In “Haunted By A Lack of Ghosts,” an article whose title was taken from a poem by Earle Birney, Northrop Frye poses the question, “Where is here”? Perhaps inspired by Louis-Antoine de Bougainville’s query, « N’y a-t-il donc pas une clef au Canada et quelle est-elle? » , Frye responds by providing a definition of the landscape as seen by the early colonists, by offering a small tribute to the multicultural Toronto of the 1970s, and by concluding that Canada was a space through which people moved and still move. He concluded that the “feeling of nomadic movement over great distances persists even into the age of the aeroplane.” One might extrapolate a prolongation into space travel with the recent choice of two Canadian astronauts, a propensity to retrace one’s steps back to the place of origin as did Arthur Kroeger to the Mennonites in Russia, David Azrieli and Alfred Bader for example who were uprooted because of the war, or to travel in time, to the past like Michael Ignatieff following the route taken by his grandfather , to the future like Nalo Hopkinson describing anarchy in a futuristic Toronto in Brown Girl in the Ring, or to lands which exist only in one’s imagination as does Yann Martel in the Life of Pi.
However, all this displacement is but a continued attempt to discover, not so much a land, but our own identity. The basic question is thus, really “who am I?” When we explore the land, we are actually searching for self. F.R. Scott’s poem, “TransCanada” is a propos: This frontier, too, is ours/This everywhere whose life can only be led/At the pace of a rocket/ Is common to man and man, And every country below is an I land.” Writing about landscape is essentially intransitive and descriptive. This is not a new idea. Roland Barthes considered travel writing an exploration of self until he went to Japan and while writing his Kingdom of Signs, discovering “Other,” forgot he was revealing himself. Writing about self is possessive and the verbs are thus reflexive. But if I is plural and we are a nation, and the nation is Canada, then the tense is conditional. Writers continually describe what could be. They are ready to improve on the surroundings. Take Cécile Cloutier’s poem as an example: « Ville/Fixée par tes arbres/Comptée par tes maisons/ Epelée par tes rues/ Accepte encore/Le geste d’un pont. » The bridge added by the writer will guide the land from the present text to a possible future. This transformation is reflected by a trail we shall trace in literature starting with the individual’s losing him or her self in the vastness of the forests, working to take possession of the landscape and shape it to his or her needs and will, thereby defining him or herself in the landscape which inevitably changes and disappears due to the presence of humans, necessitating the attempt to rediscover land and self either through retracing routes[roots], rediscovering the past or creating a mythology of national identity. This is what John Ralston Saul does in A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada when he attributes what he sees as the distinctive characteristics of this country (egalitarianism, a balance between individual and group rights and needs, and a penchant for negotiation over violence) to aboriginal ideas. In so doing, he moves Canada from being a land without a mythology to a country with a mythology, ending at the very beginning. I believe, however, that the mythology has always existed in different forms waiting for us to discover it and to relay its narrative, but that the quest for possession of land, is a process in which nature’s text is inevitably erased or at least altered, making the quest for ownership of the environment and control of one’s identity/destiny a tragic tale in which humankind’s search for the eternal is washed away by the rising tide and in which ironically, that which humanity sought to possess is destroyed in the process. The land has been tattooed by roads and scarred by people who have disfigured the land between two seasons of ice. This is especially true in the North where nothing disintegrates and waste simply piles up in mountains while broken snow mobiles litter the landscape along with the carcasses of caribou and wolves, char and narwhals. It is ironic that as we discover our land and ourselves we create our myth of identity but that upon which it is based is destroyed by our very presence.
When we were surrounded by nature, we attempted to escape from it and convert it into urbanity. Now that we have created great cities, we attempt to define our nature by our landscape, a landscape we have already altered and which will, with each degree of global warming, resemble more closely a seascape. Douglas Glover’s novel, Elle, provides an excellent example. Cast ashore on a barren island in the Saint Laurence, a young couple live the myth of the castaways. The young man refuses to recognize the precariousness of their existence and retreats to the beach where he futilely plays tennis until he dies. The young woman becomes one with nature, exiting the island garbed in the skin of a bear. Later when she returns to Europe, she is reunited with a bear who has been taught to dance by wandering minstrels. The young man cannot be taught to live in nature and the bear cannot be domesticated. The beautiful beast and those who treated it barbarously were destroyed and a new myth was thus created—not the myth of the castaway but that of nature torn from its habitat revealing in an outburst of violence the sensitivity lacking in cruel and civilized human beings. A version of Beauty and the Beast where Nature is the frightening yet noble beast and the human is ennobled only when she rejects civilization.
