Tall Cows and Tapestries: A Perspective on the English-Canadian Canon

Abstract

There is a long and (depending on theoretical disposition) noble tradition in Canadian literary studies of pursuing patterns or syndromes. But in keeping with the aquatic psychology of so many writers in our too frozen land, the preference here is to record currents, strong currents in the fiction that eddy around origins, in family and social group, in the evolutionary home, in the historical past. Since the focus of this paper is the centrality of origins for many of the canonical writers this century — Ross, Watson, Davies, Laurence, Richler, Atwood, Ondaatje, among others — an initial notation about my own sense of origin with the literature is appropriate. My sharpest recollection is not of a particular work or constellation of works, but of a cbc public affairs program on which Morley Callaghan would regularly appear and would discuss issues such as nato, national economic policy, occasionally even a question about art.My dismay became more concentrated when, soon after, I read Hugh MacLennan, who, for all his skill, had taken on the role of recording secretary to the emerging nation. Both instances seemed obscurely unnerving and decidedly unhealthy expressions of the compulsion to see literature as a mutated species of moral instruction, the writer a purveyor of public knowledge, a voice of communal understanding. Later, Northrop Frye's remark about `the obvious and unquenchable desire of the Canadian cultural public to identify itself through its literature' (823) and, one should add, its literary figures arrived with a luminous `shock of recognition.'