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3. Collective Memory on the Airwaves: The Negotiation of Unity and Diversity in a Troubled Canadian Nationalism
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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nated by an Anglo-Canadian sensibility until the mid-twentieth century, the literary scene broadened in the second half of the century to include other cultural heritages and points of view. Most notable have been writers of Jewish background. These include such famous literary figures as Irving Layton, Mordecai Richler, and Leonard Cohen, who have not been shy about using irony and outright satire to critique the historical and contemporary values of the founding French and Anglo-Canadian cultures. Leonard Cohen, a novelist, poet, and internationally known songwriter and performer, has actually become, among the sixties generation, a symbol of the ironic Canadian and a national hero. Cohen, who is considered to have written the first postmodern novel in Canada in Beautiful Losers, is a remarkable ironist. His popular persona, that of the romantic ladies’ man, is one that has a tongue-in-cheek quality and that offers paradoxically both a serious presentation and an ironic send-up of the romantic, brooding , melancholy lover. As well as appealing to middle-aged women across Canada with this somewhat humorous romantic fantasy, Cohen has penned ironic literary works that are broad in scope. Often serious in intent, they express his multiple identities and appeal to a number of parishes, including national, Quebec, and Jewish audiences. In this excerpt from the 1961 poem “The Only Tourist in Havana Turns His Thoughts Homeward,” Cohen playfully and ironically undermines Canadian issues and prejudices with a series of injunctions to his fellow Canadians: let us sell snow to under-developed nations, (Is it true one of our national leaders was a Roman Catholic?) let us terrorize Alaska, let us unite Church and State, let us not take it lying down, let us have two Governor Generals at the same time, let us have another official language, let us determine what it will be, let us give a Canada Council Fellowship to the most original suggestion, let us teach sex in the home to parents, let us threaten to join the u.s.a. and pull out at the last moment.25 In the poem “All There Is to Know about Adolph Eichmann” from his volume Flowers for Hitler, Jewish experience is the subject of the poem, 62 media and its (dis)contents which takes a darker ironic, postmodern turn. The irony here posits no ideals, no norms of character or behaviour. Rather, Cohen considers the Nazi Eichmann in his doubleness, as an average man and as a possible monster or madman. By questioning the latter, however, the poet overturns this possibility even as he affirms it. There are no sure answers here—only the acceptance of doubleness and ambiguity, and with it, the postmodern acceptance of the instability of human character and reality. As one might expect, irony by minority culture writers in Canada is often directed inwards, towards issues and concerns of particular multicultural or religious groups and, very often, towards immigrant realities. Typically, writers from minority culture backgrounds walk in two cultural worlds. Like Hiromi Goto in Chorus of Mushrooms, they are inclined to consider the nature of Canada and what it means to be a Canadian with an ironic eye. Co-winner of the Canada-Japan Book Award and winner of the Commonwealth Writer Prize for Best First Book in the Caribbean and Canada Region, Goto writes fiction that explores poetically and with ambiguous irony the lives of three generations of Japanese-Canadian women in southern Alberta and their responses to an environment that demands their assimilation to the dominant Anglo-Canadian and Christian culture. For the youngest woman, the Canadian-born Murasaki, irony is a defence, and for her author, a means of underlining the racial and cultural barriers of Canadian society. In this fiction, the author-ironist presents no ideals of behaviour, no absolute standards. Her open-ended conclusion, two short pages of fragments of ironic conversation entitled “An Immigrant Story with a Happy Ending,” is decidedly postmodern, her final few words metafictional and quintessentially those of the ironic Canadian: “An immigrant story with a happy ending. Nothing is impossible. Within reason, of course.”26 The Trickster: A New Comic Hero for a Postmodern Age Ironically enough for the national dream, postmodern ironic ambiguity in the Canadian arts is nowhere more dramatically expressed than in the new works of Native artists, and in the figure of the Trickster, an ancient Native concept known variously to Native tribes as Raven, Glooscap, Coyote, Nanabush, or Napi. The Trickster, a spiritual...