Teaching Canada through
Short Fiction
Nationaal Congres Engels 2011
Hans Bak
Conny Steenman-Marcusse
From: W.J. Keith, Canadian Literature in English (1985)
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“Canada. A country stretching over 3,000 miles (some 5,500
kilometers) from east to west and sometimes extending almost
3,000 miles from south to north, though most of its northern lands
are unsettled and uninhabitable. In area the second largest country
in the world, with a population less than half that of the United
Kingdom. A country with two official languages, English and French,
and many unofficial. A country that shares its vast east-west
boundary with an English-speaking, culturally aggressive nationstate boasting almost ten times its population. A country in which
the native peoples (Indian and Inuit) now constitute less than 2
percent of its total inhabitants. A country of close to 4 million square
miles in which over three-quarters of the population live in towns
and cities. A country which began to come together as a stable
political unit in 1867 and whose present boundaries were
established as recently as 1949. A country whose written history
spans no more than 500 years (John Cabot entered the Gulf of St
Lawrence in 1497), and whose English literary tradition can be
traced back no further than the middle of the eighteenth century.”
Canada vs US
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ambivalence: admiration vs suspicion
admiration: American dynamism, power, technological
achievement
suspicion: economic, cultural, political dominance/
imperialism; US arrogance, moral self-righteousness
reputedly: Canadian more cautious, timid, less given to
wild, risky experimentation
national myths & ideals: “life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness” vs Canadian Confederation: “peace, order,
good government”
American West vs Canadian North: cowboy vs RCMP
Molson Canadian Beer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRI-A3vakVg
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diminishing political dependence on GB vs growing economic
dependence on US
 impulse to resist cultural infiltration of US norms & fashions
Cf anti-Americanism (early Atwood)
Canadian critics of US culture & politics: Marshall McLuhan,
Northrop Frye, George Grant
Canada: voice of conscience & critique
David Staines: Canada as “the dispassionate witness”
“Flight to Canada” [underground railroad; Vietnam]
Canadians on America (Rick Mercer, “Talking to Americans”) vs
Americans on Canadians (Michael Moore, Canadian Bacon)
Canadian humor, self-irony:
Arrogant Worms: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I49PI_MbNKI
Canada and Great Britain
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traditionally a close relationship
in wake of American Revolution: massive influx of 30,000 United
Empire Loyalists into Canada
embrace of British cultural heritage as way of resisting US cultural
dominance
contrastive development: in US political independence was incentive
to quest for cultural and literary autonomy vs English-speaking
Canada: chose to remain under wings of mother country
colonial mentality persisted into 20th century (until after WWII,
1960s)
in literary terms: persistence of traditional literary forms (prairierealism, regionalism);
Modernism (1910s-1920s)  in Canadian literature: 1940s-1950s
Postmodernism (1960s-1970s in US)  massive eruption of pm in
CanLit from 1980s to present
Canada as colonial backwater 
expatriation
Mavis Gallant (France)
Mordecai Richler
(England)
Margaret Laurence
(Africa)
Mordecai Richler on his period of expatriation in England (1954-1972)
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“[I felt] foolishly convinced that
merely by quitting the country, I
could put my picayune past
behind me. Like many of my
contemporaries, I was mistakenly
charged with scorn for all things
Canadian. For the truth is, if we
were indeed hemmed in by the
boring, the inane and the absurd,
we foolishly blamed it all on
Canada, failing to grasp that we
would suffer from a surfeit of the
boring, the inane and absurd
wherever we eventually settled
and would carry Canada with us
everywhere for good measure.”
practical & economic obstacles
 colonial mentality  no need for native
Canadian books, no book production industry, no
marketing facilities, no sustaining sense of
audience
 international literary market dominated by
British & American authors
 novels with Canadian themes & characters
considered quaintly exotic & charmingly odd
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the flowering of Canadian literature,
1970s 
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by 1970s colonial mentality shed
powerful injections by Canada Council for the
Arts  promotional tours
by 1970s possible to be writers in Canada
sense of Canadian “usable” past and literary
tradition to build on or reject
since 1970s: multiplicy of highly individualized
voices
from “colonial” to “national” (“post-colonial”) to
“global village” (“transcultural”/ “transnational”)
Margaret Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972)
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The central symbol for Canada […] is
undoubtedly Survival, la Survivance. Like the
Frontier and The Island, it is a multi-faceted
and adaptable idea. For early explorers and
settlers, it meant bare survival in the face of
"hostile" elements and/or natives: carving
out a place and a way of keeping alive. But
the word can also suggest survival of a crisis
or disaster, like a hurricane or a wreck, and
many Canadian poems have this kind of
survival as a theme; what you might call
'grim' survival as opposed to 'bare' survival.
