A Rough Draft
Nov. 12th, 2003 08:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldBelow's the provisional draft for my speech tomorrow. Any comments/suggestions would be appreciated.
Good afternoon, everyone. I’m Randy McDonald, and today I’d like to present you--my audience--with an example of some of the work I’m currently working on, originally a chapter of my Honours English thesis, entitled "‘Everything from history’: Anti-Urban Radicalism and the Canadian Shield in Atwood’s Surfacing." I sincerely hope that this essay--in which I try to bring threads from disparate fields to the study of Canadian regionalist literatures, with a particular focus on Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing–in the hope of explaining some basic, if possibly underexamined, dynamics in these literatures.
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. History, too, was important, inasmuch I was interested in the ways that events in the past have shaped the present, determining the reactions of us post- moderns, whether Canadians or not, on the basis of events which happened generations or even decades ago. (In connection with the regionalist bent of this presentation, I’d like to mention the "common wisdom" prevalent in parts of Atlantic Canada that Confederation was responsible and--accordingly--the federal government was responsible for helping the region recover somewhat, even a century after the fact.)
These interests intersect in the realm of world-systems theory. 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. Wallerstein has proposed that the world as a human system is united by what he calls the "world-economy"--a global capitalist economy that is the product of the immense European expansion overseas that began in the 15th century–and is divided between prosperous "core" economies and marginal "peripheral" economies. Though the current world-system "is [. . .] a unit with a single but integrated division of labour," it possesses "multiple cultures"; unlike world-empires, which possess a political integration commensurate with their economic integration, the world-economy in which Canada has developed possesses multiple polities and cultures.
In Wallerstein’s categorization, there further exists a special category of intermediate economies (the "semiperiphery") that may rank with core economies in a particular aspect such as living standards, control over natural resources, or a large domestic market, but which are ultimately dependent upon core economies for their intermediate status. Canada is such a semiperipheral country, exporting a wide variety of staple commodities and comparatively few manufactured goods or specialized services, yet producing some manufactured exports and investing in foreign economies. Rotstein notes that "most Canadian innovations and public policies, virtually since 1840, have been imitative of the United States." More, although Canadian standards of living are well above world standards, they have consistently been below those of the United States.
This theory has no small amount of predictive power. 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? I was particularly taken by Wallerstein’s remark that, in times of crisis, the semiperiphery of the world economy was often the most innovative region in a particular 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).
In the meantime, in comes Canadian cultural/literary theory. Margaret Atwood argues in her seminal 1972 critical survey Survival that Canadian literature and its authors have been preoccupied by attempts to survive in the midst of a hostile natural environment, and more recently by a hostile American-dominated cultural environment. Canadian literature envisioned as a nationalistic striving for autonomy. Coupled with this cultural dependency upon the United States is a profound economic dependency, based on the fear that, as Richard Gwyn writes, "[a]s a peripheral northern region of the continent [ . . .] the economic and geographic logic of the marketplace will inevitably [. . .] marginalize us." Atwood’s literary theory regarding Canadian literature’s preoccupation with Canadian cultural marginality, and Wallerstein’s sociological theory explaining Canadian economic marginality find a neat summation in Northrop Frye’s statement that "Canada is today almost the only country in the world which is a pure colony, a colony psychologically as well as economically."
However, naïvely applied the theories of Atwood and Wallerstein overlook Canada’s historic regionalism. Canada was never an integrated whole, spreading slowly westward from a homogeneous base in the east; Canada evolved ad hoc out of a combination of diverse French and British settlements. "T]here was no master plan, no vision, as in New England, of Old World regeneration overseas, and next to no interaction among these somewhat adventitious French and British beginnings in the northwestern Atlantic." Harris calls the different regional settlements components of a "Canadian archipelago"--a congregation of scattered human islands, constrained from expansion by the unproductive Canadian Shield to the north and the United States to the south. "Considered overall, the archipelago was settled island by island from Europe; it did not expand westward from an Atlantic beginning." These different human islands developed independently of one another, so that on the eve of Confederation, the different colonies of British North America were disjointed. Upper and Lower Canada were connected with one another, as were the three Maritime provinces with each other. However, there were comparatively few ties linking the Canadas and the Maritimes, while British Columbia and the Prairies were entirely outside the British North American framework. A unified Canadian community did not exist before Confederation.
