27

The Expression of Reality

“THE POETS HAVE ALWAYS PRECEDED.”1

I hear no chorus of agreement from the managers of reality, the consecrated priests of our day who distribute truth and facts like holy wafers.

Precedes whom? With what? Certainly not with political programs or intellectual arguments. Is Robin Blaser’s argument the romantic assertion of the marginal? Not really. If history is an interpretation of memory, literature is memory itself.

In spite of the deadening effect of specialist dialects, public relations and communications formulae, the poet continues to precede with language. Not language, as in one language rather than another. Nor language, as in style. Blaser is referring to language as the first expression of what lies within us—the essential communication which precedes analysis. The poet doesn’t need to know what her language means; not in the sense that an intellectual is expected to police her own meaning. The poet at his best probably doesn’t concern himself with conscious meaning.

But the poet does precede, as does culture. I’m not sure that—as Fernand Dumont has eloquently put it—“a nation is essentially a cultural reality.” The beauty of this idea somehow eliminates the full reality of people and their lives, in favour of what Jean Paré, editor-in-chief of L’actualité, calls “the vague notion of culture.”² And yet culture does precede, not so much as the ultimate reality but as the pure expression of reality.

In larger countries driven by imperial missions this expression is often used by those with power however it suits them. For their particular purposes they turn cultural reality into rhetorical mystification. Theoretically in such large societies there is room for everyone to choose their cultural position. On the other hand, the force of an imperial message tends to sweep the whole society up in its arms. Loyalty to the great cause quickly becomes a given of life inside an empire. In smaller countries, particularly those under constant pressure from the outside, the situation is somewhat different. The cultural imperative is constantly shoved to the fore of public debate. The people require the nation to defend the culture and culture to defend the nation. Yet what is shoved forward is rarely related to culture as an expression of reality. More often than not it is the illusion of culture as something utilitarian or industrial or patriotic or mystical.

The results are interminable and nonsensical arguments over the role of culture; arguments almost always devoid of cultural content. “The truth is,” the poet protests, “he’s not dead but only ignored.” “Poète, mon enfant, tu me chantes en vain.”3

A.M. Klein and Albert Ferland were not whining about the hard lot of the poet proper—neither about book sales nor government support. We all know about those particularities of the troubadour’s life, today and always, here and elsewhere. For that matter, the precision with which public officials single out cultural budgets in debate, in order to insist that what they represent is of tertiary importance to the public good, is not what it appears to be. This isn’t a matter of justifying salutary pruning or slashing. This isn’t a real attempt to weight the importance of child-care versus that of public broadcasting. I’m not convinced it has anything to do with budgets. After all, the sums involved on the cultural side are peanuts in the scheme of government finance. Peanuts before slashing and peanuts after. Yet the political discourse has an important, disciplinarian air about it; as if a Victorian father were teaching the wilful child a necessary lesson about the harsh realities of real life.

At its more primary level this is classic false populist politics: a premier of Ontario who claims not to read; a federal minister of culture who reduces culture to flag-waving; an Alberta premier who sells off cultural institutions for no particular reason; a Quebec premier whose literary references are all to ‘mother country’ culture, as if to humiliate the very culture he swears to defend; a public political discourse which in general falls well below the standards of classic comic-books. When you step back to examine all of this, and much, much more, all together as a single phenomenon, you realize that this superficial denigration of culture is far more than classic false populist man-talk or even than standard colonial self-loathing.

The incapacity of our élites to govern as if the society had a culture is one of the root causes of our divisions and of our often unspoken despair as citizens. As I said in earlier chapters, the Canadian political ethic, from its origins, embraced the cultural idea as central to its reality. This was a confused and uncertain assumption, but it was there and you found it across the spectrum of public discourse. The gradual growth in federal cultural policy from the 1930s on was merely a slow concretization of that assumption.

At the same time a counter-move began to gather momentum. You could find it first in William Aberhart’s and particularly Ernest Manning’s deformation of real Western populism, then in Maurice Duplessis’s or even W.A.C. Bennett’s focus of loathing on culture as somehow against the people. These anti-cultural undercurrents have slowly come to dominate the public place; that is, public political discourse. It seems to have happened through the marriage of communications technology, public relations and the technocratic and corporatist worship of power. All of these elements can’t help but reject the uncontrollable nature of culture. Instead, false populism has become the standard of public debate. Whatever is claimed in short emotive phrases about ‘our culture’ or in long boring paragraphs about ‘our cultural industries,’ the painful truth is that our politics have become profoundly anti-cultural. And in the process they have become a denial of the assumptions which made Canada conceivable as a country.

