My Presentation Speech
Apr. 8th, 2003 01:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldPresentation Speech
Exiles from the Centre:
The Failed Visions of Peripheral Canada in Ringuet’s Thirty Acres, Hugh MacLennan’s Barometer Rising, and Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing
Presented by Randy McDonald, 10 April 2003 at 10 A.M.
Good morning, everyone. I'm Randy McDonald, and today I'd like to give you–my audience–a brief overview of my Honours English thesis, entitled "Exiles from the Centre: The Failed Visions of Peripheral Canada in Ringuet's Thirty Acres, Hugh MacLennan's Barometer Rising, and Margaret Atwood's Surfacing." This essay represents, you could say, the pinnacle of my achievements: including the preliminary research, kindly conducted under the tutelage of Dr. Terry Pratt in his Bibliographic Research in English class, I've spent almost three years at work on my Honours English thesis. I sincerely hope that this essay–in which I try to bring threads from disparate fields to the study of Canadian regional literatures in the hope of explaining some common dynamics in these literatures–is worth the effort.
My thesis developed as a result of my interests in a broad variety of disciplines, not only the study of literature (although that certainly was an important factor!). I've always been interested in geography, for instance: even as a small child, maps and the lands that they depicted interested me, but as I matured I became interested in how the "lay of the land" determined the fate of entire societies. Learning how the St. Lawrence drew the few French colonists of New France deep into the North American interior, for instance, helped me understand not only why the French colonists were so quick to enter into relatively equal partnerships with native peoples, but why there was such a vast geographic dispersal of French Canadian communities–even in distant Missouri, one community maintained French as a living language until the 1930s. It helped me understand how Atlantic Canada evolved into a patchwork of ethnic settlements, as different colonizers implanted different populations at different times on different areas of Atlantic Canada's landmass thanks to the vast Atlantic Canadian coastline.
My interest in history, too, was important, since I was interested in the ways that events in the past have shaped the present, determining the reactions of us post-moderns on the basis of events which happened generations or even decades ago. In Canada, for instance, the War of 1812 was cited by Canadian nationalists in the 1970s and 1980s as the event that forged Canadian nationhood and incidentally was proof of continuing American ambitions towards Canada (as evidenced most recently by free trade agreements). And we, residents of Atlantic Canada, are surely aware that our region's post-Confederation economic slump made many Atlantic Canadians believe that Confederation was responsible and–accordingly–the federal government was responsible for helping us get back on our feet, even a century later.
Last year, I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, with a major in English naturally. My other major, however, was Anthropology, and that noble discipline was also an influence. Looking over historical records, I was struck on repeated occasions how little life in the Canada of 1900, or 1850, or 1800 resemble modern Canadian life; how the Canadians of the past led quite different lives from their descendants and bore much more in common with the peoples of the modern Third World. Unfortunately, the passage of time has made it impossible for anthropologists to interview the Huron just before their annihilation by the Iroquois, or to study how Gaelic-speaking settlers from Scotland built their communities out of wilderness in places as far apart as Nova Scotia and Manitoba..
My interest in mythology and folklore has also played an important role in my intellectual formation: The stories passed down from one generation to another can reflect collective experiences and true history can be extracted from these stories, as anthropologists and oral historians doing fieldwork are well aware.
World-systems theory also interested me. Briefly put, world-systems theory is a historical school created by the American social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein, combining the broad scope and concentration on long-term trends of the Annales school with a Marxist philosophical bent. This theory argues that since the creation of a world economy in the early modern era, the states of the world have been divided into three categories: core states, which are prosperous and have access to the latest technologies and the dominant military power; peripheral states, which are quite poor and decidedly not modern; and, the fluid and dynamic categories of semiperiphery, comprising those states which have some wealth and which have some technology and which are located above the periphery but which are far from enjoying equality with core states.
