Canada and the United States: Culture and Identity Part One
Tuesday, February 08 2005 @ 09:54 AM MST
Contributed by: Robin Mathews
Views: 593
Canada and the United States: Culture and Identity
(Part One)
Most writers who want to say something meaningful, something truly descriptive about Canada and the United States, are defeated from the start. The reason is ”history.” The “history” is and has been a pattern of intense propaganda; of calculated falsification of events and ideas; and of an imperial/colonial relation, the nature of which is constructed upon falsehoods and is maintained only by the continuation of falsehoods.
Even a serious (perhaps even solemn) writer, Dr. Katherine L. Morrison, in her book, Canadians are not Americans (Toronto, Second Story Press, 2003), is hypnotized into what can only be described as “conventional immobility.” Her book, subtitled “Myths and Literary Traditions,” is a kind of revelation because it is so bland and so unoriginal.
The book provides a revelation of the way critics in a colonial country (Canada) are hypnotized by the propaganda of an imperial master (the U.S.A.) to the point of becoming addled in their minds.
By that phrase I don’t mean to insult. Dr. Morrison has read everything. She has, as we say, done her homework. Her book is a revelation because she believes the critics she has read. She quotes all the acceptable authorities – however bad. She lays before us the quilt of our almost seamlessly shabby colonial-mindedness, self-deprecation, historical ignorance, and worship of foreign judgement.
The reasons for and the expression of Canadian self-flagellation may be discovered, in part – as in Morrison’s book – in the Canadian desire to be nice, friendly, polite, decent, and self-deprecating (excellent characteristics, sometimes). But there are more reasons for Canadian self-flagellation, and they need to be recorded.
In an earlier piece on literary/cultural critic Northrop Frye, I pointed out that no serious public commentator in Canada is granted importance unless he or she begins by (a) accepting Canada’s colonial status as normal and natural, and (b) having no doubt about U.S. superiority and the unquestioned higher
quality of anything thought or produced in the U.S.A.
The internationally famous Frye, as I pointed out – for all his excellences – would have been sidelined, marginalized, dismissed if he had insisted upon the superiority of Canada’s constitutional structure, if he had demanded international attention to Canada’s literary and cultural worth, and, especially, if he had made clear the strangulation of Canada’s power and expression by the U.S.A. Instead, he followed orders, saying Canada has never been a nation and never will be one. He down-played Canadian intellectual achievement constantly. Indeed, his entry in the 1985 Canadian Encyclopedia reports that Frye’s “own view of Canadian literature, which he has never much admired, is notoriously sunk in gloom.”
Poor Northrop Frye couldn’t shake the indoctrinated tradition to which he belonged, a tradition of colonial-mindedness which insists upon Canadian inferiority. How much he also came to know that “official” approvers and disapprovers pay people who denigrate Canadian achievement must be left in the hands of God to decide.
Canadians engage in self-flagellation before their U.S. masters because colonials are traditionally taught to be gentle, polite, and courteous to the imperials. Canadians engage in self-flagellation, too, because they want “official” approval. Not to get it means to be isolated, sidelined, marginalized, dismissed. “Official” approval raises up even the third-rate person so he or she can climb, shine, be honoured, and be listened to.
A sad and dreary fact of colonized cultures is that third-rate people very often become official spokespeople. In a culture and society fighting for independence, freedom, and space for native expression, the very best people have to take the lead. In a culture and society devoted to subservience, to a second-rate, copy-cat imaginative life, and to dependence upon an imperial power, the best people are shunned as “undependable” (they might react against their subservient position). Third-rate, “dependable” drones are given position because they “accept reality.”
In the warp and woof that make up the tapestry of a country’s identity, no one dares underestimate the power of “official” approval or disapproval. A perfectly reasonable parallel with Frye – on the economic and political level – is Mel Hurtig, an ardent and informed defender of Canadian independence. He has been awarded the Order of Canada (which couldn’t be denied him after his brilliant production of the Canadian Encyclopedia). But “official” Canada considers him a maverick, a sport, a mild embarrassment. Hurtig is sidelined, marginalized, dismissed.
What do I mean by that? Very simple. He is never on a continuing TV or radio panel on Canadian affairs. He doesn’t write a column for Macleans Magazine or The Globe and Mail (or like publications). Even CBC’s major shows (say, radio’s three-hour Sunday Morning) never spend an hour interviewing, talking to him – one of Canada’s best informed economic and political writers.
Why not? Because he fights openly for Canada and, therefore, has been withdrawn from “official” approval. He publishes important books. They reach a readership. They don’t get “official” approval.
“But”, you say, “Canada boasts of its equality. Everyone’s treated the same.” Sorry. If you compare the proportion of consenting Liberals and Conservatives with honours, ribbons, orders, medals, positions, and places to speak publicly in Canada’s press, media, etcetera, to the proportion of non-Liberal and Conservative people (in politics, the arts, labour, education, etc.) who are treated in the same way, you have to be amazed at the difference.
