1

Victims of Mythology

CANADA, LIKE OTHER NATION - STATES, suffers from a contradiction between its public mythologies and its reality. Perhaps we suffer more than most. Perhaps the explanation is that, while all countries are complex, the central characteristic of the Canadian state is its complexity.

Mythology often turns into a denial of complexity. That can become its purpose.

On a good day it can provide relief from the endlessly contradictory burdens of reality. Mythology thus helps citizens to summon up enough energy to consider the public good—the good of the whole. And that simple act of consideration—of doubting—is an affirmation of their self-confidence as citizens. That self-confidence allows us to question how the public good might be served. In place of fear, and the certitude fear demands, we are able to question and to think.

On a bad day, mythology encourages the denial of reality. As if in a bank of fog, we stumble into illusion, which in turn produces an impression of relief or rather a state of delusion. In that atmosphere a rising undercurrent of fear creates that self-demeaning need for certitude. Absolute answers and ideologies prosper. These are asserted to be natural and inevitable. In this way mythology becomes not so much false as mystification.

And so it suddenly is rumoured or promised that prosperity is around the corner, the quarrelling will end, la fin des chicanes, inflation will be strangled along with unemployment, debts will be outlawed, duplication and overlap evaporate, efficiency reign, outsiders disappear. In such an atmosphere of certitudes the citizen feels defenceless against the forces of superstition and the manipulation of false prophets.

Whatever their region or language or background, Canadians have no particular desire for mythologies gone wrong. Anglophones, francophones, Natives, Westerners, Maritimers, Northerners, new immigrants, whatever—none of us are more susceptible than the others to delusionary mythologies. And yet, our increasing inability to deal with our own reality suggests that we have somehow become the victims of mythology.

Mythologies gone wrong tend to turn on Heroics and victimization. Sometimes the Hero is also a victim. A martyr on behalf of a group. Sometimes this status of the Heroic victim is assumed by the whole collective. Suddenly we are dealing with or acting as if we are an Heroic, victimized people or region. All of this we have seen in the West, in Quebec, in Ontario.

The very act of brandishing slogans and flags, when done in the name of heroics or victimization, necessitates the identification of villains. Usually, in this careful society, those who require a villain also deny their need. And yet the concept is there, often in a code—a word or a phrase which believers understand to identify the enemy, unnameable because they are a race or a language group or believers in another religion.

This victim psychology has melted its way ever further into Canadian society. Scarcely a discussion goes on, between linguistic groups or regions or even within cities and towns, which is not a struggle between competing myths of victimization.

There is one other facet of public mythology. It involves specific qualities which are asserted or assumed. Often these are just good fun—harmless clichés. One group claims that it produces the best lovers, another appropriates the qualities of niceness or warmth or looks or food or courage or common sense or honesty. One claims the talent for making money. Another cares about others.

Why not? If it makes an individual or a group feel better about themselves and also fills the trough of social banter and self-congratulation, which we all seem to need, why not? There is nothing wrong with a bit of innocent comic relief. We know that, as the mythology of these specific qualities is approached, so it mysteriously recedes without damaging our convictions. However, if these appropriations of qualities are taken seriously, they quickly slip into assumptions about race or about loyalty versus betrayal or indeed salvation versus damnation. The asserted qualities of one become the unacceptable flaws of the other.

Like other western nations, we went down that road in the latter part of the last century and we have spent much of the twentieth century trying to rid ourselves of the resulting tics.

With hearts as brave as theirs,

With hopes as strong and high,

We’ll ne’er disgrace

The honoured race

Whose deeds can never die.

This nineteenth-century “Song for Canada”—an apparently Anglo-Saxon Canada—isn’t very different from the historian François-Xavier Garneau’s “that which characterizes the French race above all others is this hidden force of cohesion and resistance, which guarantees national unity.”1

Far worse was said on all sides and by well-known, well-educated people who should have known better. Pages can be and have been filled with these nineteenth-century mythological delusions. The word ‘race’ was then bandied about with the greatest of ease. It was shorthand for nationalism and national interests. The catastrophes that these assumptions would lead to in the twentieth century were still unknown.

That many of our intellectual and political leaders, from one end of the country to the other, went on talking that way beyond the middle of the twentieth century is quite another matter. Sensible, responsible people in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries knew that this sort of mystification of mythologies was dangerous, but didn’t yet know how catastrophic it could be. Once that became clear, between the 1930s and the end of the Second World War, no room was left for naïveté on the subject of race. Those who continue to use the nineteenth-century formulae, or modern versions of them, do not deserve the respect which an attempt to understand their specific case would imply.

Whatever the situation, none of us believes that we live by myth alone. It’s just that, during brief moments of excitement—when raging emotion is set loose, and often manipulated—we convince ourselves of what we don’t really believe. Even these can be moments of healthy or harmless celebration or of necessary mourning.