It was then that I thought of Canada. Isn't it almost a truism that Canada might be a wonderful place to live, but that it has always been on the fringes of successive empires and other assorted hegemonies–French, British, American? Hasn't Canada, in fact, developed as a patchwork of territories which were somewhat improbably sewn together by Confederation over a generation? I was particularly taken by Wallerstein's remark that, in times of crisis, the semiperiphery of the world economy was often the most innovative era–in the 1920s and 1930s, for instance, there were the Mexican, Russian, and Chinese revolutions and the Spanish civil war, there were colonial movements for freedom in India and South Africa and Korea, there were–fostered by previous decades' immigrants–new innovations in art (Cubism) and literature (modernism) and design (Bauhaus). What innovations, I wondered, did Canada's regional develop?
My original approach was to take selected works of Canadian literature are anthropological texts–to treat each individual work as a representative item of a different period and different culture in Canada's long history. Each book would be examined thematically, to determine how each novel's protagonists defined themselves and their regions in a broader North American context, challenging dominant North American norms from their peripheral positions. I later used the fact of Canada's historic regionalism–its patchwork history–to broaden the context of the themes being studied–not only would I examine each book in relationship to the United States, but I decided that I would also examine them from the perspective of internal power relations in Canada, mainly how they defined themselves vis-á-vis a rich central Canada (read: Ontario and Montréal).
I selected three different titles. First was Thirty Acres, written in French by Ringuet–the pen name of Canadian diplomat Philippe Panneton–but translated into English in 1940, a written when French Canada was moving to urban modernity and covering a broad sweep of time from the 1870s to the 1930s. Hugh MacLennan's Barometer Rising was next, with its action set in 1917 in the Nova Scotia of the First World War. Finally, Margaret Atwood's 1972 novel Surfacing was picked, since not only is it a canonical element of Canadian literature but it is a book that deeply examines the relationship of modern-day Canadians–urbanized, industrialized, placed in a mass society–with their northern frontier and with nature.
I expected to discover, in each of these three novels, how the protagonists managed to strike some kind of a deal or emerge victorious. In fact, however, on closer examination, in each of these novels, the protagonists and societies involved–the peasant farmer Euchariste Moisan and his rural French Canada in Thirty Acres, Neil Macrae, Penelope Wain, and other Nova Scotians in Barometer Rising, and the Surfacer and her friends in Surfacing–either get co-opted by the center or become marginalized. It does not matter whether the centre is located inside or outside Canada; what matters is that a host of cultures, each with their own potential for growth, were utterly marginalized. So, I had to change my thesis.
My essay's current argument, briefly summarized, works as follows:
Canadian literature and Canadian society is not a unity by any means; quite apart from the "French fact", there are numerous other particularisms (those of Nova Scotia and Atlantic Canada, for instance) which were marginalized by Canada's gradual development as an integrated whole after Confederation. This marginalization accelerated in the early 20th century, as Canada became a modern integrated state marked by urbanization, industrialization, and mass culture; older and more conservative cultures in regions themselves not particularly modern were overwhelmed, if not in form then in substance. In Thirty Acres, for instance, Euchariste Moisan and French Canadian society put up a valiant fight to retain their distinctive agrarian lifestyle, organized around the principles of rural living, folk tradition, and the Catholic Church. This culture, and Euchariste Moisan himself, persisted as late as they did (to the end of the First World War) only because outside conditions (high farm prices, particularly) allowed them to persist; when things changed, both the society and the protagonist fell. In Barometer Rising, Neil Macrae, his peers and relatives, and Nova Scotia as a whole live in a disjointed environment. Nova Scotia is not a unitary entity by any means; the Halifax of the Wains (Macrae's Anglophile maternal relatives) remains at least notionally attached to the idea of an integrated British Empire, while the Gaelic Cape Breton of Macrae's friends and peers remains defiantly distinct. In the end, all Nova Scotia is assimilated by a new modernity forced by the First World War; the Halifax of the Wains is better positioned (by virtue of its earlier integration with the outside world, even on the basis of a mistaken understanding) to survive than Gaelic Cape Breton, which swiftly declines. Finally, in Surfacing, the unnamed protagonist–I'll call her the Surfacer–goes north into the Canadian Shield with her lover and their friends, visiting her family's childhood lake cottage as they wait for news about the protagonist's disappeared father. She becomes progressively more alienated from human civilization; that which she sees on the Canadian Shield is not indigenous by any means but is only an outpost, an offshoot with limited potential for growth, while the Canada which she left (a southern urban entity) is as decadent as any imported American corruption. She renounces, in a religious-type epiphany, all civilization, only to return to the city in the belief that it can be redeemed.
