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ROSEANN RUNTE Reading Stones: Travels to and in Canada Whether perambulating authors set out to write travelogues, to describe their visits to Canada as part of secret spying missions (surveying the cod stocks as long ago as the seventeenth century), to write novels or romances set in the Canadian wilderness, to compose letters, not only for the edification of those left behind but to create an epistolary bridge linking the writer to the reader and the very surroundings the author has escaped or lost, or to write poetry, all share the desire for discovery. All share the realities ofinstability and seek to render permanent their impressions. This is as true today as it was several centuries ago. As Northrop Frye writes/The feeling ofnomadic movement over great distances persists even into the age of the aeroplane.,1 Furthermore, as Dennis Porter has noted, despite the fact that Claude Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques declares the end oftravel, travel writing continues today. Currentcritics likeJacques Derrida still wax eloquent over voyages, such as that of Bougamville in the eighteenth century. Others, including Roland Barthes, attempt, in their own travels and in their resulting writings, to 'go beyond essentialism in the European relation to otherness through a practice of "writing" which was intransitive.,2 However, while their writing is intentionally intransitive, it is inevitably subjective. Barthes's erotic reading of a Japanese meal, while going beyond the typical European discovery of and reaction to difference, still defines difference with regard to self and interprets these signs according to the only codes accessible to the writer, that is, his own cultural background. To varying degrees, this is the reaction of the travellers, early and late, who 'discovered' Canada. Northrop Frye notes that the horror ofnature, its unconsciousness totally alien to human consciousness,3 prompts a fort mentality, a state of mind in which the individual escapes the spectacle of a country without the 'monuments or landmarks to guide the stranger,' rued by Douglas Le Pan in his poem 'A Country without a Mythology.,4 Maritime communities were built with their backs turned to the sea and even today we find corroborating evidence of this reaction in Malcolm MacRury, who in his essay 'The Grand Toue visits not the Falls but the wax museum when he stops by Niagara Falls. MacRury writes: UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 65, NUMBER 3, SUMMER 1996 524 ROSEANN RUNTE 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 honeymooncapital -of-the-world reputation? 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. Maybe that's why everywhere you go in Niagara Falls you see neon signs at no-tell motels advertising 'Waterbeds, Jacuzzis, Honeymoon Suites!' and then in much bigger letters Wldemeath, 'Welcome Seniors.' Makes you think.s Another example is offered by Jan Morris in 'Ottawa: A Half-Imaginary Metropolis,' where she first notes, along with volumes of other useful information, that Ottawa mints the coins of Papua New Guinea and then observes, from a safe distance, the wonders of the Canadian wild. She enthuses: 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 ofsome landscaped park, the fierce white waters - those thrilling hazards of Canada which have haW1ted the national imagination always, which have meant so much in the history of this wanderers' COWltry, 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.6 This is indeed the romantic view of nature which remains, to this day, unsuppressed , despite the visible incursion ofeconomic development and the spoils of civilization...

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