Fuck the (CanLit) Farm Novel?
I know there are some Canadian Literature nerds who occasionally read this blog, so… Is CanLit too rural? My initial response to this was “Yes! God, yes!” – until I remembered that I may have read around 10 Canadian novels in my entire life. So I’m not exactly qualified to judge.
Still, since I’ve been thinking so much recently about cities and their capacity to make people and culture – to make no mention of planning a Toronto short story collection in my head that I’ll probably never write – it seems a fair question to ask here. Is Canada’s vision of itself still too focused on the ole’ “hewers of wood, drawers of water” cliche – especially when around 80% of the population lives in cities? Or is the sometimes rural focus of Canuck writing a way of re/constructing a past and a cultural legacy that one might morph and play with?
Note: This was also just an excuse for me to bust out a picture of Autumn, which is my favourite time of year.
Note 2: The only downside to that link is that calls As for Me and My House a “lobotomy between two covers”. I dunno’ – I sorta’ loved it. But then, it is a very morose, introspective novel.
I’m no CanLit nerd, but Margaret Atwood is my fave author ever, and while some of her stuff takes place in rural places (and other, older time periods), try the Robber Bride- most of it takes place in Toronto!
Thanks for the comment. I know that a lot of recent CanLit does take place in cities. I just wonder why there is this insistence on a rural past – or this reluctance to write novels that really feel contemporary. It’s not so much that it irks me – just makes me curious, really.
Ooh ooh, I get to be a token CanLit nerd! Sweet! Hmmm…Douglas Coupland is a notable exception to all of this, as is Lisa Moore. And Canadian poetry is very into the urban; check Erin Moure’s rewriting of Portugese pastoral at Bathurst & St. Clair, and of course, the peripatetic bard himself, bp Nichol. I’m doing a lot of work right now on the idea of Canadian literary history as articulating/bolstering a sense of national identity, and I think that has a lot to do with it: what’s distinctive about Canada as a nation, other than our landscape? Not that national identity is anything but a fiction, but we seem to love to name-check it just the same. But I think Whetter seriously overstates his case, and sadly, hasn’t read enough contemporary Canadian lit.
Thanks Melissa. I thought maybe it was a little too polemic.
About that whole landscape thing – this is silly and anecdotal, but the great northern wilderness shtick has never factored into my conception of Canada. It’s always been all the other fictions – the multiculturalism, the politeness etc etc. The thing that’s been running around my head lately is that Canada is somehow very ‘a-centric’ – like it resits central visions of itself, even as one or two cultures remain dominant. How many people even agree what Toronto is about let alone Canada?
Anyway, I have a feeling that I may be the first person ever to talk about Canada and national identity… Any super deep revelations that most people haven’t thought of before?
Didn’t Northrop Frye call this the “garrison mentality” of Canadian literature and culture?
Sort of; garrison mentality suggests that there is a pervasive sense of isolation in Canadian literature and culture, as we used to live in self-contained garrisons surrounded by “impenetrable forests” and “violent Natives.” The farm trend that Nav is talking about seems to be some sort of neo-pastoral tendency, whereas Frye was more about terror in the face of unconscious nature. The garrison thing tends to be seriously overstated in most discussions of it; for Frye, it was specifically couched as a provisional idea that may or may not be valid at any time, or may only be valid in some times (like when we actually lived in garrisons). And it also has to take into account the fact that a) Frye was an introvert, and so had a tendency to read isolation into just about everything and b) he hated Marshall McLuhan, and so likely purposely ignored the potential of communication technologies to overcome an older sense of isolation. In reality, much of what we think of as Frye’s conception of the garrison mentality actually belongs to Atwood, who runs with it in _Survival_, and goes farther than he does.
Nav, here’s what I’m working on right now (this is going to be practice in simplifying my SSHRC argument), which is very much about Canadian national identity: Canadian poetry at the mid-century is obsessed with mythology (as is Frye) because as the centennial of Confederation approaches and the Canadian government uses the Massey Report to encourage Canadian arts and culture, there’s an upsurge in nationalist sentiment; to bolster our national identity (which in Canadian literary history, has always been closely tied to a national literature), the mythopoeic poets attempt a post-colonial rewriting of Canadian literature that legitimates our arts and culture (& therefore identity) by connecting it to the powerful mythologies of Greece, Rome, and the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Make sense? If no, please let me know, ’cause I’m SSHRC-ing it up this weekend, and need to get my thoughts straight.
One more: this isn’t an original argument by any means, but I think there’s a strong case for arguing that the only thing that truly unites Canadians is a shared hatred of Toronto.