Our obsession with the definition of undefinable terms—nation, distinct society, people—to say nothing of our obsession with whether you’re for or against one or the other, is not just a prolongation of the paralysed deification of culture as an ideal devoid of culture. It isn’t surprising that we then have so much difficulty dealing with the living complexities of who or what we are. Why do we find it impossible to digest the idea of necessary differences within communities—differences which need to be assumed, enjoyed, even accentuated in order for people really to live together?

All the lessons of psychiatry, psychology, social work, indeed culture, have taught us over the last hundred years that it is the acceptance of differences, not the search for similarities which enables people to relate to each other in their personal or family lives. This is doubly true in a country. That’s why nationalism based on the assertion of love of ‘the same’ is a deformed marriage of the worst of nineteenth-century nationalism with the most manipulative of twentieth-century public relations.

One of the long-standing lessons of the Canadian experience has been the importance of living on several levels at once. Somehow we have found enough intelligence and developed enough curiosity to maintain this successful but uncomfortable position. Now the anti-culture culture of our élites leads them to focus on ‘wasted’ overlap and the virtues of power at one level or another. The whole cultural history of Canada can be traced through the growing pleasure taken by the population from living on both levels at once without regarding the complexity as a matter of waste or desperately searching for simplicity. Canadian culture could be defined as a celebration of overlap.

Recently I came across a curious little pamphlet aimed at the forty-five thousand war brides who arrived in Canada after World War Two. The preface was by the Countess of Athlone, wife of the governor general. In her pinched and arcane style she nevertheless managed to explain what would most confuse these young women coming from mono-cultures such as the English, French and Dutch. The key was Canadians’ desire for complexity. “So wherever [in Canada] one may make one’s home one’s loyalty is to Canada and one’s province.”4

Our problem in accepting this today is not one of left versus right. The left is often caught up in the administrative religion of establishing clear lines of power; the right in the market religion of clear lines of competition. Both are denials of civilization. Whatever the romantic vocabulary of contemporary nationalism, the reality behind it is one of power, control and administrative methodology. In such a context the very idea of culture as an uncontrollable and complex expression of reality is impossible to accept.

In spite of this, culture remains at the core of our actions. The manipulations of false populism may permit votes to be won. What this does not produce in the citizenry is either self-respect or respect for the public system.

There is a great deal of talk from ‘responsible’ people about the new forces of inevitability and the new values. But, when élites talk about inevitability, they are either incompetent or duplicitous. As for values, the Swedish writer Carl-Henning Wijkmark puts it succinctly—“[T]he sign of authentic values is that they can resist evil.”⁵ In other words, values are not the product of newness or change, but of careful evolution combined with the judgement of experience. That’s why any sustained discussion of ethics and values automatically stretches back over 2,500 years.

And that is why, over the short period of a few centuries, the line of culture in our society is easy to follow. The women’s suffrage movement rose out of language, writing and literary organizations—Nellie McClung’s writing and speaking made her the leader of the advance guard. The Toronto Women’s Literary Club led the way in Ontario. It was Félix Marchand, the only professional writer to become premier of Quebec, who led the revival of the lay movement against the church’s control of education. His force—the force which Honoré Mercier, Lomer Gouin and Louis-Alexandre Taschereau all lacked—was a solid cultural base. As for the qualities which did exist in conservative thought earlier in the century, much of it came from the trilingual economist Stephen Leacock and the novelist, preacher, activist Ralph Connor who, among other things, chaired the Manitoba Council of Industry after the Winnipeg strike. The poet and lawyer F.R. Scott was at the core of the formalization of the socialist movement. His production of aggressive, ironic poetry and his translations of francophone poets such as Anne Hébert and Saint-Denys Garneau sit naturally alongside his two landmark Supreme Court victories against the Padlock Act and on behalf of Roncarelli against Duplessis. Both of these were victories for citizens’ rights.

I talked in earlier chapters about the intellectual, even literary and creative nature of the early Canadian leadership, a tradition which gradually petered out after men like Mackenzie King and Brooke Claxton. There was a revival under Trudeau, but again it slipped away. However, the disencultured period of Canadian public life in which we are now mired at the federal and provincial levels—a period which often seems to verge on the functionally illiterate—represents only a short amount of time in the experience of a century and a half.

