Latitude Rising: Historical Continuity in Canadian Nordicity

Abstract

Hugh MacLennan's Barometer Rising, George Woodcock wrote, concerns Homeric wanderer returning to mysteriously changed homeland. (f.1) Anyone who wanders through conflicting conceptions of Canada's North cannot help but feel similar change. It has changed its latitude: from country as whole as North to country having distinct But has it changed its attitude? Think of question in terms of holding compass. All directions are somewhere beyond us. We are at centre. If we call where we are North, we put ourselves where we are not - we decentre ourselves. False knowledge results about both where we are and where we say we are, fugue whose full effects are still to be seen.The country-as-North began at Confederation, with R.G. Haliburton's patriotic essay On Northern Culture; it continued steadily to John Sutherland's nationalist journal Northern Review and Donald Creighton's studies. In our time, John Diefenbaker heralded full vision in his 1958 campaign: a new Canada - Canada of North. While Edmund Wilson reminisced that Canada was the 'North Woods' - of upstate New York, Malcolm Ross told us we were more than Yankees, and W.L. Morton asserted that was one of four permanent factors in Canadian history. Cole Harris argued that our character and destiny bound us, somewhat Prometheus-like, to Precambrian Shield, while Mordecai Richler introduced his own calling Canada white, Protestant, heterosexual ghetto of north. Northrop Frye discussed north as symbol in Canadian writing, and Eli Mandel approved it. Frye also said that irony and tragedy dominate Canadian poetry, view that corresponded nicely with section in Anatomy of Criticism called Mythos of Winter: Irony and Satire, even if Frye ignored Canadian literature. It corresponds entirely if we include W.L. Morton's belief that life moral or puritanical and creates disposition for satire. Oddly, E.D. Blodgett agrees with Frye that pastoralism predominates in Canadian literature, but he still entitles relevant chapter Cold Pastorals. How, then, do we take F.K. Hare's dissent, that Canadians have not, as nation, put North anywhere near centre of their mythology, or Rudy Wiebe's regret that Canadians have so little comprehension of our own nordicity? Part of our national mythology climatic and temperamental difference between Victoria, Montreal, and Tuktoyaktuk. Or are we just series of similarly frozen blocks, as Philip Stratford teased when he said that whereas United States 'melting pot' Canada 'a tray of ice cubes'? (f.2)Our mythology Here we move into second, conflicting sense of northernness: North-of-country. We find disagreement - but, surprisingly, little commentary - over location of Canada's Lack of consensus may result from its corollary topic of North-as-frontier, which itself shifty concern. Even William Westfall, in his landmark essay on Canadian regionalism, lets location slip like an ice cube from his grasp; his deconstruction of metaphor of northern land into regions - Atlantic, Central, Prairie, and Pacific - drops North as region entirely. Has it fallen into snow of Gilles Vigneault's pays - l'hiver - or Canada that, as Robert Kroetsch chuffs, is as timeless as winter? George Woodcock skips over it in his Northern Spring: The Flowering of Canadian Literature, which informed by Canadian nationalism and related phenomenon of regionalism. Has North fallen down shaft of The Northern Miner, trade journal published in Don Mills, Ontario? Will light from Penumbra Press, Northern Publisher, as it likes to be known, of Moonbeam but mainly Waterloo, help us find it? Will we finally have to concede that North too slippery an entity, one that we can only hope to catch glimpses of in Northward Journal, periodical which serves northern arts from Kapuskasing base but also receives mail in downtown Toronto? …