CanLit embarrasses itself with GG award
Eleanor Catton is a worthy writer, but a Canuck? That’s a stretch, writes CHRISTOPHER DUMMITT.
What makes a book Canadian? Does it need a Canadian publisher? Probably not, at least not anymore, given how many presses have disappeared. Even the allegedly ever-so-loyal Canadian and newly minted historian of hockey, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, published with the American house Simon & Schuster. Is there a Canadian topic, a theme, a “feel” that just comes from a book — perhaps a scent of maple syrup, the sweat from a hockey bag that has somehow soaked into the ink and is just barely detectable on the page? Probably not. The idea that a Canadian book — that Canadian literature — is about any one thing is very 1970s. We’ve spent the last several decades not only experiencing just how dynamic and important this thing called Canadian literature is, but also revelling in its diversity. You’ll still find the old Ontario Robertson Davies and the Anglo-Montreal, Nova Scotian Hugh MacLennan in the canon. But the times have changed. Even Mordecai Richler, with his once threatening irreverent Jewish bawdy humour, is now old school. Canadian literature from the 1980s onward became much like Canada in those years: international, multicultural, and respected. The idea that anyone could decipher in this cacophony a single sound, a tune that was recognizably Canadian, aside from the diversity itself, is ludicrously optimistic.
But does that mean that anything goes? Do you only need a Canadian birth certificate or passport to join the CanLit team?
This is an ever more pressing question. The nation’s prize committees have an answer: everything goes. In awarding this year’s Governor General’s Award in Fiction to Eleanor Catton’s novel The Luminaries, indeed just in nominating the book, the GG committee opted for the bare-minimum definition of Canadian. Catton is a New Zealander who happens to have been born in Ontario. She left when she was six years old, never to move back.
What do you remember from the age of six? A few hazy memories — perhaps an especially wonderful birthday gift, a horrific memory, maybe even a wished-to-be-obliterated memory of your parents in flagrante delicto, a half-remembered Christmas morning that might be a memory or might just be invented from an old photo you’ve seen. Catton speaks in a Kiwi accent and her marvellous book is itself rooted in the myths and history of New Zealand.
The Luminaries is a huge accomplished book, ambitious, subtle and absorbing. After Catton won the Man Booker prize this fall she appeared CBC’s The Sunday Edition, speaking precisely, playfully and in an inventive language that made it seem almost as if she was writing when she spoke. Any country could be proud to see her as “theirs.”
But that’s just it — the needy possessiveness of it all — as if once a nation discovers this capable, brilliant writer, they just have to have her. Even if the connection is only tenuous.
Many Canadian authors don’t write obviously Canadianthemed books — think of Rohinton Mistry, Yann Martel or even, to go back further, Mavis Gallant. But still, Catton the Canuck is a stretch.
The GG news might not be so sad if it didn’t mirror what was happening elsewhere in the country. CanLit is diminishing in importance in Canada’s universities. Canadian historians are increasingly trying to sell themselves as experts on Canada in the global world, to stay relevant and with it. Even Canadian economists, according to a recent study, are looking less and less at the Canadian economy. Canada, on its own, is so last century.
Surely part of the reason Canadians were so ecstatic over Alice Munro’s Nobel Prize is that she did talk about Canadians. And not just any Canadians, but everyday Canadians, the denizens of small towns and villages, the kind of average women who used to be either ignored in the literary canon or dismissed as nothing more than figures from domestic fiction. If not frivolous, then certainly unambitious. Yet Munro made a career out of giving exquisite voice to the small moments of these not small people.
In hugging Catton to the national bosom, the GG committee is essentially taking a step backwards. This is exactly the kind of self-conscious, colonial attitude that long dominated Canadian culture. This is exactly the kind of thing the whole Canadianization movement of the 1970s and 1980s was supposed to do away with. The Aussies and Kiwis call it “colonial cringe” — this sense that the best thing is always out there, in London or New York or even where Catton grew up, Christchurch.
When Catton won the Booker prize earlier this fall, it was a good day for her and probably for a lot of proud Kiwi Lit fans. But when she won the GG this week, it was an embarrassing day for CanLit.