of the raj’ movie, she combined her love of English literature
with her knowledge of India. So, as a writer, it’s possible
to be without a national pigeonhole.
I have enjoyed for
the most part the Merchant-Ivory productions I have seen, also
the novels of Jhabvala I’ve read, and generally compare
her condition with my own, that of the ‘rootless intellectual’
or ‘displaced person’, no less true in my case than
in hers, though I feel I have roots in Ireland, some in New Zealand,
and - a wry but unavoidable admission - some in England, and having
spent half my life in Canada, some here, too. For me, the most
significant of her remarks is that, ‘you don’t give
your whole allegiance to a place’, though I believe that,
if you settle in a place after a certain age, ‘don’t’
means ‘can’t’, at least as a writer. As an individual,
it’s a different matter.
As for deciding whether
individual works are Canadian, that is not a matter of principle
but of judgment made on a case by case basis. It would be a ramshackle
way of establishing the ‘canon’ of a national ‘literature’!
Mike Doyle
has lived in Victoria since 1968. A poet, critic, biographer and
editor, his most recent book is The Watchman's Dance: Poems
2004-2009.
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