16

Oral over Written

“IT IS A LAND AFTER DANTE’S HEART,” the painter J.E.H. MacDonald said, when he first went north of Lake Superior.1 Was he referring to an idea of hell or paradise or both? In either case, Dante had seized on the idea of our full, eternal destiny being one with the earth. After all, his narrator hadn’t popped off to heaven to meet the dead.

Underlying what Dante wrote was his conviction that he was creating an oral tool or weapon for society. It was written, but only in order to capture and enrich with poetic form the people’s language. His was at heart an oral undertaking.

From the midst of our law- and technocracy-driven society it would be hard to argue that the oral dominates in Canada, thus making us the exception to the western rule. The written dominates everywhere in the developed world. It dominates to such an extent that our current difficulties come in part from what amounts to a scholastic blockage of our ability to think, debate and act. As I’ve said elsewhere, the word scholastic is taken here in its mediaeval sense of knowledge being used, by those who have it, to block rather than to advance society.

At the heart of the western tradition there is a tension between the oral and the written. The oral at its best is a force of creativity and change; at its worst, one of disorder. The written at its worst is a force of control, even repression; at its best, of stability and responsible organization. Power shifts with time from one to the other and then back again, usually for longer periods to the written. And then for shorter, liberating periods to the oral.

Different societies have different relationships to the oral/written tension. It is in this spectrum of relationships that Canada seems to fall outside of the norm of western societies.

Some countries have literally constructed themselves through the written. France is perhaps the purest example of this. When you stand back from the delightful mythology of sacred borders enclosing a romantic civilization of individualists, great generals and cheeses, you find seven hundred years of careful legal and regulatory construction, to say nothing of enforcement. No society has been more successfully converted into an administrative reality. And most of this has been a textual accomplishment, beginning with La Grande Ordonnance of Saint Louis (Louis IX) in 1254. It excluded the use of Langue d’oc in matters of public administration, which included such things as buying and selling property. In other words, the king gave a legal monopoly to the dialect of the north (langue d’oïl) over that of the south (langue d’oc). His decree was unlikely to be understood by the southerners if issued in langue d’oïl and to write the law in langue d’oc would have been an admission of its political intent. It was therefore drawn up in Latin, the ultimate language of organization. The centralizing effect of this measure favoured Francien, the dialect of the Paris region, over the other, northern variations. So without taking the political risk of forbidding the southern tongue, the king destroyed it by denying it any utility. This same obsession with structuring society through written texts has led the French through fourteen constitutions in two centuries. And the period from Napoleon on has seen a remarkable ‘deconstruction’ of the old concept of a society in order to reconstruct it on the basis of carefully defined élites, each formed in its own Grande École. With this came a highly centralized and methodical approach towards what all children would be taught. And from the first official dictionary in the seventeenth century, the language itself has been subjected to increasing forces of formalization. Today that written formality and its increasing separation from the oral has become French’s greatest weakness as an international tool of communication.

England, in spite of its self-perpetuating myth of itself as a place of common sense and no constitution, has taken almost as stringent a written approach as France. From the Magna Carta on, a textual and centralized society has been developed until, under Margaret Thatcher, Britain actually overtook France as the most centralized of western countries. Through this period, using the same written tools as France, rival languages and dialects on the British Isles were virtually eliminated. The principal factor that has saved English from a scholastic island prison has been the development of rival Englishes elsewhere, more important or as important as the original. To understand how carefully defined and regulated language is in British society, you have only to look at its Draconian libel laws, the most discouraging in the developed world.

As for the United States, it defined itself into existence through a series of texts. Wonderful texts. Beautiful texts. But the revolution of free men was first a scholastic exercise and the strength of that scholasticism can be seen every day as that nation attempts to live within the textual boundaries it set itself two centuries ago. If it is a country of lawyers and legal wrangles, that is because it is one of the most written societies to have existed.