Laurier, in his first speech as an elected representative in 1871—he was then thirty—insisted that “In a free state, all is related and each element leads to another; legislation, commerce, industry, the arts, the sciences, letters are all part of a same body—le corps social. . . . When there is an abuse in one part, the whole social body will be more or less paralysed. . . .”6 He was not making a corporatist argument about linked interest groups, because his point was not that of interests but of inclusiveness and interdependency.

For example, the national commission appointed in 1926 to study broadcasting was led by a bank chairman—Sir John Aird. And yet he was able to imagine himself and his responsibilities as those of a citizen, rather than of a banker. As a result he recommended the creation of what would eventually become the CBC. The national campaign to force R.B. Bennett to enact Aird’s recommendations came through the Canadian Clubs, not through professional cultural interest groups. There was an almost unspoken understanding running through all parts of the social body, as described sixty years before by Laurier, that in order to carry its reality into the twentieth century, a smaller country had to give itself the new cultural mechanisms of the century.

Their argument was not, nor is mine, centred on technology. The central point is the role of language. It is at the core of civilization throughout the western tradition. Humanism, responsible individualism, the idea of the citizen, democracy itself all turn on the central role of language. This is an idea of civilization built entirely around the necessity of communication.

What makes the Canadian situation unusual is the unprecedented access which we give to the language of other societies. You might say that this is particularly unprecedented because these friendly cultures are also aggressive rivals. These high levels of penetration of our culture—which none of them permit in their own territories—are driven by both commercial and political agendas. They carry on a free and often destructive operation inside our borders, all the while complaining that it isn’t free enough. And in the process they manage to deflect attention from their organized xenophobia at home.

This penetration is particularly strong in technologies such as film and television. It is reinforced by their use of large, complex distribution systems to shoulder aside much of local culture, quite apart from questions of quality or potential audience. As a result Canadians have tended to use language in a manner more typical of the nineteenth century. That is, books remain the central means of public discussion, while elsewhere that same discussion is more likely to take place through film or television. We use novels, essays, even poetry, to set the imaginative agenda of the society. Our writers thus tend to occupy a much larger public place than in other developed countries.

This is part of the explanation for the continuing public role of poetry, when in other developed democracies it has largely slipped into a marginal intimiste art form. I am not suggesting that large percentages of the population read poetry. But rather that poetry still lies at the core of our creativity and so reverberates out through other expressions of culture. One of the signs of this energy is the continuing role of long narrative poems; again a literary structure more associated with earlier centuries.

It’s not that we use narrative poetry in the nineteenth-century form. We use it in a twentieth-century manner. It was not surprising to find Charles Mair writing “The Last Bison” or “Tecumseh” or Isabella Valancy Crawford “Malcolm’s Katie” or Octave Crémazie “Colonisation” or “Les Morts.” They were of their time. However, E.J. Pratt’s “Towards the Last Spike,” a book-length epic, is unusual for the middle of the twentieth century.

And from the 1960s on there is a sudden explosion of grandly conceived narrative poems. Pierre Morency’s Lumière des oiseaux. bp Nichol’s Continental Trance. Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter. Emile Martel’s Pour orchestre et poète seul. André Ricard’s Les Baigneurs de Tadoussac, in which urban figures swim up and down in L’Anse à l’eau at Tadoussac, the first lake named by Jacques Cartier in Canada. A whole new generation of poets are carrying on this approach—Esta Spalding, for example, with Anchoress. There is even a sub-category delivering a narrative urban vision. Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies is a long examination of Toronto and is matched by George Bowering’s Kerrisdale Elegies of Vancouver or Dany Laferrière’s Chronique de la dérive douce on Montreal. This time the city is experienced by a Haitian immigrant:

People always believe

that the victim deserves his fate.

It is the most sinister of the little

judéo-christian jokes.7

The long narrative poem has also become a tool for looking at the outside world: Peter Dale Scott’s Coming to Jakarta or Al Purdy’s “In Mexico.” The Canadian obsession with short stories—Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant being the most obvious great talents—could be seen as another expression of these narrative poems.

Earlier in this book I spoke of how profoundly oral Canadian civilization is. The long narration is an affirmation of the determination with which the society remains in this mode. Glenn Gould spoke of how in his orality “the Newfoundlander is, first of all, a poet.”⁸ In other words this characteristic stretches beyond the purely poetic. For example, Canadians seem to be returning to an old pleasure—that of public speeches, given and heard. “It was by now ten o’clock,” Robertson Davies wrote in Fifth Business, “and even the thirst of a Canadian audience for oratory was almost slaked.”⁹ You sense this great taste for the force of words—seemingly oral words—in René-Daniel Dubois’s Ne blâmez jamais les Bédouins or in Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters. In both cases the words seem hardly willing to stay on the page. They require performance. It is as if the force of language in Canadian society makes it impossible for the scholastic schools of literature to develop into a viable alternative.

