Conclusion
Reflecting on Nostalgia’s Restoration
Baden, Ontario,1 and its larger counterpart, New Hamburg, are the two most prominent settlements in Wilmot Township. Recently, change has come not only to these towns but also to the township at large; its built environment has certainly been altered by Baden’s new housing tracts and by other alterations to the physicality of the region. While the marketing for those new subdivisions has drawn in residents with a proffered promise of a peaceful small-town life, a marketing campaign reliant on popular tropes, other dramatic and sudden changes to the township’s built environment have elicited a response from the township’s residents. These changes are integrated into a narrative of the community through appeals to the past, and the responses reconceive the past in order to situate the community in the present.
While the housing tracts have accrued on the edges of Baden, perhaps the more dramatic change to the township’s built environment occurred one night in early January 2007, when New Hamburg’s heritage grandstand burned to the ground. The resulting coverage in local media celebrated the structure as a locus of identity, as a centre of community life, and as a place ensuring the connection to, and continuity of, local traditions. With the loss of that significant structure, many in the township felt untethered from the local past, a feeling of alienation only compounded by the expansion of the township’s communities; people came to feel alienated within their home place.
After the fire, the township immediately committed to rebuilding the grandstand, which, it should be noted, was used only for three or four events during the year. For the rest of the time, it served largely as a place for the township’s youth to congregate away from prying eyes. The previous grandstand was wooden, but the rebuilt grandstand is constructed out of concrete and steel, otherwise a precise replica of its predecessor. Rather than objectively examining the practical need for a structure of such size (it was originally built to accommodate the large crowds at horse racing events in the 1940s and 1950s), the township inscribed onto its built environment a more permanent version of a past ideal, largely as a reaction to sudden change; the current grandstand functions both as a practical structure, and as a type of monument, an embodiment of a celebrated vision of the local past. The township is self-consciously shaping its built environment to reflect an impression of a past, and it is doing so largely as a reaction to the recent sudden shifts in the physicality of the community. The ability of residents to situate their sense of local identity within a continuum that bridges the past and present has been interrupted as a result of the shifting built environment. As the area around them changes, local residents can no longer see a clear connection between the community of the past and that of the present.
To ensure the sense of connection to a past remains vivid, the township initiated projects to shape its built environment, and the resurrection of the grandstand is a recent reflection of an ongoing trend. As a sense of distance from a valued past has only grown for local residents over the recent decades, the township erected monuments distilling and highlighting certain aspects of the region’s history. For instance, a heritage waterwheel was erected along the banks of the Nith River in New Hamburg, a structure that celebrates the centrality of water power to the region’s early days by inflating and displaying its most recognizable apparatus. The township also devoted millions of dollars to the restoration and preservation of Baden’s Castle Kilbride, the township’s most prominent residence, which was built by the flax and linseed oil magnate James Livingston in the late nineteenth century. Prior to this restoration work, the house had fallen into disrepair, and it dominated Baden’s streets as an imposing, somewhat bleak structure of a faded, half-forgotten past.
The township has selected various features from its past and has determined that it is those things, those recognizable structures, that should be resurrected and scrubbed clean in order to revivify the historicity of the region. In choosing what to remember, the township has selected a few structures – the grandstand and the prominent residences – which become metonyms of the past, dots in an implied pattern that are strung together and made comprehensible through a projected sense of historical understanding. This is the past that the township has constructed for itself during a time of rapid change to its communities’ built environments. It is a past invoked to address a present need. The township has shaped its past through a type of physical narrativization of the land and townscapes, which shapes a story to tell itself during times of change.
The narrative of the past then becomes a type of consolation, a soothing story used to bridge times of flux. Yet, in the process, the narrative of the past becomes a focused story contingent not on the broad sweep of living memory but on those aspects of the past that those in the present value. So often, past values are vague projections from the present focusing on ill-defined notions of community and identity. This narrative becomes a type of veneration conceived of as a bulwark against decline: the valued past or at least its remnants are disappearing, and only through narrativizing that past can we slow the movement away from the cultural touchstone that, it should be said, is really a construction of the process of remembrance. Alongside this narrative of change emerges a narrative of loss; each development that does not emulate the past becomes a loss of that past. But what is really lost is the ability to connect the community’s narrative of itself to the past on which the story itself relies. The physical objects, the monuments and reconstructions, allow the community to continue to tell the story about itself, a story that relies on an understanding of the past as harbouring a kinder, more authentic version of the town and its residents.
