Context North America: Canadian-U.S. Literary Relations

From Adam to Multi-Ethnic Cowboy: The New History, Politics, and Geography of North America in a Canadian-American Context

From Adam to Multi-Ethnic Cowboy: The New History, Politics, and Geography of North America in a Canadian-American Context JJ. HEALY WHEN the words "Context North America" first crossed my desk, the first thing that came to mymind wasa group of twelveyear -old boys, hockey,and the border. Discussionof a topic like this invites one to break down borders that, once they are established, take on an ontological force. Passingfrom an ordinary hockeyrink in Cornwall,Ontario, to a more sumptuous but still ordinary one in Massena, NewYork, one loses the element of the ordinary at the border. There, the body registers its presence on ritual ground by a shifting uneasiness that ranges from discomfort to panic. The United States Immigration Service, to its own as well as outside eyes, becomes the Angel Gabriel guarding the Promised Land, the passage to a country whose Manifest Destiny among the nations of the earth is to be again the Eden that, in an earlier and fatal history,humankind squandered. Massena, New York, to a disenchanted Martian eye, is simply what it is: a collection of buildings and a bunch of people on flat ground, without much—apart from the name—of an echo of other Massenas in older worlds; except, of course, for an atmosphere of belief— almost, one is inclined to say in an Emersonian way, Overbelief—that pervades the aspect and the gestures of the populace. In this hockey rink, the original youthful home of Pat Lafontaine, now of Buffalo Sabres fame, then just back from an Olympic gold-medal victory for the United States over the Soviet Union, is a hometown hero who hasjust joined the great historical pantheon ofAmerican heroes, whichcould include PaulBunyan, Johnny Appleseed, Wild Bill Hickok.Joe DiMaggio.The mythological flows everywhere, shaping, sculpting emotions, beliefs, body checks, into its own image. Willie Loman walkingdown mainstreet Massena is,with appropriate adjustments, aJay Gatsbywaitingon the American Dream. 6 All of this from a border crossing with a group of youngsters from Ottawa on their way to a hockey tournament in Massena. None of them have read R.W.B. Lewis' The American Adam, but they have absorbed the notion that when they cross the border they will be in the presence of difference, caught in this sense of the word difference, in a moment of unapprehended postmodernism. Their American peers, who will be making the return journey a week later, will also, rather like the interminable rabbits of Richard Adam's Watership Down, sniff the air and feel, as young Americans ought to, an oppressive force emanating up route 401 from Kingston and Fort Henry, down route 16 from Ottawa: the musty, history-soaked, retentive anxieties of British North America. Nothing may be said. But equally miraculous absorptions have taken place; and, once again, innocence is abroad: Huck now has a hockey stick, and the hockey rink is, in a waythat is inconsistent, but under forced interpretation probably workable, the Mississippi. Both hockey teams, even at this tender age, are part of what we now call narratives of nation (Bhabha). There is the well-rehearsed, confident American master narrative; there is that series of regional and national novella accounts that, with appropriate diffidence, diffusion, and nonassertion , make up a great Canadian narrative, one that often seems to attain its most solid credentials as a counter-narrative to the American one. Canadian/American relations, literary or otherwise, boil down to a tale of two narratives. Any attempt to juggle them for comparative or contrastive purposes probably has to begin with the American one, mainly because the United States got off the ground as a nation in 1776, nearly a hundred years before the British North America Act of 1867, and in numbers and power overshadows Canada. Its self-images have been so replete and sufficient inside that power that, from the perspective of its mythos, Canada unannexed, remained an annex, an anomaly of a benign, marginal sort. Northrop Frye once noted that all societies, in the process of developing an identity, draw a magic circle of mythological language around themselves, giving them an account of who they want to be— distinctive, particular, often touched by divine approbation (Bush 35). The fascinating part of the American project of becoming the first new nation of the modern period (Lipset) was that its historical genesis took place at the high point of the Enlightenment, the genesis moment, par excellence, of modern Western history, one that connected the secular, universal ideals of...