Mordecai Richter Was Here

Point - Counterpoint: Richler's Montreal Mordecai Rich/er Was Here Like Richler's wonderful wandering Jew, Solomon Gurski, Mordecai is adept at disturbing la merde. Also like Gurski he wields his muckrake with purpose and passion . He tries to reach the cement floor of reality. Inhis New Yorkerpiece he seems not only to seeksocial reality butalso to unearth his own roots. Doing this, he expresses beyond misapprehension a poignant love of his city. Its decline gives him no joy. So intimate is his present pain and his fear for the future that I begin to wonder whether it was not his unabashed role ofMontrealer - pure Laine - thatoccasionedmanyofthehowlsof rage against his 'savage' article. To have donned the mantle in full view ofupper-crust America was too much. Indeed, the international place-of-publicationappears to bea principal catalyst in the stormofobloquy. It became necessary to denigrate the qualityof the article. Black comedy achieved new heights onCanadian television when an interviewer on Le Pointasked Richterifhe really thought that his article was quite up to New Yorkerstandards. Mordecai pausedand then struck this slow ball right out of the park: "They thought it was." Pain, not comedy, has characterized this whole messy episode. What Richler did so unforgiveably was to paint in harsh acrylics the unsophisticated personalization of a debate about communal living and racial survival. He used without restraint the devices of ridicule and sarcasm. Such weapons aredesigned to hurt. I am convinced that the barrageofmalevolence resulted from his havinghitthe mark farmore than from any conviction that his facts were spurious. As a Torontonian Ican sympathize with the amour propre that Richler so deeply offended. Inthe late 1950s, during a convivial evening in darkest Westmount, Andre Laurendeau asked me whether I visited Montreal often. I exaggerated a bit and then asked him whether he had ever visited Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 26, No. 4(Hivt!r1991-92 W"mter) Toronto. "No," he answered with a slight smile, "why should I?" And during twelve years in Winnipeg I constantly suffered much worse than Laurendeau's studied indifference . Butsurely this liesclose to the heart ofRichler'sargument. We have suffused the parlour game of I-spy-the-constitution with the language and emotions of personality. Quebec was 'insulted,' 'humiliated' during patriation and 'rejected' when Meech failed. Somethingcalled'dignity' would prevent'her' from ever talking again to Lesautres. Richler takes a hatchetto these damaging verbalconstructs and finally strikes at the holy-ofholies : to declare Quebec a distinct society would simply make "the p¥afully obvious official." It is tempting to wander offthrough the byways ofAllaire's twenty-twojurisdictions and all the ancillarynationaliste-sovereigniste accoutrements; but this would beto trivialize Richter's cri-de-coeur. After all, much of what he was on about in theNew Yorker had already happened. What he fears about the future, like what he sees around him in the present, has little to do with further devolution ofpower from Ottawa to Quebec City. Bills 101 and 178 arrived without benefit of major devolution - unless the notwithstanding clause be considered such. So Richler concerns himselfwith mentalitefar more than with law. Laws became pegsofreference on which to hang his ridicule, his dismay, his fear. Perhaps his least forgiveable transgression was to illuminate his documentwith quotations from that brooding bete-noir, P.E.T. Richter, in fact, depicted a society with features sooftendiscerned and denigrated by Trudeau: inward-looking, tribal and maybe worse. While anti-semitism is a prominent aspect of Richter's perturbation, it is by no means the only or the most importantone. It is significant principally because it underlines thecentrality ofrace in nationaliste thinking. On both these points I think Richler cannotbe seriously faulted. And, clearly, languageand education laws provide a kind of umbrellacum -catalyst for the BigBrotheractivities of teachers in the playground, languagebureaucrats , and vigilantes in the streets. Itcan be, and has been, said that Richler 141 dwelt only upon the extremes, and that the rest-of-Canada sports also its unilingual crazies, its thinly-veiled neo-Nazis, and a lingering subterranean anti-semitism. But race as the criterion of full citizenship does not, elsewhere in the country, enjoy the underpinning ofofficial ideology. Asgovernmental policy, multiculturalism is flawed; as a desirable alternative to...