What has occurred in Wilmot is one example of how an idea or ideal of a small town is employed for any number of purposes: “small-town Ontario” is an expression commonly used in literature and popular culture to denote a sense of loss; an image of a knowable, familiar community; a gothic sense of perverse provincialism; or a holistic cultural touchstone that has since degraded as a result of a dislocating modernity. What this study has argued is that small-town, rural Ontario is, or can be, whatever is needed by the one who invokes it, an invocation so often masked as memory. In the case of Wilmot Township, the revival of the past occurs because of an unfamiliar present in which many township residents find themselves. To re-imagine the familiar, or rather to make more familiar that which was taken for granted until it was gone, is a method of situating oneself in the present by reconceiving the past.
In the literature of small-town Ontario, the idea of the small-town past is so often a projection. This is made explicit in Richard Wright’s Clara Callan, set in both small-town Ontario and Manhattan in the 1930s. The novel contains a radio serial called The House on Chestnut Street, which offers to its audience a vision of the sunny, feel-good town of Meadowvale, a place designed to accord with most sentimental and conventional notions of the small-town idyll. This program is produced and performed by actors deep in the heart of Manhattan, who broadcast the most obvious stereotypes of bucolic small-town life, a version that proves exceedingly popular. Meadowvale is a world in which plot complications are resolved through daily denouements catalysed by small-town good will and common sense. This urban fictionalization of the small-town world provides a ready contrast to the complexity, melancholy, and final hard-won happiness of protagonist Clara’s real small-town life in Whitfield, Ontario. The space between those two experiential, economic, cultural places – the small town and the big city – has proven a vast gulf for Ontario writers to explore, and it has yielded a dichotomous tension at the heart of small-town fiction from Ontario. Yet this binary always breaks down on the margins of the texts. The productive opposition between the two temporal-spatial poles is often a sublimation of tension within the characters themselves, tension that plays out within this imaginary temporal-spatial dichotomy between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the past and the present, the small town and the city. Small-town memory may offer an alternative to the present, but the content of that memory is distrusted, doubted, or perpetually inaccessible.
In Elizabeth Hay’s Alone in the Classroom, the narrator comments on the gap between past and present and how it is both navigated and used in works of fiction. In this novel, which is set partially in Argyle, Ontario, a small town based on Renfrew, the conclusion contains a twinned image that proposes that the gaps in our knowledge of the past can be filled only by imagination. Hay’s narrator, Anne, is attempting to write a story of her family’s history, part of which is based in Argyle and part in the town of Jewel, Saskatchewan. The novel ends with a description of the narrator scraping some lichen off of the grave of Parley Burns, a central figure and the enigma around which the action of the novel revolves: the question of the novel is, what role did he play in the deaths of two girls in each of the novel’s central small-town settings? What becomes more important than the answer to that question is suggested by the final image of the lichen sitting in a box on the narrator’s desk, an image that echoes that of stones that rested in a similar box on her mother’s table; these stones were taken from an arctic creek bed only one week prior to a glacial slide that buried the creek for untold millennia. The stones are a symbol of the buried past, something now inaccessible, covered by the movement of time and change. The lichen, similarly, is a symbol of a past about which Anne’s questions will never be answered; the problem of Burns’ role in the deaths will never be resolved because he himself, the only one who could provide satisfactory answers, is now buried. The lichen is a reminder to Anne about the futility of total historical access and knowledge; we will only ever have small fragments of the past, and yet it is from these fragments that we spin complete, complex narratives. This is an act of weaving together, an act of connecting events into a narrative. In order to understand the past, we have to fill it out, provide a context for the wisps and scraps that we do have.