So. Where can my thesis be extended? For starters, my approach can be applied to the study of other Canadian regionalisms (in the Prairies, in British Columbia, in the north), and–with suitable adaptation–to other submerged regionalisms elsewhere in the world, literary or otherwise. My success here also raises serious questions about the applicability of the whole concept of a unitary Canada (or even a unitary English Canada) as manifested in literature or other cultural forms. English Canada is, at least internally, no less of an empire than Britain or the United States; acting from a central Canadian core, outlying areas of Canada with their own distinct aspirations have been assimilated. In my essay's conclusion, I make this observation:
You could quite conceivably take from this the very real truth that Canada isn't a nation distinct from others, that Canada is–in fact–a nation-state just like any others. As Eugen Weber observed in his Peasants into Frenchmen in the case of France, to create a nation you have to destroy potential competing nations in utero; and that, it seems certain from the literary and the other evidence I've presented today and in my thesis, is certainly the case in Canada.
Thank you.
I open the floor to questions from my readers and from my audience.
Exiles from the Centre:
The Failed Visions of Peripheral Canada in Ringuet’s Thirty Acres, Hugh MacLennan’s Barometer Rising, and Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing
Presented by Randy McDonald, 10 April 2003 at 10 A.M.
Good morning, everyone. I'm Randy McDonald, and today I'd like to give you–my audience–a brief overview of my Honours English thesis, entitled "Exiles from the Centre: The Failed Visions of Peripheral Canada in Ringuet's Thirty Acres, Hugh MacLennan's Barometer Rising, and Margaret Atwood's Surfacing." This essay represents, you could say, the pinnacle of my achievements: including the preliminary research, kindly conducted under the tutelage of Dr. Terry Pratt in his Bibliographic Research in English class, I've spent almost three years at work on my Honours English thesis. I sincerely hope that this essay–in which I try to bring threads from disparate fields to the study of Canadian regional literatures in the hope of explaining some common dynamics in these literatures–is worth the effort.
My thesis developed as a result of my interests in a broad variety of disciplines, not only the study of literature (although that certainly was an important factor!). I've always been interested in geography, for instance: even as a small child, maps and the lands that they depicted interested me, but as I matured I became interested in how the "lay of the land" determined the fate of entire societies. Learning how the St. Lawrence drew the few French colonists of New France deep into the North American interior, for instance, helped me understand not only why the French colonists were so quick to enter into relatively equal partnerships with native peoples, but why there was such a vast geographic dispersal of French Canadian communities–even in distant Missouri, one community maintained French as a living language until the 1930s. It helped me understand how Atlantic Canada evolved into a patchwork of ethnic settlements, as different colonizers implanted different populations at different times on different areas of Atlantic Canada's landmass thanks to the vast Atlantic Canadian coastline.
My interest in history, too, was important, since I was interested in the ways that events in the past have shaped the present, determining the reactions of us post-moderns on the basis of events which happened generations or even decades ago. In Canada, for instance, the War of 1812 was cited by Canadian nationalists in the 1970s and 1980s as the event that forged Canadian nationhood and incidentally was proof of continuing American ambitions towards Canada (as evidenced most recently by free trade agreements). And we, residents of Atlantic Canada, are surely aware that our region's post-Confederation economic slump made many Atlantic Canadians believe that Confederation was responsible and–accordingly–the federal government was responsible for helping us get back on our feet, even a century later.