In light of Wallerstein’s arguments about the creative role of the semiperiphery, and in light of Atwood’s arguments about Canada as a marginalized society constantly at the fringes of greater powers forced to turn inwards, I wondered: What innovations, I wondered, did Canada’s regions develop, particularly as manifested in the growing body of Canadian literature centered, somehow, in the regions?
My original approach was to treat a individual work as a representative item of a different period and different culture in Canada’s long history. Each text 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. I expected to discover how the protagonists managed to strike some kind of a deal or emerge victorious. In fact, on closer examination I found that the protagonists and societies involved either get co-opted by the center or become marginalized, one way or another. 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 research has led me to conclude the following:
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. One can legitimately argue that the urban centres of Canada exert an influence over the remainder of the territory which could be described as "subimperial," a term used by Kuan-Hsing Chen in his study of the relationship between prosperous Taiwan and its Southeast Asian hinterlands "to refer to a lower-level empire that depends on the larger structure of imperialism." If Canada is semiperipheral to the United States, then the centres of Canadian wealth serve, in turn, as the core to Canada’s internal periphery; the Canadian core’s freedom of action might be constrained by the United States, but the Canadian core at least has the comfort of constraining its immediate periphery.
The novel Surfacing, first published in 1971, is a book set in the Canadian wilderness, specifically the boreal forest of the Canadian Shield. In Surfacing, the unnamed protagonist--I’ll echo critical convention and call her the Surfacer--goes north into the Canadian Shield with her lover and their friends, visiting her family's childhood cottage as they wait for news about the protagonist's disappeared father. Here, the Surfacer reaches a remarkable conclusion. She rejects not only Americans, but the Canadians of the urban south as lacking indigeneity here, gaining it only if they renounce their urbanity and their essential modernity, which is identical with Americanness. The south of Canada is a source of contamination; it is only by fleeing to Canada’s periphery, by searching for arcane knowledge in the mysterious north, that the protagonist can find the healing knowledge she very badly needs.
The protagonist and her three friends travel north, from the city, into the Canadian Shield, that vast rocky northern interior of Canada characterized by infertile land, dense forest cover, and harsh climate. The Canadian Shield’s population was installed as a byproduct of southern expansion, whether in relatively fertile southern regions, along major railways and highways, or in far northern mining towns. This marginality was recognized at an early date by the first explorers. By most geographers’ definitions the Canadian Shield qualifies as a peripheral hinterland, possessing an economy highly dependent upon central Canada for investment and
trade, and thinly populated by people who are both dependent upon the mass culture propagated from central Canada and disadvantaged by their physical distance from central Canadian centers. The Canadian Shield has, in relation to central Canada, much the same sort of dependent relationship that many Canadian nationalists in the 1970s saw existing between Canada and the United States. The Canadian Shield in Surfacing is Canada in exaggerated form.
As the Surfacer travels north, she sees a gradual deterioration of the surroundings, filled with environmental decay and shabby human constructions. Arriving at the village itself, past the paint-defaced cliffs lining the road, they see the lake which provided the community with its initial raison d’être at the cost of destroying any possibility for a harmonious co-existence with nature: "It's the dam that controls the lake: sixty years ago they raised the lake level so that whenever they wanted to flush the logs down the narrow outflow river to the mill they would have enough water power." Reality in this community is simulated; people migrate here only on
a temporary basis to enjoy some of the transitory pleasures of rural life, like fishing, with as many of the benefits of urban civilization alongside as possible. Surfacing’s village is devoid of any connection with the natural world that surrounds it, existing only because of the negation of the natural world. The devastation of the local ecology--the unnatural swelling of the lake, the drowning of an ancient forest--has been carried out to meet the demands of the south for resources, for recreation, in short, for central Canada’s own parochial desires, as part of a general restructuring of the entire country to serve central Canadian needs. Canada, here, is in
fact a colonial power in Atwood’s novel, the dominant city. The city’s nature is, as the French theologian and philosopher Jacques Ellul observed contemporaneously with Surfacing, that of "a parasite. She absolutely cannot live in and by herself. And this, moreover, characterizes all of those works of man by which he seeks autonomy. Everything takes its life from somewhere else, sucks it up. Like a vampire, it preys on the true living creation, alive in its connection with the Creator. The city is dead, made of dead things for dead people. She can herself neither produce nor maintain anything whatever. Anything living must come from outside."