And yet, by coming through the political door, the scholastic has developed into some sort of false alternative. It has been unable to win any real public, but it has occupied much of the territory of public debate. And in the process it has gradually been driving culture away from the underlying political questions which determine the shape and direction of society.

You will notice, for example, that over the last twenty years the best francophone writers have gradually distanced themselves from the mainstream political debate. You could say that they now aggressively avoid it, as expressed in Pierre Morency’s ironic fictional description of a “fashionable political party” which advertises in the window of its headquarters:

Writer wanted for conceptual work, writing, correcting. We seek a talented person, with reliable ambition, filled with the desire to work for his country and wishing to live intimately with a great leader. Salary modest, but all comforts assured.10

The effect on creativity is important. For the first time in our history there is, as François Ricard puts it, a “rejection of subject” and a tendency to concentrate on “private happiness.”¹¹ Among anglophones the rejection has not been so extreme. Instead, politics have been replaced with causes. But causes represent a more romantic, distilled vision of society, and in that sense there is also a “rejection of subject.”

It could be said that this tendency exists throughout the west and so our writing has become increasingly like that of others. But what has happened is more complex than that. Radio and television have favoured the two extremes of communication—the regional and the international, both of which have positive implications. They remind us of what lies below and above the ‘truths’ of the nineteenth-century nation-state. This has been a particularly interesting release in a country with two languages. The literary critic Gilles Marcotte argues that “you could establish a link of cause and effect between the arrival of television and the renaissance of [Quebec] nationalism.”¹² And, to the extent that that nationalism is tied to a real sense of the community and not to ideological abstractions, it is a healthy renaissance. Margaret Atwood puts it this way—Cultural nationalism is “merely a determination on the part of writers to stay in their own country . . . and to write about what they kn[o]w and s[ee] around them, which is only what writers everywhere have always done.”¹³

At the same time, a very real negative has emerged. The new means of communication have revealed an incapacity even to suggest that culture exists other than in the particular language of broadcast. And this has encouraged the exact opposite of community identification. It has reinforced the big established empires of language. Suddenly it is as if we can only communicate with the world through the mechanism of our particular language, when in fact the nature of these international empires—particularly of English and French—is not primarily communications or culture but commerce. We can applaud the internationalism, but it does create a peculiar atmosphere.

Suddenly we are meant to share our primary perceptions of society with people who happen to use the same language as us (for the arbitrary reasons of imperial history) even though they may live thousands of miles away in, for example, a non-democratic society with completely different realities. On the other hand, we are to have nothing ‘cultural’ to share with people who live in the same town or within a few kilometres and with whom we share and have shared all the experiences of reality. The great and complex reality of culture is thus stripped down to little more than linguistics.

In this sense culture has never been so negatively political. Why? Because the ultimate ideological expression is that of form over content. And in our current situation the positive strengths of languages are reduced to linguistic forms or prisons. These require the theoretically absolute separation of neighbouring or interwoven cultures even when the reality is one of sharing. In other words, language is being celebrated and used in the same way that religion and race were once used. This is the full expression of solitudes as a negative.

Over the last decade this ideological idea has gradually climbed up into the constitutional/economic debates over efficiency and waste caused by overlap. Suddenly, linguistic and regional concerns have become a reason to seek the separating out of regional cultures. With a quiet insistency the debate goes on as to what level of government should have what responsibility. Driven by the politics of the PQ, culture has repeatedly been put on the list of those things which might go to the provinces.

This concept contains the fascinating idea that culture should be seen as something which a constitution could assign to a government—that culture is just another administrative activity in search of efficiency and lean organization. This is the ultimate marriage of the technocratic with the ideological. The idea that culture is alive and uncontrollable is simply evacuated. That is, culture itself is evacuated. What remains is an acultural, functionally illiterate replacement of the idea of civilization by that of administrative control.

What I am describing is the means by which the rhetoric of power can make assumptions which deny the essence of democracy and humanism. What I am arguing is that culture is not—in a citizen-based society—available for technocratic assignment to one pocket or another.