Last year, I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, with a major in English naturally. My other major, however, was Anthropology, and that noble discipline was also an influence. Looking over historical records, I was struck on repeated occasions how little life in the Canada of 1900, or 1850, or 1800 resemble modern Canadian life; how the Canadians of the past led quite different lives from their descendants and bore much more in common with the peoples of the modern Third World. Unfortunately, the passage of time has made it impossible for anthropologists to interview the Huron just before their annihilation by the Iroquois, or to study how Gaelic-speaking settlers from Scotland built their communities out of wilderness in places as far apart as Nova Scotia and Manitoba..
My interest in mythology and folklore has also played an important role in my intellectual formation: The stories passed down from one generation to another can reflect collective experiences and true history can be extracted from these stories, as anthropologists and oral historians doing fieldwork are well aware.
World-systems theory also interested me. Briefly put, world-systems theory is a historical school created by the American social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein, combining the broad scope and concentration on long-term trends of the Annales school with a Marxist philosophical bent. This theory argues that since the creation of a world economy in the early modern era, the states of the world have been divided into three categories: core states, which are prosperous and have access to the latest technologies and the dominant military power; peripheral states, which are quite poor and decidedly not modern; and, the fluid and dynamic categories of semiperiphery, comprising those states which have some wealth and which have some technology and which are located above the periphery but which are far from enjoying equality with core states.
It was then that I thought of Canada. Isn't it almost a truism that Canada might be a wonderful place to live, but that it has always been on the fringes of successive empires and other assorted hegemonies–French, British, American? Hasn't Canada, in fact, developed as a patchwork of territories which were somewhat improbably sewn together by Confederation over a generation? I was particularly taken by Wallerstein's remark that, in times of crisis, the semiperiphery of the world economy was often the most innovative era–in the 1920s and 1930s, for instance, there were the Mexican, Russian, and Chinese revolutions and the Spanish civil war, there were colonial movements for freedom in India and South Africa and Korea, there were–fostered by previous decades' immigrants–new innovations in art (Cubism) and literature (modernism) and design (Bauhaus). What innovations, I wondered, did Canada's regional develop?
My original approach was to take selected works of Canadian literature are anthropological texts–to treat each individual work as a representative item of a different period and different culture in Canada's long history. Each book would be examined thematically, to determine how each novel's protagonists defined themselves and their regions in a broader North American context, challenging dominant North American norms from their peripheral positions. I later used the fact of Canada's historic regionalism–its patchwork history–to broaden the context of the themes being studied–not only would I examine each book in relationship to the United States, but I decided that I would also examine them from the perspective of internal power relations in Canada, mainly how they defined themselves vis-á-vis a rich central Canada (read: Ontario and Montréal).
I selected three different titles. First was Thirty Acres, written in French by Ringuet–the pen name of Canadian diplomat Philippe Panneton–but translated into English in 1940, a written when French Canada was moving to urban modernity and covering a broad sweep of time from the 1870s to the 1930s. Hugh MacLennan's Barometer Rising was next, with its action set in 1917 in the Nova Scotia of the First World War. Finally, Margaret Atwood's 1972 novel Surfacing was picked, since not only is it a canonical element of Canadian literature but it is a book that deeply examines the relationship of modern-day Canadians–urbanized, industrialized, placed in a mass society–with their northern frontier and with nature.
I expected to discover, in each of these three novels, how the protagonists managed to strike some kind of a deal or emerge victorious. In fact, however, on closer examination, in each of these novels, the protagonists and societies involved–the peasant farmer Euchariste Moisan and his rural French Canada in Thirty Acres, Neil Macrae, Penelope Wain, and other Nova Scotians in Barometer Rising, and the Surfacer and her friends in Surfacing–either get co-opted by the center or become marginalized. It does not matter whether the centre is located inside or outside Canada; what matters is that a host of cultures, each with their own potential for growth, were utterly marginalized. So, I had to change my thesis.