The Canadian relationship to the oral/written tension is relatively different. This is a country built much more through the oral, some of which can be put down to the factors I have been discussing in the two preceding chapters. The survival of the animist involves what lies beyond language, but it also favours the oral—the imagination of existence rather than the defined method of existing. Our northern, marginal status legitimizes the oral. Glenn Gould, in his verbal symphony The Idea of North, seemed to be saying that the north is an oral idea. That is part of what Louis-Edmond Hamelin has been saying about nordicity. It is a great deal more than climate. It is an attitude, a form of social relationships.

The most obvious element in this orality is the aboriginal community, which remains as one of the three pillars on which the society was originally constructed. If much of the aboriginal culture has been taken into the larger new complex culture, then the oral must have come with it.

Take the example of Meech Lake and the manner in which it was killed by Elijah Harper, silent, with a feather. We have become so used to seeing ourselves as victims that we all—on all sides—interpreted this event from the point of view of our own mythological martyrdom.

Almost every political party, federal and provincial, from the prime ministers and Cabinets all the way down, saw their will being thwarted. They had decided. They had announced their decision and put their jobs on the line. Instead, the quasi-totality of the political élite was humiliated. Many of their careers were effectively destroyed. Francophones in Quebec, even though they weren’t particularly excited by the package, saw its collapse as a personal humiliation, as did the many anglophones across the country who had supported it. And the anglophones who opposed it felt not triumph but a curious embarrassment, even humiliation, before the evident reality—they could not say they had won, because their cause had not been expressed as a noble or even worthwhile option. There had only been silence and a feather. Some patted themselves on the back with the notion that the Natives had somehow taken revenge for their treatment in Quebec or indeed their treatment in the whole of Canada. And in this sense it was a curious celebration of self-humiliation.

But none of us were really listening to what Mr. Harper was saying. He and his friends weren’t trying to humiliate heads of governments or francophones. Nor were they trying to help anglophones engage in an act of ritual self-humiliation. He wasn’t thinking about any of us. He was reacting to what Natives saw as the ultimate aggression of a textual society. In Stan Dragland’s words—“These people whose culture is characterized by the spoken word have been rendered voiceless in determinations about their own affairs.”2 They saw a highly utilitarian and textual re-division of the states’ powers which, in leaving them out, left them behind.

It is difficult for those who felt themselves wounded by what happened to stand back and see this much larger and in western terms curious duel between the assembled, structured forces of the written and the disassembled forces of the oral.

Since francophones were those who felt most targeted by what happened, let me put it in a larger context. What Harper did was in many ways a long-delayed reply to the loss of the Riel Rebellion. It would be pushing the argument a bit to say it was Riel’s revenge since, as George Woodcock put it, “like many defenders [Riel] did not belong to what he defended . . . he was trying to impose the theories and visions of a man trained in a classical college” onto an essentially oral society, whether Métis or Native.3 However, it would be reasonable to say that Harper’s refusal was the Native and Métis reply to their humiliation in the nineteenth century and to the gradual marginalization of their civilization. If it was aimed at anyone or anything, it was aimed at the central power in Ottawa.

I can hear serious, worthwhile people saying, ‘But this is vague speculation. The practical reality is that the death of Meech has undermined the country.’ Perhaps. No doubt. Perhaps the country won’t survive. But the easy response to a crisis is to see it only in close-ups and assume, each of us, that we are the aggrieved, injured party. Those are the requirements of the current-affairs approach. The more interesting reaction would be to attempt to stand back in order to see what really happened.

But what about Premier Clyde Wells of Newfoundland? Well, his opposition was of the most predictable, rational sort and of little real interest. He was even more scholastic than those he fought.

On the other hand, the province he was speaking for is the last which can still pretend to an authentic oral society. It is also the province which, after the Native community, feels the most left out of the Canadian social contract. In other words, those who feel most left out are most likely to block the way in moments of crisis. Why? Because that is the only moment when they have the power to make themselves heard. On the other hand, it is hard to think of an intervention more inappropriate to the Rock than that of Clyde Wells.

What was astonishing about the whole affair was the seeming inability of the assembled Canadian élites to do anything about Harper’s opposition. What could they have done? Let me put it this way: I can’t think of another western country in which the written, structured élites would not have imposed their will by one means or another.