It is particularly interesting that this idea of assigning the content of society to the regional structures comes at a time when the power to decide the future of those regions has been consciously moved to the international level. What is presented as a nationalistic fulfilment of destiny through decentralization is more realistically a castrating of the citizens’ means of expression through globalization. As Myrna Kostash has put it, “So we (Canadians, artists) have to be diverse and decentered but they (bond traders, Disneyland) get to be monopolistic and ubiquitous.”14 Or in a slightly different way, Jacques Godbout—“We [Quebecers] are a society ready to sell ourselves body and soul to another society—the American—all the while ferociously arguing our distinctiveness from Canada.”¹⁵

What this whole approach assumes is that, to the extent governments are involved, culture should be reliant on a single clearly defined authority, and this for both cultural and financial reasons. The history of culture and politics in Canada suggests the exact opposite. It has always been the inefficiency and duplication of a system involving three levels of government which has permitted freedom of speech and remarkable creativity.

And if we had to choose one level, it would be sensible to analyse at which one creativity has fared best. The unsatisfactory answer, but nevertheless the answer, would be the national. The complexity of a federal government, with all of its contradictory impulses, makes it difficult for culture to be used in a classically nationalistic, moral or utilitarian manner. Of course people do try, but their successes tend to be less sweeping and less effective.

Provincial governments on the other hand seem to be too exposed to the interest groups which drive those sorts of jingoistic, moralizing and utilitarian agendas. And the ability of those who create to slow them down is weaker because the system is more monolithic. Ontario, for example, after a long tradition of arts support, has abruptly taken apart much of its arts programming. That same slashing process took place in Ottawa, but it was moderated by the variety of contradictory forces in play. Since the recent creation of an arts council by its provincial Liberals, Quebec has become relatively active in supporting the arts. But this initiative is only a few years old and both its staying power and its ability to maintain a reasonable arm’s-length relationship to government is as yet undemonstrated, in the sense that time is the real demonstration of political reality.

Until recently federal institutions represented the only serious sources of creative support. At the same time as the Quebec arts council has improved the situation, another important earlier creation—Radio-Québec—has been reduced to virtual irrelevancy. In fact, the federal institution of Radio-Canada remains the dominant electronic structure of francophone communications, if not the most important cultural structure of any sort. For half a century, Radio-Canada has been one of the central institutions in the development not only of culture, but of cultural independence from the political control sought by governments at all levels, but in particular the negative-nationalist governments. Where else, apart perhaps from the National Film Board, was it possible to escape the power of the church and the Union Nationale government? For all its financial fragility and administrative flaws, it remains one of the few places where the different levels of government and the private sector cannot easily get their way. The same could be said of the CBC’s role in the other Canadian provinces.

There has been very little public debate about the long-term commitment of the separatist /sovereigntist movement to maintain such an expensive and relatively arm’s-length structure should they succeed in their political project. The only relevant indication we have is their treatment of Radio-Québec. In that case their approach has not been far off that of the Klein government in Alberta.

The central problem of single-source public funding for the arts is that of freedom and creative energy. It is increasingly proposed as an inevitability, given that less public money will be available and more private money will be required. What this would represent is a return to the pre-democratic system of the royal patrons, under whom freedom of expression was limited and ritual humiliation obligatory. That was a world in which the less threatening domains of music and imagery prospered, while those individuals who used language as if it mattered were censored and often imprisoned.

None of which is to suggest that the federal government has done a good job on the cultural front. And certainly the quality of its policies has steadily declined over the last decade. The symbolic sign of that decline came with the renaming of the department, from Culture and Communications to Heritage. What is this concept of heritage, if not of the past cut off from the present and the future? Thus their fear of culture as an alive and uncontrollable force has pushed the ideologues and technocrats to repackage reality as if it were dead and therefore under control.

Still, to the extent that the democratic systems have encouraged freedom of expression and creativity over much of this century, the drive has come from federal institutions and most of the resistance or indifference has come from the provinces. And the more a province has been driven by regional nationalism, the more it has tended to impose a narrow, goal-oriented cultural agenda rather than encouraging the uncontrolled and uncontrollable. As a result most of the successful battles for a strong francophone culture have been carried on through the mechanisms of federal cultural institutions (CBC/Radio-Canada, the National Film Board, the Canada Council), often in direct opposition to narrow nationalist provincial governments.