My essay's current argument, briefly summarized, works as follows:
Canadian literature and Canadian society is not a unity by any means; quite apart from the "French fact", there are numerous other particularisms (those of Nova Scotia and Atlantic Canada, for instance) which were marginalized by Canada's gradual development as an integrated whole after Confederation. This marginalization accelerated in the early 20th century, as Canada became a modern integrated state marked by urbanization, industrialization, and mass culture; older and more conservative cultures in regions themselves not particularly modern were overwhelmed, if not in form then in substance. In Thirty Acres, for instance, Euchariste Moisan and French Canadian society put up a valiant fight to retain their distinctive agrarian lifestyle, organized around the principles of rural living, folk tradition, and the Catholic Church. This culture, and Euchariste Moisan himself, persisted as late as they did (to the end of the First World War) only because outside conditions (high farm prices, particularly) allowed them to persist; when things changed, both the society and the protagonist fell. In Barometer Rising, Neil Macrae, his peers and relatives, and Nova Scotia as a whole live in a disjointed environment. Nova Scotia is not a unitary entity by any means; the Halifax of the Wains (Macrae's Anglophile maternal relatives) remains at least notionally attached to the idea of an integrated British Empire, while the Gaelic Cape Breton of Macrae's friends and peers remains defiantly distinct. In the end, all Nova Scotia is assimilated by a new modernity forced by the First World War; the Halifax of the Wains is better positioned (by virtue of its earlier integration with the outside world, even on the basis of a mistaken understanding) to survive than Gaelic Cape Breton, which swiftly declines. Finally, in Surfacing, the unnamed protagonist–I'll call her the Surfacer–goes north into the Canadian Shield with her lover and their friends, visiting her family's childhood lake cottage as they wait for news about the protagonist's disappeared father. She becomes progressively more alienated from human civilization; that which she sees on the Canadian Shield is not indigenous by any means but is only an outpost, an offshoot with limited potential for growth, while the Canada which she left (a southern urban entity) is as decadent as any imported American corruption. She renounces, in a religious-type epiphany, all civilization, only to return to the city in the belief that it can be redeemed.
So. Where can my thesis be extended? For starters, my approach can be applied to the study of other Canadian regionalisms (in the Prairies, in British Columbia, in the north), and–with suitable adaptation–to other submerged regionalisms elsewhere in the world, literary or otherwise. My success here also raises serious questions about the applicability of the whole concept of a unitary Canada (or even a unitary English Canada) as manifested in literature or other cultural forms. English Canada is, at least internally, no less of an empire than Britain or the United States; acting from a central Canadian core, outlying areas of Canada with their own distinct aspirations have been assimilated. In my essay's conclusion, I make this observation:
[T]he willingness–or at least resignation–with which the characters in these three novels embrace the influence of the core and reject their native peripheral cultures to varying degrees in Thirty Acres, Barometer Rising, and even Surfacing has implications for the study of Canadian literature. Canadians, in fact, may not be passive victims who are Americanized against their will, but instead, they might actively accept American influence as a more exciting and entertaining alternative to their own stultifying ways. Proponents of a distinct Candian identity (in literature and elsewhere) might not be adovcating a viable alternative, instead (like the clerical-nationalist elite in the French Canada of Thirty Acres, Geoffrey Wain in Barometer Rising, and Joe and David in Surfacing) simply favouring a reactionary non-response to a modernity that happens to be represented most strongly in North America by Canada's traditional foil.
You could quite conceivably take from this the very real truth that Canada isn't a nation distinct from others, that Canada is–in fact–a nation-state just like any others. As Eugen Weber observed in his Peasants into Frenchmen in the case of France, to create a nation you have to destroy potential competing nations in utero; and that, it seems certain from the literary and the other evidence I've presented today and in my thesis, is certainly the case in Canada.
Thank you.
I open the floor to questions from my readers and from my audience.