From the village, the Surfacer with her married friends David and Anne and her lover Joe, can venture to the island cabin where her father spent his last known days. The protagonist’s three companions are all political radicals and anti-Americans. For the protagonist, her memories of her wilderness summers mingle with her mixed feelings about Americans. The belief that Americans are fundamentally predatory is echoed more strongly by Joe and David. Each man comes to see the forest wilderness as fundamentally Canadian. David suggests that the four should “‘start a colony, I mean a community up here, get it together with some other people, break away from the urban nuclear family. It wouldn’t be a bad country if only we could kick out the fucking pig Americans, eh? Then we could have some peace.’" More, the two men half-seriously suggest that, if the United States ever invaded Canada to try to secure Canadian national resources, the guerrilla movement should be based in the Canadian Shield. For David and Joe, the wilderness of the Canadian Shield assumes the same importance that Simon Schama observes in his Landscape and Memory the forests of eastern Poland enjoyed for generations of Poles during the partition,"as a naturally fortified shelter, where the [. . .] nation had begun and to which, harried on all sides, it would finally retreat." The primordial Canadian forest would shelter the guerrillas, providing a suitable base as a prelude to expelling the foreigners. For David and Joe, the Canadian Shield exists as the future incubator of the Canadian nation, as their rightful home. Despite the boasting of the two men, however, the Surfacer knows that their claims are hollow, that "if the [. . .] guerrillas were anything like David and Joe they would never make it through the winters. [. . .] The Americans wouldn‘t even have to defoliate the trees, the guerrillas would die of starvation and exposure anyway. Neither man is indigenous to the forest. Indeed, they are barely distinguishable from Americans; even David is incapable of distinguishing Canadians from Americans. Everyone here is a southerner, a foreigner. Modernity has alienated all moderns, whether American or Canadian, from the peripheral north.
The First Nations serve in Surfacing as the ideal type for a culture and a people adapted to the environment of the Canadian Shield, living in harmony with the land. Her sole recollection of the First Nations, however, relates to the final phase of their existence:
The culture of the local First Nations has passed; in its place comes the protagonist, who as an adolescent "memorized survival manuals, How To Stay Alive in the Bush, Animal Tracks and Signs, The Woods in Winter, at the age when the ones in the city were reading True Romance magazines," now a woman who feels entitled to claim an indigenous right to this, her "home ground, [their] foreign territory."
The protagonist identifies the people sent to search for her alternatively as local police, tourists of indeterminate citizenship, or David’s American invaders. She hides as she renounces language and allows the spirits of the north to communicate with her, to push her through her particular version of a spirit quest to find herself. Her epiphany communicates to her a sense that she is still fertile; rising up from the lake waters to the surface, she has been purified of her fears and anxieties, her fertility (biological and cultural) confirmed.
And yet, the Surfacer is caught by the fact that in order to communicate her epiphany to the wider world, she must return to the city. This paradox is caught by Ellul, who observes that despite the morally sterilizing effect of cities upon their populations, the city provides "the condition (by her creation of a favourable environment) for great ideological developments. [. . . I]ntellectual life cannot exist outside the city." The re volutionary potential of the peripheral Canadian Shield has been fulfilled in the protagonist; the protagonist must return to southern Canada to give birth to her child, physical proof of the new gospel.
Surfacing demonstrates the failure of Canada’s internal periphery to resist central Canada and broader modernity, both of which are often exploitative but always attractive. The parallels between the resistance to ideals of North American modernity in these outlying regions of Canada and the general resistance often identified in Canada are striking. Canadian regionalists and Canadian nationalists have both criticized how modernity has corroded primordial identities. By the time of Surfacing, the Canadian Shield, never having had the chance to develop distinctive local cultures, has become marginal; the residents of Canada’s northern frontier have begun as and remained colonials, subsisting as an inherently limited community incapable of further growth. Harris’ Canadian archipelago is finally united, but in such a way as to allow for little diversity on the parts of semiperipheral and peripheral cultures. If Canada is in fact a dependency of the United States, then it is one that fractally incorporates a large number of internal dependencies in a political/economic hierarchy strongly reflected in the cultural field.
So. Where can my thesis be extended? For starters, these insights 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. Too, 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 observe that:
You could quite conceivably take from this the very real truth that Canada is in fact a nation-state just like any other. As Eugen Weber famously observed in his Peasants into Frenchmen in the case of France, to create a nation you have to destroy potential competing nations in utero; that, it seems certain, is also the case in Canada.
Thank you.
I open the floor to questions from my readers and from my audience.