But they can also turn into explosions of anger or despair, as if only unleashed mythology can permit their expression. And so the complexities of reality are funnelled and filtered down to the dangerous false clarity of mythological truth.

Clearly we cannot live without myth. Nor should we, any more than we can or should live without the various expressions of myth. We need a reasonable level of identity, nationalism, self-respect, pride and, for that matter, fantasy. But taken beyond the reasonable, these identification marks become the tools of deformed mythology and victimization. This is the territory not so much of mythology or even of false mythology, if such a concept can exist, but of mystification. Perhaps, to use an old term, this is fouled mythology. Suddenly the believers believe themselves to be alone in their sufferings and therefore in their rights. The other—the neighbour in another region, in the city, up north, speaking another language, of another colour—recedes ever further into the abstract meaningless typology of just that—the other. Too bad for him. Too bad for her. Too bad for them. They are merely the other.

Our difficulty is how to avoid myth being deformed into a negative force which breeds—among other things—a victim psychosis. If we fail, these shadowy simplifications will restrict and deform how we see ourselves and others. With that, we lose a great force—the ability to imagine what we might do if we embraced the complexity of our reality.

Not that reality is easy to seize. Myth, after all, is a marriage of the past and the present. And that past is itself wrapped up in a myriad myths. “The memory that we question,” Saint-Denys Garneau wrote, “has heavily curtained windows.” He was echoed a half-century later by bp Nichol:

the lack of substantial fact

makes history the memory of

an amnesiac

makes anything his

who works it with his hands

& such lies as we make myths

accepted

as planned.2 

We cannot live without myth. But even a cursory glimpse through history suggests that more have died by it than have blossomed, once they become its servant.

Since the arrival of the nation-state only a few hundred years ago, most countries have tried to manage their real complexity by creating a manageable appearance of simplicity—a single language, a single culture, a single or dominant race. All of this has been dressed up in a centralized mythology. But these myths invariably required the real and prolonged use of state force. This violence has included repeated wars against minorities, the forbidding of minority languages, the centralization of government and, of great importance, the writing of a centralized justificatory history.

The centralization of government has often been close to total—as in Britain and France—or clearly dominant, as in the United States. The force required to accomplish this state of being has created mythologies which could be described as enforced realities. With time, these become expressions of acquiescence by the various groups of citizens, who agree to forget what they once were. They don’t necessarily forget everything, but usually enough to permit the enforced realities to function as if they were real.

Canada is no innocent in these matters. We have engaged in state violence against various minorities, particularly the Métis. We have attempted to forbid various languages in particular circumstances.

But most of this—by the standards of our friends and neighbours, the other nation-states—adds up to small potatoes. That hardly justifies what has been done. But none of it has come close to enforcing a reality which could produce a centralized mythology. In truth, none of those efforts have even been seriously aimed at producing the standard monolithic mythology of the other nation-states.

This is described by most federalists and anti-federalists alike as the failure of Canada. The failure to become like the others. To regularize a monolithic mythology. Some weep before the ever-retreating mirage of the unhyphenated Canadian. Others say its continued existence proves that the country is not real and cannot exist. For me, this failure to conform is in fact our greatest success. A proof of originality which we refuse to grasp as a positive.

In Les Aurores montréales, Monique Proulx’s wonderful portrait of Montreal in the nineties, she talks of Canada as “un grand pays mou—a big soft country.”3 Soft because the classic nation-state is hard—hard in the force of its creation and its maintenance. Hard in the clarity of its enforced mythology. In the simple, monolithic model, the very concept of non-conformity is a simile for weakness. In general it is recuperated and reduced to a self-indulgent description of occasional, non-threatening non-conformity by individuals. Non-conformity becomes nothing more than personal particularities.

In the standard nation-state mythology of enforced reality, soft is unnatural and therefore not real. Big, soft and weak. But is this a fair definition of ‘soft’? Perhaps the opposite is true.

Surely it is fear and a sense of inferiority which make a people require the defence of a monolithic, simplistic model. Was the violence required to enforce their mythology a sign of toughness, or the bravado of the insecure bully? Or did it simply reflect the determination of one group to dominate the others? And is softness not another word for self-confidence? Self-confident enough to live with complexity. Tough enough to assume complexity.

The essential characteristic of the Canadian public mythology is its complexity. To the extent that it denies the illusion of simplicity, it is a reasonable facsimile of reality. That makes it a revolutionary reversal of the standard nation-state myth. To accept our reality—the myth of complexity—is to live out of step with most other nations. It is an act of non-conformity.

My own sense is that the citizenry accept their non-conformity with some ease. They live it and so it makes sense. The élites, on the other hand, fret at being out of sync with élites in other countries, particularly those in the business and academic communities. But politicians also seem increasingly affected by a need to conform on some level perceived to be higher. It is an emotional or psychological problem. They don’t want to feel out of step.