All literature, all writing relies on the concept of alterity (otherness) to give meaning to the One. Good is highlighted by the presence of Evil, Beauty by Horror. Thus with the question of the environment, we find the binary opposing poles of city/country, urban/rural, romantic wilderness/civilized settlements, past/present, here and there (or hence and whence). Claude Lévi-Strauss called this le cuit et le cru.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau termed the division that of nature and culture. These concepts, fitted into a time line, read pre-colonial, colonial, modern, post colonial. Northrop Frye viewed this in Biblical terms: pre-Fall and post-Fall, an attempt to re-create paradise. The environment provides perspective from which one may understand not only oneself but one’s nation.
Culture and language are intimately linked with the environment. Language at once limits and expands thought. If we learn that bread is flat, like a tortilla, then we will use this as a reference point. When we travel we will learn that other peoples consume breads of many varieties. Until we travel, we will have but one reference point for the word. If we live in the desert, we will not possess a dozen words to describe snow. If we live in the far north, we will not know the sound of wind in the branches of a tree. Thus, our language is related to and formed by our environment. In Bruce Chatwin’s book, In Patagonia we learn that certain tribes in South America did not have words for items beyond their range of experience. Moreover, their value system was linked to nature. For example, a tribe that is nomadic will link rootless wanderings with Good while a sedentary population will view stability as Good. Ralph Waldo Emerson goes further in this argument stating that we use what we see in nature to express moral or intellectual ideas. Right is identified with a straight path and wrong is twisted. Nature is the source of meaning and metaphor for humanity and is itself a metaphor for the human mind. This is evident in Canadian literature from the very beginnings. Jacques de Meulles, in 1686, found the forests of the coastal region rather poor. On the other hand, Longfellow sang the praises of the “forests primeval.” “The murmuring pines and the hemlock bearded with moss” were magnificent and evoked druids and ancient times. De Meulles was in search of masts and his definition of Good was purely economic. If the trees were good material for masts, the forest was beautiful. Longfellow, on the other hand, wished to oppose the stately calm of the forests with the strife of human conflict creating the opposition between nature and culture. De Meulles and Longfellow represent the dichotomy between the economic and the romantic approach to nature. Both sought to use nature but the latter employed only metaphors. Together, they substantiate Robertson Davies’ statement that Canada is torn between a “northern, rather extraordinary, mystical spirit which it fears and the desire to present itself to the world as a Scotch banker.”
For some writers like Herménégilde Chiasson who asks, « Qu’est-ce que ça veut dire, venir de nulle part? », the identification between land and being are consummated in language.
Gérald LeBlanc describes Moncton as a ‘bilingual text, a city’ with a « langue bigarrée à la rythmique chiac, encore trop proche du feu, la brûlure linguistique…une prière américaine, un long cri de coyote dans le désert de cette fin de siècle…un mot avant d’être un lieu. » Bouchard spoke of Montreal as a city “where you used to have to speak French in order to be understood in English.” Agnes Whitfield is so afraid of not being able to communicate, she takes the train to Montreal and gets off at Cornwall! Desbiens says Sudbury is somewhere between a trip to Gaspésie and another to Vancouver.’ Raymond Leblanc calls the city ‘the place of the poem.’ Yet for others the city does not exist, a destination one never reaches. Desbiens wrote, « le train partait toujours sans moi/ prenant mes bagages et me laissant seul. » This dichotomy can be seen throughout Canadian literature, referring both to urban and rural contexts. Wladimir Krysinski , in describing the role of the city in modern poetry in Europe sees it operating between two poles: that of alienation (a dis-possession of l’espace disphorique) or the quest for perfection or utopia. He sees the city as the ever-renewed quest to balance nature and culture, to achieve transparency and to be foiled by the ever-present obstacle. Patrice Desbiens manages to express the two poles in one sentence twice while referring to Sudbury where everyone « vient d’ailleurs ou/ veut être ailleurs » and where he himself cannot decide whether he would rather « sauter dans l’autobus pour/ Sudbury ou sauter devant/ l’autobus pour Sudbury. »
One can take another city, for example, Sydney, Nova Scotia. When George Galt visited it a few years ago he mused on “the cold, empty streets of downtown Sydney.” Yet, when Arthur de Gobineau arrived there a hundred years earlier, after a long, transatlantic sea voyage, he stopped short of kissing the earth but declared firmly, that « Sydney est considéré le paradis de ces parages. » Anne Hébert speaks of the cities of her youth « Je te les offre/Dans la plénitude/ De leur solitude, » while Marie-Claire Blais writes, « On arriva à la ville bien vite. Julie fut bien étonnée de savoir qu’une seule montagne la séparait de cet autre pays où tout n’était pas neige et blancheur. Mais aussi, Julie sentit fondre en elle un bref sanglot de déception. Car cet autre pays n’était pas beau. Pourquoi les rues étaient-elles peupleées d’enfants aux yeux hagards? Les enfants qui grandissaient dans les villes chaudes n’étaient donc pas heureux?—Ce n’est pas bien, ta ville, dit Julie. » Even editors get involved in myth-making or revising. Louvigny de Montigny changed some details in his edition of Maria Chapdelaine. For example, he had the cows brought back into the stable only at the end of October. His explanation was that « Le climat…est déjà trop peu attirant pour qu’on le refroidisse davantage. »
The elements of religion and culture are either visibly absent or present in the countryside. Northrop Frye writes about the horror of the vastness of nature and its unconsciousness which is totally alien to human consciousness. He mentions the fear of losing one’s soul in the forest. Certainly, Samuel de Champlain did all he could to maintain an element of civility among his men as they weathered the winter, encouraging entertainments in the context of his Order of Good Cheer and literary endeavors like Marc Lescarbot’s Théâtre de Neptune, the first work of dramatic literature written and produced in North America.
