Ice Crystals

The two books which I published in 1998, Borderlands and Land Sliding, are not under review here; I mention them to provide a frame of reference, a way to shape my own understanding of some of the most striking works that Canadian writers published between 1994 and 2000. The subtitle of Land Sliding tells what that book is about: “Imagining Space, Presence, and Power in Canadian Writing.” I suspect that the book began thirty years ago, when I was studying geomorphology rather than literature, but it came into its current focus only recently. Like many other Canadians, I had long been impatient with the barrenland snowscape cliché that Hollywood uses so often to characterize my home country, an image that Jacques Cartier coined when he mused that Labrador must be “the land God gave to Cain” and that Voltaire, in Candide, reconfirmed when he dismissed Canada as “quelques arpents de neige.” However smart these quips might be, they have little to do with most Canadians’ daily lives in the twenty-first century. And yet, because the snowscape image has been repeated so often and because Canadian culture has been so influenced by European and American assumptions, the snowscape mindset continues to exert undue power. Our problems with the mindset are several: how to counter it; how to explain it without explaining it away; how to come to terms with the way that it works and with the ways in which, in so many literary works within Canada, it has been supplanted.

Land Sliding takes the image of “land” and demonstrates that the meaning of the word “slides” over place and over time. An introductory section on “land-forms” deals with current landscape theory, discussing the means by which “land” turns from an apparently simple denotative term into a baggage-laden concept—place and space, position and situation—turns, that is, into a text that can be read. Surveying Canadian writing, the book then goes on to examine various authors who have read their world or been caught up in others’ readings of it, from the Sublime to feng shui. Separate chapters consider “land” as territoriality (the competing power codes of Contact writing), property (the interrelated codes of ownership and the picturesque: utility, productivity, profit, and gender precedence), region (the codes of home and away, political precedence and marginalization), and site. The last of these turns from...