Above all, it is the multi-levelled complexity of the federal-provincial-municipal system which has given so much energy to our cultural activities. The slow edging towards single-source funding has little to do with efficiency or constitutions. It is the product of the desire among technocrats and negative nationalists to control ideas.

One of the positive curiosities of our role in the great language empires is that we have the use of two of the leading imperial languages, without the innate imperial attitudes. Those at the centre of these languages, whatever their point of view or politics, can’t help but speak and write from within those attitudes. When people try to understand the international success of Canadian literature over the last two decades, I can’t help but think that our detached position is one of the key factors. Oakland Ross’s Guerilla Beach is a classic example of this unusual approach. It brings a vision of the violence and disorder in Central America without the assumptions of any of the imperial players.

What’s more, we use these languages with the curious combination of a culture both developed and developing. You could even say that we use them in a schizophrenic manner because of the aboriginal role in our mythology and—increasingly once more—in our reality. There is also the bizarre effect of western self-confidence mixed with a severe victimization complex. Robert Lepage’s plays are good examples of these contradictions, as are the novels of most of our leading anglophone writers.

In fact, I’m not certain that writing in two of the great imperial languages is even a fundamental characteristic of our culture. For example, while I can think of no American or French or English book which has the tone you find in Guerilla Beach, I immediately think of the Swede, Sven Lindquist, and his Exterminate All the Brutes.

If we were to consider these languages as our fundamental homes, then we would be agreeing in the long run that our tone and style and even our agendas should be more or less set by what dominates in that linguistic family. In both of them we are minority players and so would be accepting a self-imposed position of victimization. That is the full meaning of François Ricard’s question—“What are we defending apart from language?”16

While making full use of the international advantages which these two languages give us, we must consciously and constantly move away from the styles, concerns and references which dominate within them. Our natural home is not in our specific language. That is an historic accident, not a cultural quality. Our natural or real home is our experience and the social, physical, political reality in which we live.

I look through the poetry of A.M. Klein and find his wonderful verse on the conscription crisis, his dramatization of Camillien Houde, his poetic condemnations of Duplessis, his ironic war poetry:

This is the man who sold the soldiers shoes—

. . . Now is he rated pillar of the town . . .

Puffs at his pipe, is sad about the war,

And plans great honour for the boots that walk no more. . . .¹⁷

In other words, some of the finest poetry which led to the Quiet Revolution was written in English in Canada. None of it was written in France. And much of the finest poetry about place, as anglophones imagine it, was written in French in Quebec. None of it was written in England.

Again, this is not to minimize the importance of the specific language. “When a language dies,” Kjell Espmark wrote, “the dead die a second time.”18 Every possible effort has to be made to strengthen (not defend) French and its role in our society.

But the key to strengthening a language lies in constantly seeking to understand the experience of those who use it—that is, their culture. That—not linguistics—is the meaning of communications. The talent for that communication lies first with those who write. And so it is an obligation for as many writers as possible to master the linguistics of those their own culture is most involved with in order to be able to get at the culture.

I am particularly struck at a time when most leading Canadian politicians, civil servants, lobbyists, military officers and national journalists are bilingual; when more and more of the smart senior businessmen are also; to say nothing of people who serve in restaurants, airports, on telephone lines; that only a tiny portion of the anglophone writers have managed to grasp a second language.

These are supposed to be our intellectual class. What’s their problem? Too locked up in the imperial language? It simply isn’t possible for a writer of good poetry or fiction to say they don’t have a talent for languages. In any case, there are obligations which come with the social status of an intellectual. The role of the intellectual has always been to increase communication. And that means a great deal more than writing in one language for one community. That may be the practical reality of most writing. And the destructive, levelling force of international commercial communications has driven many of us to concentrate on our particular communities, which is a good thing. But that is quite apart from the more basic obligation which writers have to accept—that they themselves and their words are the fundamental route of communication between communities. I’m not talking about politics or do-gooding. I am referring to the relationship between experiences and ideas and how they fit together. Stephen Leacock’s simple stories were the product of a man who in public rolled around from English to French to German as the subject required. That’s what an intellectual is supposed to do. Or rather, that is one of the basic assumptions tied to the concept of the intellectual.

And although more francophones have made the necessary linguistic effort, the writers have also become increasingly dependent on ideas and styles coming from France. These shouldn’t, indeed can’t, be ignored.

But language in France is itself mired in a deep crisis. It suffers from a great division between the written and the oral; a sign of scholasticism’s growing power on organized communications. The result is a depressingly static view of language and of society. The secondary result is a growing flight into abstraction, which is simply prolonging their crisis.

