Notes on regionalism in modern Canadian fiction

Notes on regionalism in modern Canadian fiction ROBERT D. CHAMBERS My purpose this afternoon is to work towards a concept of regionalism in literature, using materials from Canadian novels published since the Second World War. Inevitably , my conclusions will be tentative, since the question of literary regionalism is an amorphous matter, having at least two major components: first, the individual writer's awareness of his own identity, his sense of roots; second, the common ground which the reader establishes when he encounters the particular experience of the writer. What I will thus be touching upon goes back long before anyone wrote anything about Canada, for it is in Aristotle where one finds the first critical formulation of this question of the two-fold attraction of literature, the dual appeal of the particular and the universal. My specific point of departure is a passage towards the close of Two Solitudes. As Gabrielle Roy reminds us so powerfully in The Tin Flute, Canada's involvement in the Second World War gave both the nation and her people a renewed sense of direction, a feeling of purposeful consolidation after the frustration and anger of the Depression. Here is how Hugh Maclennan catches that moment of newness: In that autumn of 1939 the countryside in Canada had never seemed more tranquil. There was golden weather. In Nova Scotia and New Brunswick the moose came out of the forests on October nights and stood in silhouette against the moonpaths that crossed solitary lakes. In Ontario people looked across the water from their old river-towns, and seeing the lights of moving cars in the United States, remembered again that they lived on a frontier that was more a link than a division. On the prairies the combines rolled Journal of Canadian Studies up the wheat, increasing the surplus in the granaries until it was hard to believe there were enough human mouths in the world to eat it all. In British Columbia the logs came down the rivers; people separated by mountains, plains and an ocean remembered English hamlets, pictured them under bombs, themselves islanded between snow-peaks and the Pacific. The Saint Lawrence, flowing past the old parishes, enfolding the lie d'Orleans and broadening out in the sweep to Tadoussac, passed in sight of forests that flamed with the autumn of 1939: scarlet of rock maples, gold of beeches, heavy green of spruce and fir. Only in the far north on the tundra was the usual process of life abruptly fractured . Prospectors hearing on their portable radios that the world they had left was at war, could stand the solitude no longer; they broke camp, walked or paddled hundreds of miles southward, were flown out by bushpilots , appeared before recruiting stations in Edmonton, Battleford, Brandon, in the nearest organized towns they could find, and faded into the army. 1 Maclennan's beautifully modulated prose gives us a striking example of one extreme notion of regionalism: that is, the attempt to see the whole country as a single geographical and psychological entity. It is hardly coincidental that such a large symbolizing impulse emerges in Canadian war novels. Was it not entirely natural for Canadian soldiers, given a momentary though Godsent respite from the horrors of war - waiting endl-essly aboard barges in English ports or anticipating dawn in Italian trenches to think back across the Atlantic towards Canada? Here, for example, is Bob O'Rourke, the central figure in Edward Meade's fine war novel Remember Me: Though he were to die upon a tank27 28 scarred field in Europe, or across a rusting wire entanglement in some forgotten wood - no matter if, or how, or where he were to die - he would return to those things which transfixed his mind, would be forever his. And what were these things? They were the things that brought back to him the whole blazing glory of his land - the vast, illimitable land, the cruel and lonely and poignant land, the land of passionate beauty, power and wealth. They brought to him a vision of a bounteous land wrested from the wilderness , built upon the bones and sinews of grizzled pathfinders, the ploughmen of the virgin earth...