There are two reasons they didn’t. The first was the blustering, irresponsible—and for a prime minister, almost criminal—phrase that Brian Mulroney let loose at the key moment. “A roll of the dice,” he said, was how he played the negotiations. All of those who were against the project, but had laid their beliefs aside because they had been told it was in the national interest, suddenly felt manipulated and indeed humiliated. If there was a structural way past Harper, the will to find it and use it was destroyed by the then–prime minister’s intervention. The visceral loathing which so many Canadians have for Mulroney was activated and formalized in good part by that phrase. There is nothing more devastating for a citizen in a democracy than to discover that the person to whom she has given power has contempt for her.

The second reason the élites did not try to impose their will involves a wider, more distant interpretation. Ours has always been a society in which the oral carries its weight and in this crisis it found its way to the strategic pivot of public affairs. In effect, Meech was a reminder that the important events and debates in Canada’s past have not revolved around textual debates and interpretations. Our constitutional obsession of the last few decades is an historical aberration when seen in the line of Canada’s development.

I am not defending Jean Chrétien’s view that governments should get on with business and forget the abstract questions. After all, government is not a super public-relations firm for the private sector. The public interest reaches far beyond simple commerce and in a complex democracy like ours it is only if the greater interest is well served that the economy will be well served.

In any case, constitutional reform is not a great abstract question. It has little or nothing to do with the social contract or the public good. An obsession with constitutional reform is scholasticism at its most written. That’s not to suggest that changes are never useful. From time to time they are. But utility is the test. To invest constitutions and constitutional changes with mystic importance is a peculiar way of avoiding real debates over the social contract.

It is interesting to note that for a century our constitution remained very much in the background. After all, it was domiciled elsewhere. Some important judicial interpretations were made over that period, but in reality the society grew accustomed to imagining itself without the presence of its central legal document. This is one of the factors that kept the force of the oral in place at a time when elsewhere it was being eliminated.

A practical sign of that orality came in the run-up to the repatriation of the constitution in 1982. The provinces challenged the federal government’s right to act unilaterally. The Supreme Court replied that, while Ottawa could legally do so, that act would lack legitimacy. And so the government backed away from doing so. The difference between legality and legitimacy in constitutional affairs is in good part the difference between the written and the oral.

What I am suggesting is that constitutional obsessions will invariably work to the disadvantage of those who pursue them because the logic of the country does not respond to haggling over clauses. That this creates certain legalistic problems is obvious. But you cannot turn a constitution, which for more than a century has been a rather malleable how-to instruction booklet, into a mythical abstraction of the ideal state, when the country was developed on the basis that it didn’t need or want to be tied to a Bible-like text.

A sign of this difference is the role that public debate has played in giving the country direction. The nineteenth century was a time of debate everywhere in the west, but as the century advanced, the structures of power grew stronger and the public formulation of ideas retreated to a marginal role.

Yet in Canada Laurier became party leader and prime minister at the end of the century in large part through four astonishing speeches, filled with political philosophy, ethics, history and an idea of the public good. Two were given in French, two in English. The first, in Quebec City in 1877, was his defence and definition of modern liberalism. The second was in Montreal before fifty thousand people on November 22, 1885. They were there to protest the hanging of Riel.

The other lead speaker was Honoré Mercier, who would build his governmental coalition out of this crisis and become premier in just over a year. Mercier was a seductive speaker, but it was in the style of the classic nineteenth-century nationalist demagogue—great emotional flourishes, a world divided into good and evil where martyrs struggled against opponents who, by virtue of their opposition, were traitors; where the only solution was solidarity. Traitors and solidarity are still the two great themes of this school.