James Reaney addresses this question of historical knowledge head on in his poem “Prose for the Past.” It begins conventionally enough with the persona visiting the archives at the local library to inquire “What was it like in the past?” He then seeks answers to that question by reviewing stacks of faded newspapers, that “shaky fading paper rope into the darkness of the past” (13). The conventional catalogue of items and events of the local past, the contrasting price of cordwood in the winter and summer, the frustrations of local poets, and the arrival of the railway to town, soon becomes a catalogue of more personal images, perhaps scenes or stories from his own past: “There were the old ladies who stopped the church bells from ringing after midnight because it disturbed their slumbers / An Indian crossing the Market Square in the November twilight with a long feather in his hat” (15). This final image spurs the persona’s memory further, and he introduces the figure of Granny Crack, a mythical character from local lore, a wanderer of country roads. “She speaks from the past,” the persona confirms, as if to leave her out of the town record is to miss something central to any account of the region. The poem ends with an image of the twin mythical figures of the town, Granny Crack and the Winter Janitor:
The old woman of the country, Summer Wanderer,
The old man of the town, Winter Janitor,
Old Women, Granny Crack
Old man, old woman
Revolving back to back
Looking down
Granny Janitor Angel
On my town.
This twinned figure comprises marginal, even dreaded figures in official town life, inhabitants of country roads and back closets, and yet this twinned figure is an essential answer to that initial interrogative, “What was it like in the past?” What begins with a look into the official record of the town, in order to know what it was like “back then,” subsequently merges into a mythical and yet personal alternative or addendum to the town’s history: the answers to the question can only be manifold, as numerous as those who remember the past, since the official chronicler of town life, the newspaper, can supply only one type of answer.
One distinguishing feature of the literary Ontario small town originates with Leacock’s portrayal, according to Gerald Lynch, who says that small-town Ontario embodies the idea of the “home place,” as it relates to “individual, communal, and national identity” (The One 182) – that is, the small town as common past. However, as I have argued, Leacock’s work is more about the loss of the home place and its failed recuperation through memory. Furthermore, Leacock’s work reveals a process of thinking about and remembering home as largely a response to change. This influence reverberates throughout the work of Ontario writers, writers who never simply parrot Leacock but do negotiate his influence. What Leacock’s work firmly establishes, and what echoes throughout the subsequent literature, is that literary small-town Ontario may be a home place, but as a home place it can exist only in memory. When a physical return does occur, that place is no longer recognized as home: home, now, is in the cities located at the far end of the train tracks running through town.
What this study has argued is that the nature of these small-town memories does not simply depend on the experiences of the past, but rather they depend on the needs of the present, needs that invariably shape the past. If Laurajane Smith argues that the past we conceive is always a product of the present we inhabit, literary small-town Ontario offers examples of how this projected past becomes an object of ambivalence for the very source that projects it. For instance, Mariposa is not situated in the past, but rather it exists as an idea of the past that has been formed by experience in the urban present. Mariposa as the quintessential Ontarian small town is, paradoxically, the result of the increasing urbanization of the province and the attendant perceived ills of the modern city; the town is both the response to and antidote for those ills but can only ever exist in collective memory. When Robertson Davies’s protagonist Dunstan Ramsay revisits Deptford after returning from a “bigger and more sophisticated” place and acquiring a supposedly broader perspective, his initial Mariposan or conventional perspective of the town as the parochial counterpoint to urban sophistication disintegrates when he can no longer see the small town as separate from the homogenizing forces of a global modernity; what affects the city also affects the country. Alice Munro’s works suggest that the influence of the small town is inescapable or, more accurately, that the past one experiences, whether it be rural or urban, is formative at the deepest levels. The past in Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women offers a full-immersion sensory repository that is always available to the artist in the present; the individual’s past becomes as vivid as the present, as that is what the remembering artist requires according to her narrative technique. This vision of the past is revised in Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are? as Rose understands that the past recalled through memory always serves the purpose of storytelling. Rose begins to doubt the impressions that her memory feeds to her; it can never escape the shaping principles of narrative, since memory abides by the requirements of storytelling – it attempts to make sense of a past, to give it shape and meaning. Furthermore, when these memorial narratives influence one’s actions in the present, they lead to dead ends, traps, or pitfalls, as Rose discovers of her friend Ralph, whose return to Hanratty has preceded her own. To revisit the town one remembers is, in fact, a necessary journey to re-engage subsequently with an unfamiliar or dislocating present. Jane Urquhart shows how an understanding or conception of a past home place is not reliant on having experienced that particular place and time. The present in Urquhart’s novels is always fallen from a projected past ideal, but the rural past, the idyllic touchstone against which the present is weighed, can only ever be imagined, never experienced. Her pasts are invariably consolatory, essentially solace for a vague but perpetual sense of loss in a dislocating, inescapable present; the past is a palimpsest written and rewritten through the lens of the present, and the persistent storytelling about that past, its framing through narrative, offers Urquhart’s characters their only recompense for perceived loss in the present.