Anne Langton’s journals, published under the title, A Gentlewoman in Upper Canada, mention the cold which froze the water in the basins in the house at night, the fact that she wore three pairs of socks plus moccasins to work in the house and that she did not see other human beings for months at a time. She writes about planting a tulip bulb and watching the flower bloom in a kind of symbolic statement of the victory of civilization over the wilderness. As she takes a brief break to admire the beauty of the bloom, a terrorist in the form of a squirrel hops along and grabs the blossom, dashing it to the ground, leaving only the stalk as a reminder of her efforts. Northrop Frye, wrote, possibly in reaction to this text or another, “the pioneering literature of the nineteenth century continually conveys the feeling that Canada was a kind of non-criminal penal colony, designed for remittance men and Irish housemaids.” Yet there is also a realization of one’s finiteness in an infinity of space. Land becomes time and the fear experienced by the traveler is that of human frailty, of the certainty of death as well as the realization that any philosophical system, which seems so clear in textbook cases, is written in terms of relativity or inscrutability on the face of the landscape. When his compatriots leave l’Habitation in Port-Royal to return to France, Lescarbot writes a lamentation, regretting less the fact that his colleagues are leaving than the fact he is not leaving too and that he is condemned to another winter on the barren coast of what would become Nova Scotia. Impressed, like F.P. Grove, in The Turn of the Year, with the weather—“Like a desert of barren snow is my mind, a white blank stunned into unconsciousness of all things about me”—human beings attempt to possess the landscape.
They do so by naming the countryside. In Anne Hébert’s Kamouraska, the naming of the landscape is an attempt to capture the immensity and to carve out a place for humans: « Louiseville, Saint-Hyacinthe, Saint-Nicolas, Pointe-Lévis, Saint-Michel, Montmagny…Sainte-Anne, Rivière Ouelle, Kamouraska! … Le marié brandit son fouet sur le ciel de juillet….On ne voit pas l’autre rive du fleuve. » Her prison has a name and an immensity from which she cannot escape. Gérald LeBlanc adds to the list of names the possessive pronoun as if he could thus possess not only the places but his own dreams: « ma Louisiane, mon Acadie chaude/mon Mexique, mon Québec/ma Californie, mon Bouctouche/ mon Edmunston. » Eva Kushner points out that the “tendency towards acculturation of the Other at the level of the epistemology and methodology of the human sciences …leads to a reassuring taxonomy, making the Other familiar and rationally knowable, but which may betray us because it reaps only what it sows, neutralized images of the Other.” This perhaps is the gentle land Janice Kulyk Keefer presents when she cites Joseph Howe in his Western and Eastern Rambles: Travel Sketches of Nova Scotia where he describes the “little paradise” of the land in which he sees a reflection of Europe and where he sees land to cultivate, not wilderness, wealth not poverty and joy not suffering. His writing is directly contrary to that of, say, a Georges Beignet who offers us « un tableau puissant et tragique d’un émigré [en Alberta] aux prises avec l’inflexible Nature canadienne. »
Sometimes, however, it was the land which ended up possessing the visitor. Rudy Wiebe’s The Discovery of Strangers reminds us of the futility of human efforts in a land where the elements have the power and authority of the eternal. The Franklin expedition has offered a subject which fascinated writers from Pierre Berton to Margaret Atwood. The quest for knowledge, a new passage, ended in mystery.
