Latitude Rising: Historical Continuity in Canadian Nordicity

Point-Counterpoint: The Idea ofNorth "Point-Counterpoint" for this quarter includes two pieces on the North and the idea of North. David Heinimann's paper was given at the "Aux Canadas" conference in honour of Philip Stratford, who was at one time a member of this journal's editorial board. John Moss's autobiographical essay is part of a larger work on the North, Enduring Dreams: An Exploration of Arctic Landscape. Both studies challenge our perceptions of what is "North" and the ways in which we engage in those very perceptions. Latitude Rising: Historical Continuity in Canadian Nordicity M.A.P. Hugh MacLennan's Barometer Rising, George Woodcock wrote, concerns a Homeric "wanderer returning to a mysteriously changed homeland."1 Anyone who wanders through the conflicting conceptions of Canada's North cannot help but feel a similar change. It has changed its latitude: from the country as a whole as North to the country having a distinct North. But has it changed its attitude? Think of the question in terms of holding a compass. All directions are somewhere beyond us. We are at the centre. If we call where we are "North," we put ourselves where we are not - we decentre ourselves. False knowledge results about both where we are and where we say we are, a fugue whose full effects are still to be seen. The country-as-North began at Confederation, with R.G. Haliburton's patriotic essay "On Northern Culture"; it continued steadily to John Sutherland's nationalist journal Northern Review and Donald Creighton's studies. In our time, John Diefenbaker heralded the full vision in his 1958 campaign: "a new Canada - a 134 Canada of the North." While Edmund Wilson reminisced that Canada was "the 'North Woods' - of upstate New York," Malcolm Ross told us we were more than "northern Yankees," and W.L. Morton asserted that a "northern character" was one of the "four permanent factors" in Canadian history. Cole Harris argued that our "northern character and destiny" bound us, somewhat Prometheus-like, to the Precambrian Shield, while Mordecai Richler introduced his own mythology, calling Canada the "white, Protestant, heterosexual ghetto of the north." Northrop Frye discussed the "north as symbol" in Canadian writing, and Eli Mandel approved it. Frye also said that irony and tragedy dominate Canadian poetry, a view that corresponded nicely with the section in Anatomy of Criticism called "The Mythos of Winter: Irony and Satire," even if Frye ignored Canadian literature. It corresponds entirely if we include W.L. Morton's belief that "northern life is moral or puritanical" and creates a "disposition for satire." Oddly, E.D. Blodgett agrees with Frye that "pastoralism predominates in Canadian literature," but he still entitles the relevant chapter "Cold Pastorals." How, then, do we take F.K. Hare's dissent, that "Canadians have not, as a nation, put the North anywhere near the centre of their mythology," or Rudy Wiebe's regret that "Canadians have so little comprehension of our own nordicity"? Part of our national mythology is the climatic and temperamental difference between Victoria, Montreal, and Tuktoyaktuk. Or are we just a series of similarly frozen blocks, as Philip Stratford teased when he said that "whereas the United States is a 'melting pot' Canada is 'a tray of ice cubes'"?2 Our mythology is regionalism. Here we move into the second, conflicting sense of northernness: the North-of-country. We find disagreement - but, surprisingly, little commentary - over the location of Canada's North. Lack of consensus may result from its corollary topic of the Northas -frontier, which is itself a shifty concern. Even William Westfall, in his landmark Revue d' etudes canadiennes Vol. 28, No. 3 (Automne 1993 Fall) essay on Canadian regionalism, lets the location slip like an ice cube from his grasp; his deconstruction of the "metaphor of a northern land" into regions - "Atlantic, Central, Prairie, and Pacific" drops the North as region entirely. Has it fallen into the snow of Gilles Vigneault's pays - "[' hiver" - or the Canada that, as Robert Kroetsch chuffs, "is as timeless as winter"? George Woodcock skips over it in his Northern Spring: The Flowering of Canadian Literature, which is informed by Canadian nationalism and the...