National Battles: Canadian Monumental Drama and the Investiture of History

National Battles: Canadian Monumental Drama and the Investiture of History ALAN FILEWOD And we of the newer and vaster West, Where the great war-banners are furled, And commerce hurries her teeming hosts, And the cannon are silent among OUf coasts. Saxon and Gaul, Canadians claim A part in the glory and pride and aim Of the Empire [hat girdles the world,' English[-speaking] Canada is a nation by default, neither a political entity nor manifest national sentiment; more than a land but less than a country. Few would dispute that Quebec is a nation within a nation, but fewer might assert with confidence that Canada is therefore a nation surrounding a nation. The paradox in that formulation is the paradox of postcolonialism as it is manifest in Canadian experience. The prospect of an independent Quebec (and for that matter, the present reality of an independentiste Quebec) exposes "the rest of Canada" (as what used to be called "English Canada" is now commonly named in awkward but accurate journalistic practice) as a political arrangement wanting historical mission. (Canada: what was left when American republicanism transformed the larger part of colonized North America into ideology; the rest of Canada: what is left when Quebec repudiates the proposal that the rebellion of thirteen British colonies forced the condition of nationhood on the ones that were left.) The idea of historical mission is not a necessary corollary of nationhood, but nationalisms typically propose a narrative of the past that "proves" the continued existence of the nation as an imperative of history. It is possible - as the de [acto anglo-Canadian nation shows - to be a country without a myth of origins, but it may not be possible to speak of patriotism without one. The question of national sentiment is a difficult one for Canadians to grasp, in Modern Drama, 38 (1995) 71 72 ALAN FILEWOD large part because the history of the country has been one of negotiating place in or against the sentiments of more powerful countries. I want to examine this question more closely in tenns of two monumental plays, written a century apart, that memorialize, for different but converging reasons, the War of 1812. Both of these plays, Charles Mair's Tecumseh (1886)2 and Michael Hollingsworth's The History of the Vii/age of the Small Huts. Part Two: The British (1994),3 define the War of 1812 as a transformational point in the development of Canadian nationhood. In Mair's case, an ideologically over-determined imperial pageant enters a history of ironic readings to arrive as a parody of itself; in Hollingsworth's case, an ironic parody of received history reinforces the idology it purports to disrupt. Connected by a problem of irony and nationalism, the two plays raise questions about the narration of war as the historical instrument that transfonns land into nation in postcolonial practice. The literature of colonial nationalism, of which Tecumseh is exemplary and The History ofthe Village ofthe Small HulS a re-inscription, proposes the colony as an empty place, "a domain of Nature's things" as Mair put it, which is transformed into a "newer and vaster" replica of the mother country by the process of settlement and its discourse (Tecumseh, 5). Mair models this process in the passage from Tecumseh that attracted the most favourable comment from the critics of his generation, when the Byronic artist Lefroy describes his expedition to the western prairies to the British general Isaac Brock. Lefroy describes a primeval land that reveals form through his privileged gaze: We left The silent forest, and, day after day, Great prairies swept beyond our aching sight Into the measureless West; uncharted realms, Voiceless and calm, save when tempestuous wind Rolled the rank herbage into billows vast, And rushing tides which never found a shore. (Tecumseh. 91) As he charts the emptiness with the language of discovery, Lefroy erases the qualities which attract him to it., reconfiguring them as extensions of the place in which he speaks, which is itself the contested site of history. Lefroy and Brock are conversing by moonlight on the southernmost banks of Canada, across the river from the American fort at Detroit. As Brock looks...