Laurier on the other hand came at the tragedy of the North West as a crisis of the public good—the greater good that everyone could and should share. His condemnation of the federal Conservative francophone ministers was on that level, not one of demonization or of racial division. And then, because his position was based on the ethics and understanding of responsibility proper to a social contract, he was able to move well beyond blame and recrimination to place himself in the centre of the ethical standards he demanded from the government—

Had I been on the banks of the Saskatchewan, I also would have taken up my rifle.—Si j’avais été sur les bords de la Saskatchewan, j’aurais, moi aussi, épaulé mon fusil . . .4

Laurier was the leading Opposition francophone in Ottawa. He was almost challenging the authorities to charge him with sedition.

The House was recessed. When it reconvened there was a debate on the Rebellion. Laurier waited until the end, then late on the evening of March 16, 1880, he rose to give a speech no one in his own party wanted him to give. He spoke for two hours. It remains, unless something has escaped me, the finest speech given in either French or English in Canada. He built his condemnation of the government’s “judicial murder” on all of the ideas, standards and traditions which responsible governments claim for themselves.

Rebellion is always an evil, it is always an offence against the positive law of a nation; it is not always a moral crime.

And the paragraph which cannot be repeated enough—

What is hateful is not rebellion but the despotism which induces that rebellion; what is hateful are not rebels but the men who, having the enjoyment of power, do not discharge the duties of power; they are the men who, having the power to redress wrongs, refuse to listen to the petitions that are sent to them; they are the men who, when they are asked for a loaf, give a stone.

Then he turned the idea of loyalty on its conventional head by invoking the supremacy of the public good over the interests of the state.

Loyalty must be reciprocal. It is not enough for the subject to be loyal to the Crown; the Crown must also be loyal to the subject.

Have the Government been loyal to these half-breeds? If they had been loyal to the half-breeds no such trouble would have occurred. But the Government has not been loyal to the laws.

Had they taken as much pains to do right, as they have taken to punish wrong . . .

Our prisons are full of men who, despairing ever to get justice by peace, sought to obtain it by war, who despairing of ever being treated like freemen, took their lives in their hands, rather than be treated as slaves.5

Toronto’s Orange newspapers dared him to repeat his defence of Riel in Ontario. His party and friends discouraged him. There were threats of violence, but the Young Liberals asked him to come. An enormous crowd turned out in the Agricultural Pavilion on the 10th of December, including a large contingent of those who had dared him to come to Toronto. Perhaps the tension and expectation of this first entry into the eye of the storm set him slightly off balance. The speech was a bit heavy, but it was more than enough—

When we find a government ill-treating a poor people, simply because they are poor and ignorant, we must ourselves feel that injury and injustice. . . . It is the duty of all citizens to resist this violation and to fight freely with all the means that the constitution places in our hands.⁶

The opponents scarcely managed a heckle. His triumph was not just that of a successful evening. What he had done was demonstrate that it was possible to draw people together, by rising to the values they hardly seemed to realize they shared, rather than seeking power through the divisions of race or religion. More precisely, he proved himself a possible prime minister by the courage and intelligence with which he defended the Métis before those who opposed them.

I’m not suggesting that the oral tradition is the normal road to power in Canada. Rather, my point is that much of the shaping of the country has taken place outside the mechanisms of power, through ideas pressed forward in public debate. Power itself seems to have been slightly less important than elsewhere, perhaps because of the complex system of a highly decentralized country. As no one government can dominate, there is space left for a public debate which can sway a citizenry spread across different regions and even sway the uncoordinated governments.

And so William Lyon Mackenzie and Louis-Joseph Papineau were primarily tribunes, not men of power. Thomas D’Arcy McGee, George Brown, Joseph Howe, Henri Bourassa, J.S. Woodsworth, Tommy Douglas, Georges-Émile Lapalme, to name only a few, were tribunes. They weren’t demagogues. They were men who thought out loud in public. Their language did more to shape the country than most ministers, indeed than many prime ministers.

Some of them were independent journalists who used their papers as podiums, printed yet in the oral tradition. J.W. Dafoe in Winnipeg and the wonderful Bob Edwards in Calgary understood what Mackenzie and Howe and Bourassa had understood—that thinking out loud is half the job; the other half is relentless criticism.