The road out of this marginalization of their own language will most likely come through their own real community—Europe—that is, through ever-increasing involvement with neighbouring cultures using other languages. For francophones in Canada, to be dependent on that process means an increasing isolation from the realities of the place in which we live.

If the natural references for our culture do not lie in England, France and the United States, where are they to be found? We have to look at our reality to understand that.

For a start we have an obsession with communication tied to the existence of a small population in a large, difficult area. The result has been that new ideas about communication in the twentieth century have more often come from Canada than from anywhere else. We have access to the dominant imperial culture of our day and yet we live on its margins—this is what Robertson Davies once described to me as the enormous advantage of coming from the provinces, because it allowed you to write about the whole world without the curiously provincial limitations of believing you are at the centre of it. There is the astonishing strength of poetry and of new voices in poetry. There is the very unusual ability to absorb into our culture, without demanding assimilation, a whole range of immigrant voices, from Dany Laferrière and Joseph Skvorecky to Dionne Brand and Alberto Manguel. There is the constant rebalancing between regional and wider visions, between two languages, between victimization and self-confidence. There is an almost Third World aggressivity which is rarely found in the literatures of Europe and the United States.

But above all there is the sense of an uncontrollable nature running through everything from Frederick Philip Grove and Octave Crémazie to Ann-Marie MacDonald and Christian Mistral. The conclusion which I draw from all of this is that we waste a great deal of time comparing our literature with its linear neighbours in English and French.

If our fiction resembles any another, it is Russian and the other northern literatures. If our contrasting sophistication and insecurity resembles anyone’s, it is that of Central Europe and Latin America. We really have very little in common with two European ex-empires and the United States, all three beneficiaries of temperate, manageable lands, dense populations and centralized mythologies.

On the other hand, if you look at Russian literature you find a certain melancholy, a celebration of the provincial—think of all those country estates on which people dream of Moscow through the pens of Turgenev or Chekhov. There is a great sense of the contrasts and differences within society, of the difficulty of change, of nature out of control. There is that curious mixture caused by living on the uncontrolled margins in a sophisticated social system.

Alice Munro, for example, in The Progress of Love or Monique Proulx in Les Aurores montréales or David Adams Richards or Mavis Gallant—in spite of their different generations and tempos—come at the world in the same cool, hard-edged way, so that what is human seems all the more real and unbearable. It is an approach you will find in Turgenev or in Gogol’s Dead Souls. Even the dispassionate, casual descriptions of people’s clothing is similar. Munro uses the phrase “both perma press” the way Gogol uses “with some pretensions to fashion,” as a summarizing conclusion after a devastating description.19

As for melancholy, it runs through everything written in the north. Robertson Davies gives it a specific edge of mythological regret—“Like so much in Canada, its spirit was Chekhovian clothing in a present dubiously accepted, a regret for a past which had never been.”²⁰ Antoine Gérin-Lajoie’s classic, “Un Canadien errant,” expresses more than typical nineteenth-century romanticism.

Non, mais en expirant,

Ô mon cher Canada,

Mon regard languissant

Vers toi se portera.

You find the same melancholy tone in Gilles Vigneault or Stan Rogers. Or, for that matter, in Wilfred Campbell or Gordon Lightfoot or Octave Crémazie:

The fields were dead, the wind had lost its will

I’ll get along, you know, I’ll take tomorrow with a grin.

Sad, crying shadows,

Which in the sombre forests

In those grey, withered days.²¹

Melancholy is married to solitude in this same context. You find it in Lermontov the way you do in Pierre Morency or in Anne Hébert’s Les Fous de Bassan or in George Bowering’s Kerrisdale Elegies—

Most of all I loved my solitude,

hoping another

somewhere did the same.

or the Estonian poet Jaan Kaplinski—

I need solitude.

The forest. For solitude is like the forest

or the sea. Solitude is

space, open space.

Or Madelaine Gagnon—

Here the

women cry in their houses, with the men most

often, the quays are there only for celebration . . .

There are strange urban solitudes in novels such as Russell Smith’s How Insensitive, or Daniel Poliquin’s L’Écureuil noir. There is the almost inexplicable deliberate solitude in Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, with men meeting in the middle of nowhere after walking for days in opposite directions on a railway track, as if they had been following animistic song-lines. In John Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright the hero arrives in Newfoundland and thinks—“It seemed free and aloof, preserving a secret few would be strong enough to learn.”

