Literary Landscapes: A Novel Approach

The explicit assertion of A Literary Atlas of Canada is that books published in our continent-sized country must first be approached through their geographies. This is a simple but original thought. Two of the more haunting interviews in the series involve Gwich’in novelist Robert Arthur Alexie and Montreal writer Gaétan Soucy. To better appreciate the implications of these authors officially sharing a literary flag, I read Soucy’s The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches and Alexie’s Porcupines and China Dolls with a view to thinking of them as part of a single literature.

Besides the quality of the work and the portraits of damaged individuals, the distance between the novels includes—in no particular order—4,000 kilometres, two languages, and at least one cultural and literary tradition. Alexie is a Tetlit Gwich’in native from Fort McPherson in the Northwest Territories. Porcupines and China Dolls, his 2002 debut, howls at the disaster of colonialism in the far North. It draws equally on the western novel and storytelling, mixing scenes of raw realism with explosions from the native dream world. The remote Blue Mountains are its landscape. The only non-aboriginal references are to American TV and cinema. Down south means Alberta and British Columbia; Ottawa, Toronto, or any place further east scarcely exists.

Gaétan Soucy teaches philosophy near Montreal. The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, first published in 1998, is a parable. Featuring an epigraph by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein about pain, the book is a prismatic text concerning two siblings raised in a deprivation tank of weirdness and cruelty. Cultural allegiances lie with European philosophy and the new French novel; no landscape is identified, either by location or time. The novel was a bestseller in Quebec and has been translated into numerous languages and widely published abroad. But its muted resonance in English Canada may suggest that recent rumours of the death of the foundation myth of the two solitudes—a binding story that Richler notably downplays—have been exaggerated.

In exactly which ways can one speak of Alexie and Soucy as both being writers of Canadian literature? Certainly not using the same easy definitions that authors from Berlin or the Black Forest might employ to mark their shared identity as German, nor, arguably, with even the confidence that a novelist from Yunnan province in southern China would affirm his kinship with a poet born in Manchuria.

Canada, of course, has always been a physical enormity connected by only the most tenuous of theories or, for that matter, railway lines. Now, with many formerly empty zones being filled in by authors such as Robert Arthur Alexie, the country is, if anything, getting bigger by the minute. No surprise, it is also acting less like a nation-state and more like a singular social, cultural, and political entity. Whether or not the overtired word multiculturalism is the right term to describe the literary manifestations of that entity is debatable, and Richler may find a better word in time for the publication of the series in book form in the spring of 2006.

By rendering that vastness and evolution so visceral, and for insisting on taking literature out on the road, A Literary Atlas of Canada is engaging in a new kind of thinking. Credit Noah Richler and the cbc for making bookish radio and for recognizing the cultural work that the twenty-first century requires. Nation building—or anti-nation building, perhaps—just can’t be like it was back in the old days. Dr. Atwood may have the diagnosis correct: Canada is “the place where one is free to make up Canada.”