Good afternoon, everyone. I’m Randy McDonald, and today I’d like to present you--my audience--with an example of some of the work I’m currently working on, originally a chapter of my Honours English thesis, entitled "‘Everything from history’: Anti-Urban Radicalism and the Canadian Shield in Atwood’s Surfacing." I sincerely hope that this essay--in which I try to bring threads from disparate fields to the study of Canadian regionalist literatures, with a particular focus on Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing–in the hope of explaining some basic, if possibly underexamined, dynamics in these literatures.
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. History, too, was important, inasmuch I was interested in the ways that events in the past have shaped the present, determining the reactions of us post- moderns, whether Canadians or not, on the basis of events which happened generations or even decades ago. (In connection with the regionalist bent of this presentation, I’d like to mention the "common wisdom" prevalent in parts of Atlantic Canada that Confederation was responsible and--accordingly--the federal government was responsible for helping the region recover somewhat, even a century after the fact.)
These interests intersect in the realm of world-systems theory. 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. Wallerstein has proposed that the world as a human system is united by what he calls the "world-economy"--a global capitalist economy that is the product of the immense European expansion overseas that began in the 15th century–and is divided between prosperous "core" economies and marginal "peripheral" economies. Though the current world-system "is [. . .] a unit with a single but integrated division of labour," it possesses "multiple cultures"; unlike world-empires, which possess a political integration commensurate with their economic integration, the world-economy in which Canada has developed possesses multiple polities and cultures.
In Wallerstein’s categorization, there further exists a special category of intermediate economies (the "semiperiphery") that may rank with core economies in a particular aspect such as living standards, control over natural resources, or a large domestic market, but which are ultimately dependent upon core economies for their intermediate status. Canada is such a semiperipheral country, exporting a wide variety of staple commodities and comparatively few manufactured goods or specialized services, yet producing some manufactured exports and investing in foreign economies. Rotstein notes that "most Canadian innovations and public policies, virtually since 1840, have been imitative of the United States." More, although Canadian standards of living are well above world standards, they have consistently been below those of the United States.
This theory has no small amount of predictive power. 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? I was particularly taken by Wallerstein’s remark that, in times of crisis, the semiperiphery of the world economy was often the most innovative region in a particular 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).
In the meantime, in comes Canadian cultural/literary theory. Margaret Atwood argues in her seminal 1972 critical survey Survival that Canadian literature and its authors have been preoccupied by attempts to survive in the midst of a hostile natural environment, and more recently by a hostile American-dominated cultural environment. Canadian literature envisioned as a nationalistic striving for autonomy. Coupled with this cultural dependency upon the United States is a profound economic dependency, based on the fear that, as Richard Gwyn writes, "[a]s a peripheral northern region of the continent [ . . .] the economic and geographic logic of the marketplace will inevitably [. . .] marginalize us." Atwood’s literary theory regarding Canadian literature’s preoccupation with Canadian cultural marginality, and Wallerstein’s sociological theory explaining Canadian economic marginality find a neat summation in Northrop Frye’s statement that "Canada is today almost the only country in the world which is a pure colony, a colony psychologically as well as economically."
However, naïvely applied the theories of Atwood and Wallerstein overlook Canada’s historic regionalism. Canada was never an integrated whole, spreading slowly westward from a homogeneous base in the east; Canada evolved ad hoc out of a combination of diverse French and British settlements. "T]here was no master plan, no vision, as in New England, of Old World regeneration overseas, and next to no interaction among these somewhat adventitious French and British beginnings in the northwestern Atlantic." Harris calls the different regional settlements components of a "Canadian archipelago"--a congregation of scattered human islands, constrained from expansion by the unproductive Canadian Shield to the north and the United States to the south. "Considered overall, the archipelago was settled island by island from Europe; it did not expand westward from an Atlantic beginning." These different human islands developed independently of one another, so that on the eve of Confederation, the different colonies of British North America were disjointed. Upper and Lower Canada were connected with one another, as were the three Maritime provinces with each other. However, there were comparatively few ties linking the Canadas and the Maritimes, while British Columbia and the Prairies were entirely outside the British North American framework. A unified Canadian community did not exist before Confederation.
In light of Wallerstein’s arguments about the creative role of the semiperiphery, and in light of Atwood’s arguments about Canada as a marginalized society constantly at the fringes of greater powers forced to turn inwards, I wondered: What innovations, I wondered, did Canada’s regions develop, particularly as manifested in the growing body of Canadian literature centered, somehow, in the regions?