So long as Canada was a small, marginal place, more or less invisible on the world scene, the best of our élites embraced the originality of the project. And by élites I mean those who occupy any of the positions of responsibility in government or business or academia or public service. The growth of Canada and the growth of visible global models has triggered their inferiority complex. What we now call globalization, like it or not, is a great force for conformity. In this context the élites don’t like not fitting in. They long to conform, each in their own way, to the old monolithic national models and the new monolithic international economic models.

“We have quietly accepted the disappearance of the past,” writes the Swedish poet and novelist Kjell Espmark.4 How can those who hold the various reins of power throughout society play their role if they are cut off from the reality of the society’s past? I am not suggesting that they turn towards the past or act as its prisoners. But that reality and its mythology are always the key to the future.

Change may come at supersonic speeds and give the impression of anarchy all around us. But no matter how radical the forces of change, societies do not fly about in the air and transform themselves as if this were a matter of changing clothes. Those who successfully embrace change do so from the solid basis of what they are. Reality and a healthy mythology are the key to change.

Our élites have largely lost contact with our reality. They are so caught up in a need to conform that they have forgotten—perhaps wilfully forgotten—that the very originality of the Canadian experiment has always been to stay out of step with the norm. That’s what makes it interesting. Not cliché patriotism, flag waving and simplistic emotional evocations.

What might be called Canada’s moments of failure can usually be traced to those periods when we feel ourselves—or rather the élites feel themselves and so try to convince the population of the same—too insecure, too weak, too tired to carry the burden of an essentially complex nature. Then anglophones begin preaching unhyphenated Canadianism and francophones claim singularity as the key to survival. The models they reach for are imported, and are not intended to complement the local reality or improve it or strengthen it, but to replace or rather deny it.

This is the provincial, colonial mind at its most insecure. Social, cultural, educational and economic models from the Rome of the day are dragged back home as proof of sophistication. Local circumstances become embarrassing reminders to this élite that it is not really Roman. And so, in place of the classical weapons of enforced realities, the élites use their positions to engage in a modern form of violence. Their desire is to turn these models into mythologies divorced from reality.

How is this done? Practical memory is eliminated. The modern tools of communication become the tools of propaganda. And fear of the consequences of non-conformity is propagated.

During the 1995 referendum campaign, I personally could find only one sustained reference to the reality of our past. It was a particularly tortured version used by Jacques Parizeau in his speech introducing the referendum bill before the Quebec legislature. It called out for reply and correction, but none came. For the rest of the campaign Mr. Parizeau dropped all pretence of context.

As for the language used by Daniel Johnson, Jean Charest and Jean Chrétien, it was as if the country had popped out of an egg the day before, fully formed. And Lucien Bouchard’s repeated references to the past referred only as far back as 1982. The statements made by the various provincial premiers—Frank McKenna, Mike Harris, Roy Romanow—were little more than cheap advertising copy filled with saccharine emotions, devoid of time and place.

Our future was debated and decided as if we had no past. No experience. Therefore no reality. And yet Canada is not a new country. In legal terms it is one of the oldest in the world. In constitutional terms it is one of a tiny handful of stable, long-lasting democracies.

As for the peculiar, non-conforming Canadian experiment, it is several centuries old. Elements were put in place very early on through European–Native treaties. The change of colonial regimes in 1763 was followed by seventy-nine years of groping in the direction of the final element to this triangular pact. It was formalized in 1842.

Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine, standing in the legislature in Kingston, described this agreement as a binding handshake. His with Robert Baldwin. They were the original Siamese twins. But their handshake was far more than that. More than French Canada with English Canada. And more precisely that of the reformers on all sides—those whom we could today describe as the democrats, the decent men, the humanists—each with the other. “These relations have created not only mutual sympathies,” LaFontaine said, “but moral obligations to which our honour alone imposes the imperative duty not to be found lacking.” Moments before, Baldwin had spoken of a “union of hearts and of free born men.” “The voluntary choice of a free people.”5

That various schools of historians and politicians have sought out only the failures in this process, or concentrated on the wrongs done or the victories for their side, is another matter. I will come back to that later. But the intent of the handshake between Baldwin and LaFontaine, like that between Louis-Joseph Papineau and William Lyon Mackenzie or indeed between thousands of others less well known, was clear. The specific point here is the longevity of the experiment. And the complexity of it. This original triangle—because despite our prolonged denials, the Natives have always been part of the bargain—is like a multi-jointed box which can fold and unfold in many ways. Language, geography, experience, all change the way in which citizens see their situation and their role.