For French Canada after the English took
over it became cultural survival, hanging on
as a people, retaining a religion and a
language under an alien government. And in
English Canada now while the Americans
are taking over it is acquiring a similar
meaning. There is another use of the word
as well: a survival can be a vestige of a
vanished order which has managed to
persist after its time is past, like a primitive
reptile. This version crops up in Canadian
thinking too, usually among those who
believe that Canada is obsolete.
Canadian identity
self-definition over against US and GB
in cultural limbo between GB (history, tradition)
vs US (present, future; materialism, technology)
  uncertain cultural identity
 “Canadians have no alternative but to insist on
what they are not rather than what they are . …
Psychologically, we are indisputably an American
people; at the same time, we are anxious to
distinguish ourselves from those whom the rest
of the world recognizes as the American people.”
(W. Keith)
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“... first, Canada and the U.S.
have diverged to the point
where it’s no longer true to say
that we’re essentially the same
thing. … Secondly, as a result
of divergence between Canada
and the U.S., we’ve reached
the point as Canadians where
we no longer define ourselves
against Americans. … We
confidently stand for a set of
values on which we agree on
all the big points, but quibble
over the little ones.” (Douglas
Coupland)
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“Canada is a fiction, a makebelieve nation. … We have a
few precious sacraments: our
health care, our hockey, our
beer, our news. But as much
as we might like our country,
we don’t love it, at least not
with the Biblical devotion that
seems hard-wired into the
American psyche. … We’ re not
just post-colonial, we’re a postmodern nation held together
by speculative patriotism, a
country forever trying to make
cultural ends meet as it
debates its own existence. A
necessary fiction.” (Brian D.
Johnson)
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It seems to me that the
Canadian sensibility has
been profoundly
disturbed, not so much
by our famous problem of
identity, important as that
is, as by a series of
paradoxes in what
confronts that identity. It
is less perplexed by the
question “Who Am I?”
than by some such riddle
as “Where is here?”
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Northrop Frye, 1965
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Clark Blaise:
“Sociologically, I am an
American. Psychologically, a
Canadian. Sentimentally, a
Québécois. By marriage, part
of the Third World. My
passport says Canadian, but I
was born in America; my legal
status says immigrant.
Resident Alien. Everywhere I
see dualities. The continent of
gringos, everything north of
the Rio Grande, is sliced in
half, and I occupy both sides
uneasily.” [Intro to Resident
Alien, 1986]
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Michael Ondaatje:
“Canada offers Ondaatje a
geography but no inheritance;
Sri Lanka offers him a family
history, but no tradition, no
way of passing things on; the
English language offers him
both an inheritance and a
history, but no time and place.”
J.E. Chamberlin, in: Sam
Solecki, ed., Spider Blues:
Essays on Michael Ondaatje
(1985)
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Who qualifies as a Canadian writer?
Malcolm Lowry? Jack Kerouac? Wallace Stegner? Saul Bellow? Carol
Shields? Bharati Mukherjee? Rohinton Mistry? Yann Martel?
Which Canada?
A confederation of widely divergent regions uneasily bound together
 “CanLit” a confederation of regional literatures uneasily grouped
under one banner?