My original approach was to treat a individual work as a representative item of a different period and different culture in Canada’s long history. Each text 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. I expected to discover how the protagonists managed to strike some kind of a deal or emerge victorious. In fact, on closer examination I found that the protagonists and societies involved either get co-opted by the center or become marginalized, one way or another. 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 research has led me to conclude the following:
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. One can legitimately argue that the urban centres of Canada exert an influence over the remainder of the territory which could be described as "subimperial," a term used by Kuan-Hsing Chen in his study of the relationship between prosperous Taiwan and its Southeast Asian hinterlands "to refer to a lower-level empire that depends on the larger structure of imperialism." If Canada is semiperipheral to the United States, then the centres of Canadian wealth serve, in turn, as the core to Canada’s internal periphery; the Canadian core’s freedom of action might be constrained by the United States, but the Canadian core at least has the comfort of constraining its immediate periphery.
The novel Surfacing, first published in 1971, is a book set in the Canadian wilderness, specifically the boreal forest of the Canadian Shield. In Surfacing, the unnamed protagonist--I’ll echo critical convention and call her the Surfacer--goes north into the Canadian Shield with her lover and their friends, visiting her family's childhood cottage as they wait for news about the protagonist's disappeared father. Here, the Surfacer reaches a remarkable conclusion. She rejects not only Americans, but the Canadians of the urban south as lacking indigeneity here, gaining it only if they renounce their urbanity and their essential modernity, which is identical with Americanness. The south of Canada is a source of contamination; it is only by fleeing to Canada’s periphery, by searching for arcane knowledge in the mysterious north, that the protagonist can find the healing knowledge she very badly needs.
The protagonist and her three friends travel north, from the city, into the Canadian Shield, that vast rocky northern interior of Canada characterized by infertile land, dense forest cover, and harsh climate. The Canadian Shield’s population was installed as a byproduct of southern expansion, whether in relatively fertile southern regions, along major railways and highways, or in far northern mining towns. This marginality was recognized at an early date by the first explorers. By most geographers’ definitions the Canadian Shield qualifies as a peripheral hinterland, possessing an economy highly dependent upon central Canada for investment and
trade, and thinly populated by people who are both dependent upon the mass culture propagated from central Canada and disadvantaged by their physical distance from central Canadian centers. The Canadian Shield has, in relation to central Canada, much the same sort of dependent relationship that many Canadian nationalists in the 1970s saw existing between Canada and the United States. The Canadian Shield in Surfacing is Canada in exaggerated form.
As the Surfacer travels north, she sees a gradual deterioration of the surroundings, filled with environmental decay and shabby human constructions. Arriving at the village itself, past the paint-defaced cliffs lining the road, they see the lake which provided the community with its initial raison d’être at the cost of destroying any possibility for a harmonious co-existence with nature: "It's the dam that controls the lake: sixty years ago they raised the lake level so that whenever they wanted to flush the logs down the narrow outflow river to the mill they would have enough water power." Reality in this community is simulated; people migrate here only on
a temporary basis to enjoy some of the transitory pleasures of rural life, like fishing, with as many of the benefits of urban civilization alongside as possible. Surfacing’s village is devoid of any connection with the natural world that surrounds it, existing only because of the negation of the natural world. The devastation of the local ecology--the unnatural swelling of the lake, the drowning of an ancient forest--has been carried out to meet the demands of the south for resources, for recreation, in short, for central Canada’s own parochial desires, as part of a general restructuring of the entire country to serve central Canadian needs. Canada, here, is in
fact a colonial power in Atwood’s novel, the dominant city. The city’s nature is, as the French theologian and philosopher Jacques Ellul observed contemporaneously with Surfacing, that of "a parasite. She absolutely cannot live in and by herself. And this, moreover, characterizes all of those works of man by which he seeks autonomy. Everything takes its life from somewhere else, sucks it up. Like a vampire, it preys on the true living creation, alive in its connection with the Creator. The city is dead, made of dead things for dead people. She can herself neither produce nor maintain anything whatever. Anything living must come from outside."