Mackenzie saw words as “efficient weapons” to be put into “the hands of free men.” Defending himself against a charge of libel brought by the Family Compact in 1831, he replied—

If all false quotations and false opinions are improper, then all discussion, either in this House or through the Press must also be improper, for one set of opinions must be wrong. And if none but true opinions can be given or quoted by either party, then there can be no argument.

Censure of government causes inquiry and produces discontent among the people, and this discontent is the only means known to me of removing the defects of a vicious government and inducing the rulers to remedy the abuses.7

As William Kilbourn put it, Mackenzie was “the most unselfish of idealists; he was a born muckraker and scandal-monger.”⁸ That is precisely the job of the oral critic. The aim of most libel laws is to prevent criticism by drawing it through the formalized mechanisms of a highly written society.

But the creative influence of these tribunes went far beyond their critical talents. If there was a real father to Pierre Trudeau’s Official Languages Act and to the immersion schooling system, it was Henri Bourassa. Joseph Howe sowed the seeds of provincial power long before Oliver Mowat and Honoré Mercier began to exercise it. J.W. Dafoe was at the heart of the strategies to distance Canada from the Empire. And the social net in Canada is the child of J.S. Woodsworth and his friends more than of any government. They created the debate which helped the citizenry to imagine that such policies were possible.

This oral phenomenon is not simply the creature of politics. For example, management is the everyday religion of our time. It is one of the most scholastic of exercises, revolving as it does around structural control and rhetoric. As a science of methodology it has accentuated precisely what needs to be avoided in administration. Two of the world’s leading centres for thinking about the flaws of management, working within the religion but against the scholastic, are in Montreal under the leadership of Alain Chanlat, at the Hautes Études commerciales, and Henry Mintzberg, at McGill’s business school. Their approach is one which leads towards the humanist, the informal or flexible. It belongs to the oral tradition.

This is less surprising when you consider that the leading western thinkers on modern communications—Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan—were centred only a few hundred miles away at the University of Toronto, and that they were examining the tension between the oral and the written in the context of new technology. Indeed, George Grant, pessimist though he was, walked down the same path. And Northrop Frye was seeking within the great texts meanings which escaped mere text.

Perhaps the strangest of all these intellectual phenomena was the role played by one of the leading modern anarchists, George Woodcock, living in Vancouver. He devoted the second half of his life to such things as the Métis question and the shape of modern Canadian literature. Anarchism, by its very refusal of conventional structure, is in part an oral phenomenon. It was Woodcock who took the debate over the Métis Rebellion beyond the martyrdom of Riel. He did it by concentrating on Gabriel Dumont, the Métis’s Métis, a paragon of action and of oral culture; in many ways an anarchist’s dream.

Seen from this perspective, the Rebellion was less about an heroic martyr and more about what Woodcock called a failure of Canadian democracy.

For the truest democracy is not that in which the majority imposes its will on all minorities. It is surely that in which minorities are allowed to flourish, even at some expense to the patience of the majority.9

Woodcock played an important role in bringing this conception back to the centre of Canadian public life. Somehow he also found in Canadian writing the contradictions which could interest an anarchist’s mind: the regional contrasts, the languages, the oral. He became one of the Western voices putting intellectual flesh on the ideas of decentralization, helping to take it beyond resentment and power bargaining. The point is that there aren’t many places where applied anarchism could have a serious and long-term effect.

But then this is the same society that was able to digest much of Marius Barbeau’s idea about the importance of traditional oral cultures. Some in Quebec were understandably concerned that his approach might give comfort to the static, nationalist religion of Le terroir. But with time they saw that Barbeau’s argument was quite different. He was evoking these earlier oral cultures as a way through to the modern.

In that sense it isn’t surprising that this is one of the few developed countries where poetry remains an important factor. It isn’t important by its sales. But poetry continues to play a central role in how our literature functions. The quantity and size of public readings are an illustration of this. What is this role? Why are poets—from Anne Hébert and Leonard Cohen through Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje—still at the core of our imagination? I can only think it is because ours is an essentially oral culture.