The result is a multitude of non-contradictory visions. This is a strength, not a weakness, so long as the memory of “moral obligation,” “honour” and “imperative duty” to respect “the voluntary choice of a free people” is still there. What is difficult for us to remember is that this is not an invitation to introspection. Memory is at its least interesting when reduced to an evocation of past wrongs done by the other. The question is not, “How is the other treating me?” It is primarily an invocation to consider how we treat the other. That is not easy when multitudes of mythologies tell each of us that we are the aggrieved party.

Two centuries is a very long time in the history of any country. Perhaps this is because the typical nation-state asserts that it is the product of a natural and completed experiment. Civil wars, coups d’état, dictatorships, territories added by force, others lost, minorities digested against their will, minority cultures and languages eliminated; all of these are treated as minor accidents along the way. Accidents de parcours. They are quickly erased from the experience of the central mythology—the imposed reality. And so the state’s idea of itself as a completed experiment is reasserted within a few decades of each disaster. The myth of natural permanency envelops and softens any real memory.

For Canadians, whatever their language or politics, the acceptance of complexity has meant the acceptance of a perpetually incomplete experiment. In such a myth, the link to reality is dependent on our maintenance of a whole series of equilibriums.

This idea of living with balance and doubt seems to have become more difficult as time has gone by. In part, I would put this down to a growing rift throughout western civilization—between reality and mythology. Our reality is corporatist, interest based, anti-democratic, determinist, and thus passive. As for mythology, it is increasingly a distraction, inflated and manipulated by the ever more sophisticated means of communication. This is mythology deformed into mystification.

A cynic might argue that the citizen is now manipulated with techniques first perfected in the 1930s by Hitler’s film-maker, Leni Riefenstahl, in Triumph of the Will. She demonstrated how images, music and words could be detached from each other and so from reality. This in turn opened the door to highly efficient meaninglessness.

At its most banal this methodology has grown into that mass of words and images which constitute our daily propaganda; that is, our advertising, press releases, sound bites and personality pieces. But it is more than that. Suddenly emotion bereft of content is made so powerful that it obscures the mechanisms of reality; that is, of power.

That would be the cynic’s interpretation. For myself, I would say that this new high-tech mythology has become the loser’s consolation prize in the growing global structures of corporatism.

Why a consolation? Because insecurity and fear are the weapons of power in this mythology for losers. “Les murs lisses de la peur—the smooth and slippery walls of fear are the habitual refuge of the defeated.”6 That was how the great painter Paul-Émile Borduas put it.

But the mind-set of the defeated, whether it refers to a few thousand abandoned colonials on the banks of the St. Lawrence or to thirty million citizens in an enormous country, is precisely that—a state of mind. And that psychological state is lodged first and foremost in the minds of the élite, who fear and therefore propagate fear among the population as a justification for their own failures.

Borduas’s formula succinctly describes the negative side of our mythology from its earliest days. To the extent that we are unable to accept and assume the complexity of our reality, so we are gripped by a fear of non-conformity. We are overcome by a desperate desire to present ourselves as a natural and completed experiment, monolithic, normal, just another one of the standard nation-states.

Jacques Godbout described this state of being in his novel Les Têtes à Papineau. The heroes are Siamese twins. They have one body, two heads and two separate but interrelated personalities. Together they are very interesting. Most people want them to be separated—to be normalized. Banalized. To become like other people. To give up their real non-conformity for perhaps a more self-indulgent, less demanding sort. Gradually they lose track of their sense that to be different is a positive. In the end they agree to be separated, and so conform to the norm.⁷

The insecurity we feel is constantly accentuated by our relations with the three countries who have played the central roles in our past and present—England, France and the United States. They are also the prime international models of violently imposed monolithic mythologies. In the case of Britain and France the result has produced a remarkably monolithic reality. We are descended from and have been dominated by countries which incarnate the completed experiment. Not only are these the least likely nations to admire the concept of the state as a perpetually incomplete experiment, my experience is that they don’t actually understand the concept.

In the shadows of such powerful ‘normalcy’ it isn’t surprising that we tend to mistake our strengths for weaknesses. Nor is it surprising that each element—anglophone, francophone, aboriginal and the great waves of immigration from around the world over the last hundred years—is so often seen by the other as an additional weakness in the quest for normalcy.

It has often seemed over the last few years as if public discourse in Canada bears no relationship to the reality lived by the citizenry. Variance has slipped into division. Fear, frustration, passivity and anger have grown as we focus on a mythological language which doesn’t function in either English or French. The citizen can find no way into this false debate. The fact-driven and power-dependent élites are frightened by the citizenry and by the idea of noncorporatist participation. And the ever more deformed machinery of communications has indeed become a weapon for what the Counter-Reformation, four centuries ago, identified as propaganda.

In this atmosphere of insecurity and fear, mythology rarely functions as a practical tool of memory. Instead, it has become a tool to narrow and harden perceptions on all sides.