Tall Cows and Tapestries: A Perspective on the English-Canadian Canon

MARK LEVENE Tall Cows and Tapestries: A Perspective on the English-Canadian Canon There is a long and (depending on theoretical disposition) noble tradition in Canadian literary studies of pursuing patterns or syndromes. But in keeping with the aquatic psychology of so many writers in our too frozen land, the preference here is to record currents, strong currents in the fiction that eddy around origins, in family and social group, in the evolutionary home, in the historical pastl Since the focus of this paper is the centrality of origins for many of the canonical writers this century - Ross, Watson, Davies, Laurence, Richler, Atwood, Ondaatje, among others - an initial notation about my own sense of origin with the literature is appropriate. My sharpest recollection is not of a particular work or constellation of works, but of a CBe public affairs program on which Morley Callaghan would regularly appear and would discuss issues such as NATO, national economic policy, occasionally even a question about art. My dismay became more concentrated when, soon after, Iread Hugh MacLennan, who, for all his skill, had taken on the role of recording secretary to the emerging nation.2 Both instances seemed obscurely ,unnerving and decidedly unhealthy expressions of the compulsion to see literature as a mutated species of moral instruction, the writer a purveyor of public knowledge, a voice of communal understanding. Later, Northrop Frye's remark about 'the obvious and unquenchable desire of the Canadian cultural public to identify itself through its literature' (823) and, one should add, its literary figures arrived with a luminous 'shock of recognition: However culhlral emphases evolve, those complex DNA-like operations of religion, geography, patterns of settlement and law, of social and territorial expectations, the novelistic consequences have been staggering in their consistency and too often their claustrophobia. That the autonomous individual in his or her various traditional manifestations - the questing artist, the social rogue, the prophet on the loose - is regularly subordinated to the needs of a community or tribe in its manifestations as family, society, or nation is not in itself a novel observation. We find a 1 This article is a version of a paper entitled 'Postwar Fiction in Canada' which I presented at the First International Symposium in Canadian Studies, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, in November 1997. 2 See Woodcock, 45ff. Also Cameron, 172 , 253UN1VERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 67, NUMBEH 3, SUMMER 1998 THE ENGLISH-CANADIAN CANON 681 version ofit in Frye's seminal 'Conclusion' to the Literary History ofCanada, in Robin D. Mathews's essay 'The Wacousta Factor,' in Gaile McGregor's The Wacousta Syndrome, and in the lively ideological broth served up by Frank Davey in Post-National Arguments.3 What I am advancing is the ubiquity of this counter-modernist current in the texts generally located as central to the tide of fiction, largely postwar, in English and the intimate connection with the extraordinary biophiliac tendency we encounter in, for example, Margaret Atwood's Surfacing and Timothy Findley's The Wars and which Irving Layton encapsulates in his image of the swimmer who, 'stunned by lost gills ... frames gestures of self-absorption / Upon the skulllike beach' (1).4 What this article records about the fiction is first, a persistent anxiety of individuation - to the point where the Promethean figure and Thanatos are virtually indistinguishable - and the sometimes oppressive, sometimes rich claims of a community, and secondly the 'seductiveness that the wilderness or the elements extend to those who become aware of an innate need for a return, beyond self and community, to the biological home.5 In Australia and New Zealand, the 'Tall Poppy Syndrome' holds sway; individual assertion, going, growing, beyond the average or commonplace is punished in an overt expression of cultural consensus.6 But this is, one gathers, a social rather than a literary principle. In Canada, paradoxically, we have no such phrase, although the now almost mythic 'eh' may be an esophagal variation on it, but the literature is suffused with tall, and, hence, manicured poppies, except that they are tall artists, tall old women, tall seducers, tall businessmen, tall cows, and, of course, tall pine trees. The latter two are to be found in one of...