A noble ideal lies frozen in tundra, a perfect metaphor for Simon Schama’s work, Landscape and Memory. While the arctic cold takes lives, it preserves their trail and provides the subject for the eternal quest, the narrative for the speculative myth.
Margaret Laurence writes about Susanna Moodie, as did Margaret Atwood. Visiting the area around Kitchener/Waterloo, she reflects: “Suddenly I could see why the Group of Seven was so obsessed with trying to get it down, this incredible splendour, and why, for so long, many Canadian writers could not see the people for the trees.”
With trees like these, no wonder people felt overwhelmed. The maples stretched along ridge after ridge, with yellow poplar and speared pine for the eye’s variety, as though God had planned it this way…Later, months later, thinking of the blazing cold conflagration of the maples in the fall and the sense of history, of ancestors buried here, I thought of one of Margaret Atwood’s poems about Susanna Moodie, when that prickly, over-proud pioneer lady’s son was drowned. The last line of one poem will always haunt the mind—‘I planted him in this country like a flag.’” Perhaps we end up owning the land just as it becomes our place of final rest.
On the other hand, travelers visiting the splendors of the Canadian countryside were often inspired by the same vastness and beauty. This is the contrast between the sublime and the horrid so beloved by the Romantics. Travel writer, Jan Morris, in “Ottawa: A Half-Imaginary Metropolis,” observes from a safe distance the wonders of the Canadian wilderness. She writes, “Best of all, here and there around the capital you may see, as a white fuzz in a distant prospect, as a deafening marvel on the edge of some landscaped park, the fierce white waters—those thrilling hazards of Canada which have haunted the national imagination always, which have meant so much in the history of this wanderers’ country and which remind the stranger still, even when tamed with sightseeing bridges, picnic sites or explanatory plaques, that this is the capital of the Great Lone Land.”
Humorously, Malcolm MacRury mocks the religious experience of nature and the modern Canadian when speaking of Niagara Falls in his essay, “The Grand Tour”: “The local natives believed that thunder gods lived in the Niagara waters. Naturally, they tried to stay on good terms with them. And so do we. But our strategy is to bring in demigods like Blondin, Marilyn and Elvis to do our negotiating for us or at least to help us forget that we always live at the caprice of natural forces. And speaking of natural forces, what about this honeymoon-capital-of-the-world reputations? Aren’t the newlyweds just another response to the primal power of Niagara? A conscious or unconscious attempt to tap into the thunder god’s potency? And maybe it works.”
An evolutionary template for Canadian writing might well begin with Northrop Frye’s notation of the fear of emptiness and the desire to build forts. Houses turned their backs on the sea and the spray. Villages clustered together with a suffocating closeness. On the one hand, people sought comfort against the cold. As poet J. Macpherson sighs, “All other winters shall break against hers,/ Such fire is wedded to her frost.” The land was, as Patrick Anderson has said, ‘far greater and grander than the dreams of the pioneers.’ The wagons were metaphorically circled. It was hard for the settlers to see beyond the satisfying of their daily needs to enjoy the poetry of the sunsets.
Gargas, a simple soldier stationed at Port Royal, describes his job. He was to walk behind the wagons which unloaded barrels of supplies from the ships, picking up any precious nails which might have fallen. When every nail counts and when you are staring at the earth to find them, you might understandably miss the splendor of the sky. This is a shame, for, as Alexandre Amprimoz wrote of Windsor, « c’est le crépuscule/ qui fait le paysage. »
At the same time, the immigrants to this land experienced nostalgia for the city, for the land from which they came. This theme can be found throughout literature in general. In the 17th century, it was expressed in pastoral descriptions of a land of arcadia, of plenty, where good shepherds and shepherdesses lived in delightful innocence and comfort surrounded by their obedient flocks. This is the feeling expressed by Paquin who visits Paris and writes, « Faudra-t-il toute l’eau/Du Saint-Laurent/ Tout le vent des forêts/ Et la force du Temps/ Pour dire à Paris/ Que je t’aime! » The new land necessarily becomes, by comparison, a place of exile, a pale reflection of the splendors of the past, of elsewhere. This is the Toronto of the immigrants in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion. Nostalgia is, however, countered by urban construction, by the creation of the multicultural metropolis, itself the subject of celebration in writing by Philippe Garigue, for example « Toronto: fin de siècle…/Regroupement de gens/de tous les continents,/conglomérate de langues/religions et coutumes/de toutes civilizations,/venant de tous les horizons/et aucun n’est l’ensemble. Notre ville/est une nouvelle manière d’être/ses langues sont/pluralité/d’un seul univers/la ville-monde,/du monde lui-même.” The same can be said of Claude Tatilon who wrote, « Avec l’avenue Danforth, l’hellénique, la rue Dundas, l’asiatique, et le lusitanien marché Kensington, [le Corso Italia] est l’un des témoins les plus éloquents de la diversité torontoise…Tout le mauvais goût de la péninsule semble s’être donné rendez-vous. Et pourtant, ces quelques arpents de rue ont sur moi un effet souverain : j’y retrouve, par delà l’immensité océane, la saine joie de vivre méditérranéenne. »
