Ontario: Ours to Discover

Ours to Discover In a recent article, "Ontario Culture - and What?" which appeared in Canadian Literature's IOOth issue, James Reaney urges his readers - as he urges his graduate students at the University of Western Ontario - to see Ontario as "a big poem rather than an elusive mystery or an exercise in materialism." At first sight, Ontario may still seem to be uncongenial material, a province characterized by conservatism, puritan values, smugness, denominational quarrels, Bay Street business habits, and unimaginativeness. It remains in Reaney's words "one of the most unpopular and misunderstood Canadian provinces." But wherein lies the poem and who will write it? Ontario surely is a poem, a spatial song of multifaceted landscape, complex cultural mixture, and the layerings of many generations, especially to a poet. If that poet is one of those wonderfully sensitive creatures upon whom nothing is lost, his possibilities for expression and treatment would seem boundless. The poem, however, makes great demands. To get at "real life" in Ontario is to be in command of a vast amount of knowledge, historical, cultural, anthropological, geographic, geological, botanical, religious, philosophical. It is to be involved yet to have a distance from historical events - a distance that allows us to be less selective in our memories, less inclined to distort or manipulate in order either to feed or to starve a cliche. The struggle for a workable perspective is, of course, the aim of all serious academics and writers. We must learn to separate nostalgia and escapism from genuine interest in the past. We must learn to distinguish the facts and ideas ofOntario's heritage from the myths that have emerged to explain those facts and ideas. We need more by way of documents, more by way of acute responses to the voices that still speak to us out of their own inherent preoccupations and in their own peculiar tones. The complaint that Reaney raises about the writing of Ontario history - "there is as yet to my knowledge not a book for grown-ups that professes to give a clear account of our province's life from beginning till now" - is doubtless true for many other disciplines. As a region Ontario remains an elusive entity, not so readily definable as the prairies, the north, or Quebec. No single image of place characterizes the province. It is, to many, simply the centre, and as such, restrictive or powerful, depending on one's point of view. "Everywhere I look," writes Germaine Warkentin in Stories from Ontario, "the Ontario experience seems to me to be defined by the presence of boundaries in the midst of places intensely known, yet haunted at the same time by a continuity of experience never quite described." Native Ontarians, pressed to articulate their sense of place, culture and provincial identity, likely share with Warkentin these paradoxes of boundary and continuity, intimate knowledge and uncertain expression. Alice Munro, for whom paradox is a special gift, describes her sense of life in a typical southwestern Ontario town with particular vividness and contradictory force: "People's lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable - deep Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 20, No. t (Printemps 1985 Spring) 3 caves paved with kitchen linoleum." Our work is to fathom the paradoxes. In Christopher Dewdney's metaphor it is to sort through and celebrate the layers of culture and language upon which the Ontario present depends. This issue of the Journal ofCanadian Studies offers a range of contributions to this complex, immensely important process. From William Westfall's examination of the place of religion "near the heart of [nineteenth-century] Ontario" to Robert Lecker's clear-sighted analysis of Dewdney's intricate poetics, the issue offers studies that range and intermingle the disciplines of literature, history, philosophy and religion. The emphasis is upon seeing more clearly, upon demystification and close analysis. With some editorial licence, the issue follows Captain John Franklin to the Arctic and Gilbert Parker to Lower Canada for theirs are ways of seeing that affect our sense of Upper Canada and the way it was perceived in the nineteenth century. Each article is, as it were, a word or a line in, perhaps a footnote...