And yet even this imperfect consolation of the past that is indirectly displayed in A Map of Glass only anticipates a further movement in Urquhart’s subsequent novel and most recent work set in rural Ontario, Sanctuary Line. For the past to have comprehensible meaning for the present, it has to be framed, narrativized, but by doing these things, one is limiting its possible meanings and interpretations. In Urquhart’s novels, this framing allows characters to understand the significance of the past, and yet this understanding is really only of a circumscribed past, one shaped for the benefit of those in the present. The frame narratives of Urquhart’s earlier work, which become more complex in A Map of Glass, virtually disappear in Sanctuary Line. The latter novel, which takes place on the north shore of Lake Erie, focuses on the dissolution of a farming family who had inhabited this land for generations, so many generations, in fact, that the stories their descendants tell about their ancestors cannot be distinguished one from the other. They are referred to vaguely as “the great greats,” and the various threads of their stories cannot be untangled; their meaning, therefore, cannot be clarified for the benefit of those in the present. The distant past is almost absent from the dominant narrative, or at least is muddled, appearing here or there in the form of a near-mythical story of some great or dramatic occurrence. This past, rendered not by a framing narrator but indirectly, second-hand, and at a further remove, through a central character and offered only in jumbled fragments and scraps, is more distant than in Urquhart’s other texts. This is the result of a disappearing family who can no longer recount family lore but also of a modernizing landscape in which inscriptions of the past, those signs that allow Urquhart’s characters to string together narratives, have disappeared.
Urquhart’s novels contain people in the present imagining a historical world in which they feel more at home, as they seem uncertain of, or disconnected from, contemporary life. Small, rural Ontario communities occupy a central role in this imagined world. But this world remains intact only in the imagination. Urquhart and Leacock present places that foster a sense of being at home, yet this feeling of belonging can be sustained only as long as one remains distant from that home place. Davies and Munro show that actual returns to the home place dispel the feeling of belonging. Small-town Ontario, it would seem, is far more evocative as a remembered or imagined home place as opposed to an inhabited one. These works also reveal two very different approaches to the past: one approach views the past as a locus for both meaning and value that is absent in the present; the other critically examines the past to understand the home place as opposed to the role it is assigned from the present. The latter approach gazes towards the possible culmination of identity in the future, while the former laments the loss of the possibility of authentic identity in the past.
Throughout this study, I have rarely used the word “nostalgia,” which literally means a pain or longing for home. I have been far more concerned with the labyrinthine meanderings of memory, of which nostalgia can be only one manifestation, and how the role and function of the small town emerges from these memories. Only two of the studied authors’ works may be called nostalgic, in that their characters yearn for a lost home, and even these differ in the nature of their longing. While Leacock and Urquhart bookend this study, their texts posit very different assumptions about the present significance of the rural past. The distance between the nostalgic projections of Leacock’s and Urquhart’s characters might best be explained by Svetlana Boym’s different types of nostalgia. “Reflective nostalgia,” says Boym, “dwells in algia [pain], in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance” (41), and it is through this type of longing that Leacock’s remembering subjects shape Mariposa. Boym develops reflective nostalgia’s characteristics:
[It is] more concerned with historical and individual time, with the irrevocability of the past and human finitude. Re-flection suggests new flexibility, not the reestablishment of stasis. The focus here is not on recovery of what is perceived to be an absolute truth but on the meditation on history and passage of time … [T]hese kind of nostalgics … take sensual delight in the texture of time not measurable by clocks and calendars … Reflective nostalgia can be ironic and humorous. (49)
Leacock’s narrator, while at times melancholic, also delights in the flexibility temporal distance bestows on memories. He leads his fellow club men in remembering “correct” versions of Mariposa, versions that never claim to recapture the “truth” of an original but are relayed by a narrator who quite consciously acknowledges the enhancing effect of temporal-spatial distance. The narrative voice is both “ironic and humorous,” in part because the Mariposa reflected in his narration can exist only in memory. The whimsical concluding train journey is itself a “meditation on history and passage of time,” for it reveals the irrevocable effects of time passing without encouraging the club men to attempt a further recovery of the past, to overcome those differences between now and then in some ill-conceived attempt at heritage revival. The final chapter retroactively casts the previous eleven chapters as products of memory, certainly, but memories that provide some compensatory pleasure for their central, absent signified. Not only does Sunshine Sketches end by affirming the “irrevocability” of temporal change, but it also proposes that a type of consolation can emerge from the very suppleness of memory itself.