From the village, the Surfacer with her married friends David and Anne and her lover Joe, can venture to the island cabin where her father spent his last known days. The protagonist’s three companions are all political radicals and anti-Americans. For the protagonist, her memories of her wilderness summers mingle with her mixed feelings about Americans. The belief that Americans are fundamentally predatory is echoed more strongly by Joe and David. Each man comes to see the forest wilderness as fundamentally Canadian. David suggests that the four should “‘start a colony, I mean a community up here, get it together with some other people, break away from the urban nuclear family. It wouldn’t be a bad country if only we could kick out the fucking pig Americans, eh? Then we could have some peace.’" More, the two men half-seriously suggest that, if the United States ever invaded Canada to try to secure Canadian national resources, the guerrilla movement should be based in the Canadian Shield. For David and Joe, the wilderness of the Canadian Shield assumes the same importance that Simon Schama observes in his Landscape and Memory the forests of eastern Poland enjoyed for generations of Poles during the partition,"as a naturally fortified shelter, where the [. . .] nation had begun and to which, harried on all sides, it would finally retreat." The primordial Canadian forest would shelter the guerrillas, providing a suitable base as a prelude to expelling the foreigners. For David and Joe, the Canadian Shield exists as the future incubator of the Canadian nation, as their rightful home. Despite the boasting of the two men, however, the Surfacer knows that their claims are hollow, that "if the [. . .] guerrillas were anything like David and Joe they would never make it through the winters. [. . .] The Americans wouldn‘t even have to defoliate the trees, the guerrillas would die of starvation and exposure anyway. Neither man is indigenous to the forest. Indeed, they are barely distinguishable from Americans; even David is incapable of distinguishing Canadians from Americans. Everyone here is a southerner, a foreigner. Modernity has alienated all moderns, whether American or Canadian, from the peripheral north.
The First Nations serve in Surfacing as the ideal type for a culture and a people adapted to the environment of the Canadian Shield, living in harmony with the land. Her sole recollection of the First Nations, however, relates to the final phase of their existence:
There weren‘t many of them on the lake even then, the government had put them somewhere, corralled them, but there was one family left. Every year they would visit the lake in blueberry season and visit the good places the same way we did, condensing as though from the air [. . . W]hen they saw that we were picking they moved on, gliding unhurried along near the shore and then disappearing around a point or into a bay as though they had never been there.
The culture of the local First Nations has passed; in its place comes the protagonist, who as an adolescent "memorized survival manuals, How To Stay Alive in the Bush, Animal Tracks and Signs, The Woods in Winter, at the age when the ones in the city were reading True Romance magazines," now a woman who feels entitled to claim an indigenous right to this, her "home ground, [their] foreign territory."
The protagonist identifies the people sent to search for her alternatively as local police, tourists of indeterminate citizenship, or David’s American invaders. She hides as she renounces language and allows the spirits of the north to communicate with her, to push her through her particular version of a spirit quest to find herself. Her epiphany communicates to her a sense that she is still fertile; rising up from the lake waters to the surface, she has been purified of her fears and anxieties, her fertility (biological and cultural) confirmed.
And yet, the Surfacer is caught by the fact that in order to communicate her epiphany to the wider world, she must return to the city. This paradox is caught by Ellul, who observes that despite the morally sterilizing effect of cities upon their populations, the city provides "the condition (by her creation of a favourable environment) for great ideological developments. [. . . I]ntellectual life cannot exist outside the city." The re volutionary potential of the peripheral Canadian Shield has been fulfilled in the protagonist; the protagonist must return to southern Canada to give birth to her child, physical proof of the new gospel.
Surfacing demonstrates the failure of Canada’s internal periphery to resist central Canada and broader modernity, both of which are often exploitative but always attractive. The parallels between the resistance to ideals of North American modernity in these outlying regions of Canada and the general resistance often identified in Canada are striking. Canadian regionalists and Canadian nationalists have both criticized how modernity has corroded primordial identities. By the time of Surfacing, the Canadian Shield, never having had the chance to develop distinctive local cultures, has become marginal; the residents of Canada’s northern frontier have begun as and remained colonials, subsisting as an inherently limited community incapable of further growth. Harris’ Canadian archipelago is finally united, but in such a way as to allow for little diversity on the parts of semiperipheral and peripheral cultures. If Canada is in fact a dependency of the United States, then it is one that fractally incorporates a large number of internal dependencies in a political/economic hierarchy strongly reflected in the cultural field.
So. Where can my thesis be extended? For starters, these insights 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. Too, 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 observe that:
[T]he willingness--or at least resignation--with which the characters [...] embrace the influence of the core and reject their native peripheral cultures to varying degrees in [...] 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 [...] 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 is in fact a nation-state just like any other. As Eugen Weber famously observed in his Peasants into Frenchmen in the case of France, to create a nation you have to destroy potential competing nations in utero; that, it seems certain, is also the case in Canada.
Thank you.
I open the floor to questions from my readers and from my audience.