Split loyalties: region vs nation
Eastern vs western Canada: center vs margin
Geographically, politically, economically and ethnically
Anglo-Canadian canon vs peripheral voices claiming acces to center
A precarious sense of “unity”  Canada as postmodern nation par
excellence (“a necessary fiction”)
From bi-cultural Canada …
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Anglophone versus Francophone Canada:
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Hugh MacLennan: “Two Solitudes” (1945)
Frank R. Scott, “Bonne Entente”:
The advantages of living with two cultures
Strike one at every turn
Especially when one finds a notice in an office building
“The elevator will not run on Acension Day”
Or reads in the Montreal Star:
“Tomorrow being the Feast of the Immaculate Conception,
There will be no collection of garbage in the city”;
Or sees on the restaurant menu the bilingual dish:
DEEP APPLE PIE
TARTE AUX POMMES PROFONDES
… to multicultural Canada
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Canada not so much
bicultural as multicultural
Pierre Trudeau:
Multiculturalism Act
(1988): “a public policy
that encouraged
Canadians to be loyal as
citizens to Canada while
celebrating their cultural
heritage from wherever in
the world they or their
ancestors came”
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Trudeau in 1983
Critiquing Canadian multiculturalism
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Bharati Mukherjee:
Canada is a country that officially, and proudly, resists the policy and
process of cultural fusion. For all its smug rhetoric about ‘cultural
mosaic,’ Canada refuses to renovate its national self-image to
include its changing complexion. It is a New World country with Old
World concepts of a fixed, exclusivist national identity. And all
through the 1970s when I lived there, it was a country without a Bill
of Rights or its own Constitution. Canadian official rhetoric
designated me, as a citizen of non-European origin, one of the
‘visible minority’ who, even though I spoke the Canadian national
languages of English and French, was straining ‘the absorptive
capacity’ of Canada. Canadians of color were routinely treated as
‘not real’ Canadians. (1996)
US: “melting pot”
 Canada: “vertical
mosaic” (John Porter,
1965)
 towards
“transnational”
Canada?
 “kaleidoscope” (Janice
Kulyk Keefer)
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The Canadian Short Story
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Yann Martel (1963- )
Colonial period (1750-1867)
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Frances Brooke, The
History of Emily
Montague (1769)
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Thomas Chandler
Haliburton, The
Clockmaker (18361840)
Susanna Moodie (1803-1885)
Catherine Parr Traill (1802-1899)
Native voices
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Thomas King (1943- )
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Tomson Highway
(1951- )
Robert Weaver, CBC
Canadian women writers
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Alice Munro (1931- )
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Carol Shields (19352003)
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Aritha van Herk
(1954- )
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Janice Kulyk Keefer
(1952- )
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Michael Ondaatje
(1943- )
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Timothy Findley
(1930-2002)
Yeshim Ternar
the postmodernist challenge
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Robert Kroetsch
(1927- )
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Rudy Wiebe (1934- )
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Guy Vanderhaeghe
(1951-)
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Clark Blaise (1940) &
Bharati Mukherjee
(1940)
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Lynn Coady
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Roch Carrier
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Lawrence Hill
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Dionne Brand
Stephen Leacock
“The Marine Excursion of the Knights of Pythias”
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Half-past six on a July morning! The Mariposa Belle is at the wharf,
decked in flags, with steam up ready to start.
Excursion day!
Half past six on a July morning, and Lake Wissanotti lying in the
sun as calm as glass. The opal colours of the morning light are shot
from the surface of the water.
Out on the lake the last thin threads of the mist are clearing away
like flecks of cotton wool.
The long call of the loon echoes over the lake. The air is cool and
fresh. There is in it all the new life of the land of the silent pine
and the moving waters. Lake Wissanotti in the morning sunlight!
Don't talk to me of the Italian lakes, or the Tyrol or the Swiss Alps.
Take them away. Move them somewhere else. I don't want them.
Excursion Day, at half past six of a summer morning! With the boat
all decked in flags and all the people in Mariposa on the wharf, and
the band in peaked caps with big cornets tied to their bodies ready
to play at any minute! I say! Don't tell me about the Carnival of
Venice and the Delhi Durbar. Don't! I wouldn't look at them. I'd shut
my eyes! For light and colour give me every time an excursion out
of Mariposa down the lake to the Indian's Island out of sight in the
morning mist. Talk of your Papal Zouaves and your Buckingham
Palace Guard! I want to see the Mariposa band in uniform and the
Mariposa Knights of Pythias with their aprons and their insignia and
their picnic baskets and their five-cent cigars!