Boym’s “restorative nostalgia” is a far more conservative impulse, which
puts emphasis on nostos [home] and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps … [Restorative nostalgics] do not think of themselves as nostalgic; they believe that their project is about truth. This kind of nostalgia characterizes national and nationalist revivals all over the world, which engage in the antimodern myth-making of history by means of a return to national symbols and myths and, occasionally, through swapping conspiracy theories. Restorative nostalgia manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the past. (41)
It is a stretch to suggest that Urquhart’s fiction is thoroughly and unambiguously “restorative” in its nostalgic longing, but, and as Boym points out, these categories of nostalgia reflect “tendencies” rather than “types” (41), and the unambiguous cultural value Urquhart continually relegates to the past reflects a restorative tendency. Where Leacock’s narrator recognizes the effects of distance on memory with little concern regarding the “truth” of his past, Urquhart’s characters lament what has been lost and seek to solidify the remembered past through its memorialization. The impulse in Urquhart’s texts is not simply to remember but to use those memories as the impetus to restore, to carry the past into the present. However, by revealing Sylvia’s active fictionalizations of the past in A Map of Glass, Urquhart herself may be recognizing the sheer folly of the assumption of total historical knowledge: restoration can only ever be imperfect, incomplete, as the past is a changeable construction.
Because of Urquhart’s ongoing concern over the ephemeral nature of memory and her characters’ attempts to find a stable cultural value in the rural past, we must reiterate what Boym sees as the problematic associations of restorative nostalgia: “This kind of nostalgia characterizes national and nationalist revivals all over the world, which engage in the antimodern myth-making of history by means of a return to national symbols and myths” (41). While Urquhart may be accused of conservative nostalgia, her works simultaneously display unease with the types of revivals they ostensibly advocate. David Harvey also identifies a more recent revival of cultural identities that, he suggests, is the result of individuals within a world that is increasingly “placeless”:
The more global our interrelations become … and the more spatial barriers disintegrate, so more rather than less of the world’s population clings to place and neighborhood or to nation, region, ethnic grouping, or religious belief as specific marks of identity … [T]here is still an insistent urge to look for roots in a world where image streams accelerate and become more and more placeless … Who are we and to what space/place do we belong? … [T]he diminution of spatial barriers has provoked an increasing sense of nationalism and localism, and excessive geopolitical rivalries and tensions, precisely because of the reduction in the power of spatial barriers to separate and defend against others. (“Between” 427)
The search for identity rooted in place is, of course, an active concern for Leacock, but the temporal-spatial location of Mariposa is vague, more a concept than a locale, somewhere out there and back then, and it remains as such at the text’s conclusion. This search is far more intense in Urquhart’s writing, as her characters participate in a drama through which the loss, lamentation, and subsequent search for an identity rooted to the past of specific place becomes the recurrent plot. Together, the two texts by Urquhart examined in this study contain anxious interrogations of the “roots” of identity precipitated by the cultural flux and disorientation of an urban or cosmopolitan modernity. Urquhart’s fiction harnesses various memorial processes in order to restore an originary ideal that the small-town and rural Ontario of the past represents for her characters (not to mention for Urquhart herself, as is evident in her interviews). Where Leacock’s reflective nostalgia harnesses distance to provide an alternative form of consolation through the process of memory, Urquhart’s restorative tendency disavows distance, even while it remains dependent on that distance for the manufacture of its longed-for, authentic rural past.2
