RISE OF THE CANLIT CANON
New book explores the history of Canadian writing, and why book lovers have it better than ever today,
What was CanLit anyway?
Today it sounds more like a course code than shorthand for Canadian writing — but, in a valuable and refreshingly lively account of the subject by University of Toronto professor Nick Mount, it’s really anumber of things: a canon of works to be studied, a historical phenomenon and a myth.
In Arrival: The Story of CanLit, Mount looks at the subject from all three angles.
He is briefest on the books themselves, choosing not to get involved in critical evaluation beyond providing brief margin notes that rank the core texts on a scale going from one to five stars as is done on the internet. For what it’s worth, he says Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook is the Great Canadian Novel, with Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women being the only other five-star contender in that category. Which is at least using an expansive definition of “novel.”
Arrival is more concerned with the books’ context: biographical, cultural, political and economic. Such an approach may sound dry and scholarly, but it’s presented in a breezy, humorous, nonacademic manner that makes for a quick and genuinely informative read, even for those who think they know the story well. Indeed, the main drawback is that in covering so much ground, the discussion gets spread pretty thin in places. One wishes Mount would slow down!
It’s also the case that such an argument pushes the actual CanLit canon, intentionally or not, even further to the margin. By emphasizing the many different forces coming together at the same time and place that gave birth to and shaped Canadian writing during these years — among them a golden age of middle-class affluence, a huge boom in publishing to feed an educated mass readership and the beginnings of various programs of government funding — CanLit comes to seem less about the writing and more about a kind of product (of the kind sometimes derided as “Canned Lit”).
This isn’t unfair though, and in some ways it makes for a welcome corrective to the default position of ancestor worship that continues to dominate so much discussion of CanLit. Mount doesn’t say genuinely gifted authors from Pierre Berton lucked out simply by happening to be in the right place at the right time — though he gives plenty of examples of how they won the lottery in that regard. (You have to smile at George Jonas recalling getting a job at the CBC in 1960: “You could just walk into an office unintroduced and say, ‘I want to work here.’ ”) Rather, Mount argues that, as authors, they were made by their time and place.
In particular, it was readers that made them. This is a principle Mount insists on throughout, demonstrating just how much cultural displacement has taken place in the field of literary criticism and how far the critical pendulum has swung away from now marginal texts toward a more market-based form of analysis.
Finally, CanLit is a myth. A self-made and unabashedly self-serving myth, as many of Mount’s biographical sketches reveal. These myths weren’t lies, but they weren’t always true either. Mostly they were just stories that were useful as promotional material. CanLit writers became fictional characters: Irving Layton the sexual juggernaut, Gwendolyn MacEwen as Lilith. In turn, this myth was CanLit’s greatest achievement. If the cultural construction of CanLit was the product, the myth was the advertising, and nobody played the media as skilfully as this generation of writers.
But what of CanLit today? This is an important question and one that Mount doesn’t shy away from addressing, though we may debate his conclusions.
In the first place, given that CanLit was a product of its time and place we can confidently declare it over, aside from the few surviving legacy brands. What’s more, we won’t be seeing the cultural and economic conditions that gave rise to it occurring again.
This leaves us with the matter of its legacy.
As a national project CanLit is irrelevant now, and much of the infrastructure built to sustain it is eroding. Nevertheless, Mount, correctly I believe, sees the average quality of the literature produced in Canada to be higher today than it was during the golden age. Readers have never had it so good. I would much rather read the work of authors as distinct and distinguished as Nino Ricci, Barbara Gowdy, Russell Smith, Mark Anthony Jarman or Tony Burgess than almost any of the best known books of the CanLit generation. What is the link, then, from past to present?
Is the CanLit canon, as Mount concludes, a “now recognizable body of writing for critics to describe, students to read, the public to celebrate and writers to steal from or define themselves against?”
That’s the way it’s supposed to work, but it’s not easy to make the case. Frankly, one has to look hard to find the influence of CanLit, at least in terms of books being written as creative response or reactions to any of its canonical works. Rather, if CanLit was defined by its context, it was in turn that context — the network of media and money primarily — that subsequent generations have had to adapt to or try to resist. This makes the story Mount tells all the more relevant, even as CanLit slowly fades from view. Alex Good is the author of Revolutions: Essays on Contemporary Canadian Fiction.