The third reason for Canadian self-flagellation springs from a combination of deep indoctrination and a feeling of inferiority that is unconscious and irrational. The Canadian who does something bold and original relating to Canadian identity in the shadow of U.S. imperialism – whether poem, play, novel, painting, sculpture, political analysis, political party, or something else - is stopped dead. That process teaches the person stopped – as well as others who observe – that to work creatively in relation to Canadian identity is a road to failure. And failure teaches a sense of inferiority.
If that person is Mel Hurtig, his past reputation and work permit him a diminished audience. If a bright young man or woman does something bold and original, he or she may cling to a small area of legitimacy, but will mostly be snuffed out – sidelined, marginalized, dismissed.
It is in those terms that one reads Morrison’s book, Canadians are not Americans. In the section “The Canadian Search for a Past,” she begins telling the reader that the “bitterness of the colonists, both English and French, prevented them from considering innovative ideas coming from the United States.” (p. 47)
That is wonderful, brainless, and standard pap of the kind that says if Canadians criticize the U.S., they are really eaten up with envy of U.S. greatness. For Morrison, Canadians didn’t reject U.S. ideas because they didn’t like the ideas but because the Canadians were bitter. The presumption is that if Canadians had not been bitter, they would have welcomed U.S. ideas about having a republic, a government like the U.S.'s, and joining with the U.S. – all U.S. “innovative” ideas.
“Innovative” ideas (in that context) are, of course, new and good. Except that in the Confederation Debates of the 1860s John A. Macdonald said that Canada didn’t want the (innovative) U.S. presidency. The U.S. presidency, he said, is a despotism. What John A. said 150 years ago is being seen as more and more meaningful by an increasing number of the world’s population.
Morrison tells her reader that Canada’s colonial literature “is mostly derivative,” meaning inferior. In doing so, she repeats the ideas of a long line of indoctrinated colonial minds in Canada. She does not say the colonial literature of the U.S.A. is mostly derivative (which it is). To avoid doing so, she must manipulate history. But, to begin, nearly all colonial literatures are “mostly derivative,” everywhere in the world, for reasons of culture and migration.
But something enormously surprising reveals itself in the development of literature in Canada and the U.S.A. Canadians moved much faster than U.S. people did to end the “derivative” period. This becomes evident when we remember that the settlement of the two countries happened at very different times. U.S. settlement was significantly advanced before Canada’s seriously began.
Remember. Harvard was founded in 1636, Yale in 1701. New England and parts of the U.S. South had an early, large immigrant influx which quickly took root. Plymouth was founded in 1620, New Haven in 1638, the colony of Connecticut in 1662, Maryland had a large settlement by 1675, and so on.
When the U.S. fought the War for Independence (1776), it had many established settlements and a population more than ten times that of Canada's.
In Canada, as we know, explorers and traders, using the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the river systems, penetrated the continent early. But settlement was slow to take hold because of the tough climate. It is no accident that the Lord Baltimore who secured a charter to found Maryland, to which his son and successor took 200 highly successful colonists in 1633, first tried to found a colony at Avalon, Newfoundland, but had to give it up because the conditions of life were too exacting. So the settlers went to Maryland, and success.
What is enormously surprising (because it is never pointed out) is that – despite its huge lead in having a settled white population – the U.S. did not begin a serious, independent literature before Canada. Among U.S. people that fact is carefully ignored – as it is by Dr. Morrison. The U.S. only began an independent literature about 75 years after gaining independence – and that was after 200 years of considerable settlement!
Canada began its serious literary expression AT THE SAME TIME, at least 30 years before Canada gained “independence,” with one tenth the population of the U.S.
A number of forces prevented the U.S. from developing a literature.
To begin, the U.S. began, and has continued, as an anti-intellectual country (electing presidents like the near-illiterates Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush). Its powerful religious authorities scarred its first centuries with hatred of imaginative art and learning. Its fundamental basis in a kind of grasping individualism early elevated the corporate thief and degraded the socially responsible thinker. Gluing its eyes on “expansionism,” the U.S. had no time for real debate and difference of outlook.
To that end, the extermination of the native Indians was a State policy, and today the small remnant are not in U.S. law First Nations (as they are in Canada) but merely the dependent refuse of conquest. By the same token, ALL U.S. people agreed to slavery after 1776 – for not a major U.S. politician (or other) resigned in protest and fought the policy in public campaigns. There was, to put the matter briefly, no rising up against a newly-minted nation that was based upon the extermination of the native peoples and the lawful increase of slavery. It is, in that light, not surprising the U.S. clung to slavery and fought against emancipation for decades after emancipation was the law in British dominions.