What secret? The secret of Gilles Vigneault’s “grand pays solitaire.”

These ideas of melancholy and solitude are tied to that of a place which has no rational shape, nor can it be given one. It is not available for human domination. Solitude in less marginal places is often tied to escapism. In places like Canada and Russia it is part of reality. In that sense northerners seem to revel in melancholy, solitude and the uncontrollable character of the place; the marriage of “roughness and beauty,” in John Steffler’s words.22 Lermontov clearly did. They accept somehow that nature will play an important role in forming the community. “White winter had set in with the cruel stillness of cloudless forests . . .” and so Turgenev’s characters adjust themselves to a completely different life.

It is a sort of life which is marked, as it so often is in this northern fiction, by a refusal of the idea that being heroic is enough to create a hero. I talked in earlier chapters about this anti-heroic phenomenon in Canada. But that is also the message of Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time and of Gogol’s Dead Souls. You find it in Dostoevsky, even in Tolstoy. “The wildly and chaotically unpredictable which formed the basis of new creation in nature must also exist in the world. In civilization,” is how the Swedish novelist Kerstin Ekman puts it.23

Instead there is a proliferation of remarkable heroines who come as close as a developed society can to the idea of mother earth—again, a non-rational, non-European concept. Tolstoy’s Natasha is perhaps the model. Blanche in Philippe Aubert de Gaspé’s Les Anciens Canadiens has an almost identical psychological approach and plays the same role as Natasha with the men in the book, as does Hagar in Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel, as does Mary Dempster in Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business. No matter what happened she “felt no humiliation.”²⁴ She assumed the humiliation of others and herself. In many ways these heroines are the natural product of a society which, apart from being anti-heroic, still has strong animist roots.

All of what I am describing is tied to the dominance of place; the inability to imagine place reduced to structure; to a form which humans control. In this context, I think often of something the composer Harry Freedman said to broadcaster Adrienne Clarkson—“Sibelius is a Canadian composer. Without him I could never have written music.”

What makes Canadian creativity more complex than the purely Russian is the doubly marginal factor of being placed beside a great power as well as being in the north. The experiences of the Poles and Czechs with their dominant neighbour may have been far more violent than ours, but these are nevertheless the close relationships of small sophisticated societies with an unavoidable great empire. In that sense, their experience is like ours. That’s why the literatures of central Europe also tell us a lot about ourselves; a great deal more than the literature of a people questioning their destiny in London, Paris and Los Angeles. George Elliott Clarke writes eloquently about the intellectual consciousness which living on the edge can produce. Talking of the revival in Toronto in the 1990s of an old American musical which dealt with black–white relations, he says that “an acceptable commodity for African-American audiences . . . was, for many African-Canadians, grimly insulting kitsch.”25 There is also the curious and very real mixture of western and non-western—European and Aboriginal—which links us to Latin America and to Australia. The result, again, is a literary and cultural tradition which has little to do with that suggested by simple linguistics and the false relationships produced by empires.

All of this reinforces my sense that the quality of our culture is the product of its complexity. It is the drama of that complexity which pushes us on. It was those tensions that made Montreal the centre of the first explosion of creativity in both languages. A racial and cultural mix without the depressing drive towards sameness is a great creative strength. And it is that same tension that has brought Toronto alive over the last three decades.

Complexity is not an abstract idea. Or, as George Bowering put it in two lines about winter in rural Saskatchewan,

a farm woman clencht her buttocks,

afraid to go out to the privy.

He then goes a bit further in his Short Sad Book:

The snow covers me and I lie covered

with snow. Is it the grasp of winter. Is

winter my country.

My country is not a country it is winter. . . . ²⁶

To remember and assemble events is the meat and potatoes of a conscious civilization. That is the most basic sort of memory; more necrophilia than history. All too often these identified remains or ‘incidents’ become a denial of complexity; the flagpoles of jingoism or victimization. This is particularly the case when language is treated as linguistics. Then language simply reinforces the view of history as celebratory flagpoles or cairns of humiliation.

But when language escapes from linguistics and rhetoric and propaganda, it can become the means of communicating culture and thus the means by which society expresses its reality. That reality embraces differences, but leaves behind the worship of divisions. And it reveals the interesting patterns of shared attitudes and interwoven experiences.

Robin Blaser said the poet precedes, which means that culture precedes. In this atmosphere of shared attitudes and interwoven experiences it can even precede as an expression of reality. Culture seen in this way is an expression of memory in all its complexity.