Urquhart’s works are the most recent studied in this book, and they also point to another possibility that contemporary Ontarians face: the inability to distinguish rural and urban modes of life, since, as her works suggest, an all-encompassing modernity blankets both city and country alike. The only possibility of difference between these two spaces exists through the malleability of retrospect and the subsequent shaping of the past according to present desires. This suggestion raises the questions: what does it even mean to live a rural, small-town life? Is it simply one that is located beyond the city’s boundaries, or is life qualitatively different in rural space? That is, is a rural life determined by location in space or by the adoption of certain rural markers or lifestyles? If, as Glenn Willmott has argued in Unreal Country, the rural in the Canadian modern novel represents an invisible city, that it is always already dominated by modern forms of commerce and thus can offer only an “uncanny double” of urban experience, what value can there be in maintaining a rural-urban binary in that literature, and will that binary, then, always reflect an inauthentic reality, an illusion of difference based on a faulty type of retrospect? Why are these boundaries demarcating the rural from the urban – spatial, psychological, economic, even temporal – necessary to maintain? Can Urquhart’s “conservative nostalgia for premodern times,” and the value her characters locate in the land and townscapes of the past, be a tactical negotiation of modernity itself rather than the blinkered misapprehension of the past that the phrase “conservative nostalgia” might otherwise suggest? What is clear from this study is that the small-town past in Ontario’s literature is not unambiguously positive; rather, it is formed largely from the present and is used as a tool to help characters negotiate the present, to make the unknown present more familiar, to help a protagonist re-engage with contemporary difficulties, or to carry some sense of known value into the present. The danger, however, is in defining that value as unambiguous. That definition always occurs in retrospect: to use, then, that definition as a template to critique the present, whether for its inauthenticity, its disparateness, or its sense of disorienting change, is to misunderstand the process of how popular notions of the past form. It is a tool used by tyrants and authoritarians the world over to promote a historically naive form of nativism.3
In the concluding remarks in his book on pastoral literature, Terry Gifford writes:
If our lives now lack a separation between urban and rural existence, we need a post-pastoral literature that will help us understand that dialectical experience and how we can take responsibility for it. Against necessary notions of roots, neighbourhood and community there is another necessary impulse towards retreat, renewal and return. This is the circle of postmodern mobility. The paradox with which the post-pastoral engages is the fact that retreat informs our sense of community, and at a time when we are conscious of the need to improve our relationship with our neighbours on this planet, no literature could be more important to our imaging our very survival. (174)
Gifford stresses that the retreat away from our modern world that is part of pastoral literature will in fact help us engage more productively with it; through the renewal we experience by visiting the rural sphere, we can return to the modern, urban world better able to steer ourselves towards a future in which we have not been obliterated. Yet the problem remains: what value exists in a rural or small-town setting that we can then transfer into the urban sphere? Can we actually engage in productive retreats to the rural sphere if no qualitative difference exists between these two dichotomous poles? Can nostalgia result in anything other than a type of irresolvable melancholy for an imagined past that shades the ending of Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches, or the wistful hyperbole that a new strain of political populists use to bulldoze any semblance of liberal pluralism? Can the imagined past be used for anything other than to reinforce existing preferences and biases?
Perhaps the answers to these questions begin not with dismissing the imagined difference between the rural and urban spheres as the projections of the disgruntled, alienated, and dissatisfied, or by theorizing away the imagined economic and cultural separation of the country and city, but in studying how notions of difference actually create tangible manifestations.4 The rural past is invoked for innumerable political and cultural purposes, and we must pay more attention to how and why it is invoked, either as a “stick to beat the present” (R. Williams 12) or as a repository that allows us to “take what is good and pass it on” (Elliott, The Kissing Man 20) – that is, as reactionary or productive impulses. The associations related to the rural past–urban present divide may exist simply in a cultural imagination, but rather than suggesting these reflect a naive nostalgia or blinkered historical consciousness, we should try to understand how different imagined pasts have vastly different implications in and for the present.