Finally, the bloody rupture with Europe, born of local greed and established lawlessness, was turned – of necessity (how else to give it meaning?) – into a celebration of a newly born world of traditionless, egotistical, individualistic, anti-intellectual ignorance. From that kind of society, literature and art and original thought come only slowly, and when they come they are often stillborn or damaged.
That fact seems to be a constant burr in Dr. Morrison’s saddle. “The Canadians,” she seems to say, “have done things differently, but only by accident or because they were bitter, and they’ve never done things better. When they succeed, Canadians are manifesting smugness or (sin of sins) anti-Americanism."
At the end of her section on “Nature,” she is plainly uncomfortable that Canadians appear to believe in the possibility of a self-respecting nation. That can only mean, for her, that Canadians must have a smug sense of disapproval of the U.S.A. Her final (irrational) sentence in that section is: “There is a vague sense of moral superiority in their [the Canadians'] attitude, reminiscent of the Loyalists looking on the new United States as a mobocracy.” (p. 98)
Writing of humour, she falls into the same pose. Thomas Chandler Haliburton and Susanna Moodie are not simply writers for her. Rather, their “deeply felt anger” leads them “to unsophisticated humour.” (p. 283) The two writers don’t consider differences between the two countries as anyone else might do. No. Rather, “bitterness over the outcome of the American Revolution [the War for U.S. Independence] led to Sam Slick and some satirically depicted Americans in Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush.”
Couldn’t it just be that a writer like Haliburton – who had a very large, international audience and was considered the leading humorist at the time in North America and beyond – saw wonderful differences between the two countries to exploit and make humour from? When Mark Twain sets out to make humour about the differences between Britain and the United States, Morrison doesn’t see “deeply felt anger,” “bitterness,” but a humorist plying – more or less successfully – his trade.
A part of the colonial-mindedness of critics is expressed in anger at Haliburton and Moodie - who dared to see U.S. fraudulence for what it was and to point it out. Mrs. Moodie, especially, presenting a humorous depiction of her yankee neighbour, makes people like Dr. Morrison choke and sputter with disapproval.
Indeed, Dr. Morrison is so far from knowing who Susanna Moodie really is that she insists upon describing her incorrectly as coming from the “upper” class of English society.
Dr. Morrison can’t see the reality before her, I suggest, because she has read the critics more carefully than the literature. For her (as manifested by her own statement) none of John Richardson, Thomas McCulloch, or Thomas Haliburton (all published before or in the 1830s) was a significant author. In the same way, she refuses to see the greatness – psychologically and narratively – of Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush (1850).
Morrison reports that the “Traills and the Moodies experienced nature in Canada, and nature defeated them.” In fact, both Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill braved settlement in Canada; both wrote important books; and Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush is a great work of “novelized” biography.
There is much more to say about the fact that serious, powerful U.S. literature only began in the same decades that such literature began in Canada. U.S. literature was obstructed by the inhuman traumas which defined the nation and its violent separation from Europe. Canada suffered none of those traumas. Canadians were rooted in a real place and with real traditions extending across the sea. McCulloch satirizes the provinciality of his new society. Susanna Moodie articulates brilliantly the immigrant transformation which is repeated every generation in Canada, so far. John Richardson writes greatly about the gigantic battles for the continent and the rich differences in fundamental social values between Canadians and the people of the U.S.A. And Haliburton begins a long, long history of humourous comparison of people and customs in the so-called Atlantic triangle: Canada, the U.S.A. and Britain.
In those decades, too, the francophones of Canada were shaping a literature of “appartenance”; that is to say, belonging. The first hesitant voices were insisting upon the themes to be greatly stated in the later classic, Maria Chapdelaine (1914). Perhaps much is said in saying that out of Quebec came the first great Canadian history, Francois-Xavier Garneau’s Histoire du Canada (1845-1850).
There is much more to be said about that, too.
But let’s go to the roots of Dr. Morrison’s book – roots that would please all the major critics of Canadian culture and literature in relation to the culture and literature of the U.S.A. Describing her book, Dr. Morrison settled, she says, “on seven themes for the purposes of comparison: a sense of the past; nature; a sense of place; religion and the church; gender, ethnicity, and class; violence; and humour.”
Consciously or unconsciously, those are headings that may be dealt with in a way that can avoid the central issues arising from the differences between the cultures.
The differences would have to be faced head on if she had listed as “themes” that had to be considered: individualism; imperialism; racism; the meaning of Europe; and capitalism in the formation of society. Alas, limiting herself as she does, Dr. Morrison can’t – with anything like fairness – discuss the themes she herself has chosen as central. To ask her to approach themes directly connected to real identity, real history, and real differences as they thrust themselves forth in the literature is probably too much to ask.
[Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on February 9, 2005]
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