Yeah, that totally makes sense to me. ‘Course, other than perhaps your students, I’m the worse person you could possibly ask. But we’ll ignore that.
Question: why a post-colonial re-writing?
You can be my non-specialist reader; if you understand it, hopefully the fine arts prof will too!
I think it’s in response to that old adage of “Canada’s identity is its lack of identity”; the centennial of Confederation was coming up, the Massey Commission had just suggested the necessity of increased funding for a distinctly Canadian arts and culture, and the Canada Council was established to do just that. Anniversary of Confederation brought up old colonial concerns about out culture just being an inferior copy of Britain’s; hence the attempt to connect it to traditions that are both older and more revered than theirs (and to participate in older traditions of mythopoeic poetry that give us Blake etc.). Mythologizing becomes a response to a colonial inferiority complex (which my training as a good postmodernist makes me disclaimer with: but that’s only one reason, and from one perspective).
Okay, that makes sense. I think I forgot that ‘post-colonial’ is something that can be applied to ‘mainstream’ (i.e. Anglo) Canadian as well. That’s what you get, I suppose, for living in a poco ghetto (and just generally not being well-read).
It’s such a shame that we rarely know what’s going on with each others’ research. At a party recently, a mutual friend of ours who I’ve known for at least a couple of years articulated her project to a curious guy there; it was the first time I’d ever heard what she was working on. That’s weird, right? But I guess the new website certainly helps.
Anyway, hope you can finish your SSHRC/OGS stuff soon so you can get to the much more serious and important business of writing about food and/or wine
[On that note, feel free to tell anyone else who you think might be interested in writing, lives in Toronto and you think would be good at it.]
I’ll be excited to finish the SSHRC too; it’s taking forever, and while it’s fun, I’m more interested in the potential results. And the wine. Can’t forget the wine. I think my first Snacks post is going to be titled “Good Mussels, Bad Sauvignon.” I’ll leave you with that.
I know what you mean about often not knowing what people are doing; I’m lucky that I can sometimes point people toward others who are doing related things, but that’s usually only because we discussed it ad nauseam on the picket lines. Anyone who didn’t picket, I have no idea what they do. Come to think of it, I don’t think I know what you do!
Hi there, great post. I’m reading for a canlit exam at the moment (I’m writing it next month), and I’ve seen it all: rural stuff, urban stuff, a mix of both, stuff that is interested in place, and some that seeks to be placeless…
FYI, short list of Canlit novels/sh stories that aren’t rural:
Frances Brooke The History of Emily Montague (1769) (Quebec City)
The Two Solitudes by H MacLennan (1945) (Montreal)
Barometer Rising (MacLennan) (Halifax)
Leacock Arcadian Adventures of the Idle Rich (Montreal)
The Tin Flute G. Roy (1945) (Montreal)
Cohen Favourite Game (Montreal)
Green Grass Running Water King (Edmonton, I think)
Joy Kogawa Obasan (Vancouver)
Mistry A Fine Balance (doesn’t really take place in Canada, though, so you may decide to throw this one out)
Ondaatje, In the Skin of A Lion (Toronto)
I think because Canada’s history is so young, and because people are so spread out here, and a lot of our population lives in rural areas it’s a valid concern/preoccupation for writers. Also, some of our cities are kinda small (esp in the east and on the prairies–Fredericton is taken up in Clarke’s George and Rue, for example, but it’s not really an urban novel, or even an urban setting, really because Fredericton is like a big town.)
Also, re the second comment on this post: does a novel have to be set in a city to feel “contemporary”? I don’t think it’s necessary.
I love this conversation about Canadian lit stemming from a This magazine column.
Melissa might like to know that the author of that column (contrary to her “sadly, hasn’t read enough contemporary Canadian lit”) is a professor of Canadian lit (he taught me in my first forays into the subject) and wrote his dissertation on Ondaatje (who is a largely urban writer, of course) and has published his own urban Canadian novel about biking across Canada, which I dug a lot.
For sure there are a ton of exceptions to the idea that Canadian writing focuses on farm angst, but nobody reads very much anymore. There are a lot of Canadian books published every year (along with dozens of lit mags), and no one has time for them (mostly). So prizes become important. What’s taught in courses matters more than it should (the canon, right?). I don’t think that Whetter is talking about what’s being written, but rather on what’s being read/published/awarded/valorized.
I agree with Melissa that it’s connected to some sort of notion of nationalism. I also agree with Whetter, because mythic nationalism is boring, and we need other.