Regardless of political or cultural assumptions, imagining a world alternative to the present one, somewhere out there and back then, is practically a reflex. We can see the manifestations of this conception of the past all around us: organic farmers’ markets in the middle of the city staffed by people whose garb is reminiscent of old-order Mennonites; urban farming and the farm-to-table and locavore movements influenced by vague notions of how people in the past fed themselves; the popularity of rural heritage and small-town tourism, which are marketed as trips into the past; even in popular bands like Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats, Mumford and Sons and the Lumineers, or Ontario’s own Elliot Brood and the Gertrudes, bands that wear waistcoats, woollen slacks, shaggy beards, suspenders, and fedoras: heritage hipsters. Rather than reflecting a naive understanding of the value of the rural past, these trends utilize a mish-mash of signifiers, a pastiche of pastness, to provide cultural manifestations, pop or otherwise, with a sense of greater authenticity, timelessness, and meaning than their seemingly vacuous, more contemporary contemporaries may possess. These quintessentially modern activities are masked as a rejection of modernity, a retreat away from the cacophony of current life, all the while being part of one of its dominant expressions. The value acquired simply through the performance of an idea of the past is self-evident, it would seem, because, for many, the past has an unqualified association with all that we have lost, all that we have sacrificed, to the temptations of modernity. And yet, these manifestations are merely the integration of an idea of a past into very contemporary trends, not an outright rejection of the heterogeneity of contemporary modes of existence. These manifestations reflect not simply aesthetic preferences but earnest desires to improve a world seen as deficient.
In Ontario’s small-town literature, two types of return to the rural past occur. Whether the return occurs through the meanderings of memory or imagination, or is an actual return, the rural past is used to help structure or encourage a more livable present. Because the rendered rural pasts in small-town Ontario fiction are irretrievably lost to temporal distance, or left behind by a striving protagonist, these literary figures are left with only a present whose shape is, in the words of Raymond Williams, “undefined” (297). All of these works engage with the rural past to find, as Williams states, “a world in which one is not necessarily a stranger and an agent, but can be a member, a discoverer, in a shared source of life” (298). The understanding of the rural past formed in these works is used to help shape, or at least come to terms with, the “undefined” or incomprehensible present.
As Ontario and Canada become even more urbanized, and as small communities continue to lose their economic autonomy, the tangible influence of this rural space decreases; paradoxically, as has been seen in the last century, while the rural sphere’s influence diminishes, its imagined significance, its place in our understanding of the past and, thus, our present, becomes stronger. If we view modernity as, essentially, a homogenizing force, then we must acknowledge that its influence has a reactive consequence; the same force that disintegrates differences – cultural, lifestyle, regional – also ensures the availability of alternatives, antidotes, and antitypes. For urban Ontario, the rural past is the site distant enough to maintain these necessary notions of difference.
1 In Jane Urquhart’s A Map of Glass, Baden has a minor role, as its tavern is where the character Branwell stops to wait out a winter storm.
2 Again, the ambiguity of the ending of A Map of Glass complicates this conclusion, as, through the image of the sand dunes, Urquhart’s narrator symbolically alludes to time’s continual shroud thrown over the physical signs of the past.
3 It must be said here that Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory in the United States had much to do with his slogan, “Make America Great Again,” the effectiveness of which, I think, can be explained by the remarkably prescient quote from David Harvey included above. The slogan at once assumes that the present is degraded and that the nation’s apogee rests within an indefinite past. When was it great, how was it great, how did it become great, for whom was it great (and, therefore, for whom was it not great), why do we imagine it as such … seeking answers to these questions is discouraged by the sheer blunt pithiness of this indirect appeal to vague notions of a past. The vagueness is intentional, as many different retrospective visions can then be projected onto the indeterminate period and status evoked by the slogan. This is a bullying restorative nostalgia that, it goes without saying, is unaware of itself as nostalgia.
4 One manifestation, for instance, is that location seems an indicator of political preference, as increasingly there is a divide between political persuasions among rural and urban voters.