This multicultural mosaic, equally celebrated and denigrated, inspired some writers like Pico Iyer to hail Canada and especially Toronto as the model metropolis of the future. Others, like Neil Bisoondath, found this formula to be a superficial bandage to more serious world problems. Of late, even John Ralston Saul has joined the ranks of the doubters, saying that globalization is a thing of the past. Perhaps he is right. It depends, of course, on one’s definition of globalization. If globalization is watching world news on CNN and buying exotic fruits in the market, then it has been replaced by the “buy local” mantra and protests about conflict in far-away places right on the Gardiner Expressway. Globalization no longer means traveling to see the world. It means dealing with the world every day in our lives, our streets, our classrooms. Unlike, Ralston Saul, however, I would see a kind of neo-globalization, a post-globalization on the horizon. It is the concept of “spread-eagling” described by Andrew Parkin in his Hong Kong poems. Canadian writers have written about their origins; have travelled to their homelands and written about their immigrant ancestors. Now, at last Canadians can stop their endless and nomadic quest for a landscape which is ever changing and a land which each re-creates in his or her own image. Now, we find Canadian writers at home around the world, having adopted new languages and cultures. They are beyond globalization. They are globalized. They see bits of Canada in Hong Kong and bits of Hong Kong in Vancouver. Here is an excerpt from Andrew Parkin’s poem, “Post Card to Happy Valley,” “A mailbox drips in the month-long rain/ and swallows this Vancouver card/ glossing empty mountains in the sun…/I miss the bamboo washing-poles…/Wish not you here, but me there./ Yes! One day this fallen maple leaf/will flutter back to Happy Valley/ and turn a Hong Kong shade of red.” Hédi Bouraoui, francophone author of Bangkok blues who resides in Toronto, becomes a world citizen. And, even without travel, Ethier-Blais describes Sturgeon Falls as a ‘city which might have served as a backdrop for Checkov.’ A few years ago, I met the Chinese-born Canadian conductor of an Eastern-European symphony orchestra. There may no longer be a static national identity. Instead of defining ourselves in contrast to the Other, and our land in contrast to Other lands (especially the USA), we may actually become a union of the first and the third person. We will combine what Todorov called pouvoir and savoir. Discovered by others, we will discover others and ourselves. This is true even in the world of mystical, metaphorical and real beasts –be they gargoyles or real elephants. We can create a new field of dialogue, a new literature, new myths for a world where nearly everyone shares discovery in the active and passive. When lands were first explored, it was for “glory, God and gold.” Later it was for curiosity and challenge, glory and various natural resources. Today curiosity remains. Along with Frye’s ghosts which continue to haunt us and an appropriate dose of self-doubt for just as we appear to be, like Margaret Atwood, “surfacing” we know there will be another wave, perhaps an economic downturn.
Pioneers and poets have both created gardens, books. Ironically, both books and gardens use precious resources and contribute to the destruction of the landscape. Both alter the landscape in the image of the author’s ideas and ideals. The land has changed as in Lesage’s utopian landscape which he created several centuries ago and located between Niagara and Ottawa by flattening some hills, altering the course of several rivers and creating a micro-climate. A fascinating process has occurred. Our landscape actually has become a palimpsest, erased by our writing, as we compose, improved by our ideals as we dream and destroyed by our doubts and errors as we burn the midnight oil. At the same time, our dreams are informed by the land or sky, which we read, according to our economic or poetic condition. As the world grows inevitably smaller, pioneers no longer have new lands to discover and alter. They must travel, like poet Wallace Stevens, to a “Description Without Place,” an imaginary land of their own creation where the mythology can be as fanciful as desired. It is a land without borders and a new beginning without end. It offers hope even to those victims of self-doubt and to those whose horizons have become entombed in the sturdy concrete of suburbia and the inevitable mall. It is, to paraphrase Porter, a kind of post-global beyond of both theory and practice.
Dr. Roseann O’Reilly Runte
President and Vice-Chancellor
