Is there a Canadian mind? I’ve been reading Andy Lamey’s just-published
book The Canadian Mind: Essays on Writers and Thinkers, and he finds some Canadian minds worth including in his search for evidence
of “Canada as a generator of culture and ideas mature enough to be worth considering
in a spirit of discrimination.” Some of his minds are well-known (Margaret Atwood, Charles
Taylor, Mavis Gallant), some maybe less so (John Metcalf, Will Kymlicka), and
some surprising (Conrad Black).
Lamey, a Canadian philosopher currently teaching in
California and a journalist on cultural matters, calls himself a “nationalist in my own way” – he must be, he
says, look at what he writes about all the time. But he starts by criticizing
Margaret Atwood (and by extension the CanLit generation of the 1960s to the
1980s’), arguing they sought to find “a particular message or theme that is the unique
hallmark" of Canadian writing" -- regardless of the literary quality
of the works in question.
I find him ungenerous here. Surely the goal and achievement
of “CanLit” was doing the work to establish the practical foundations of a
literary culture -- funding and prizes, publishers, promotional machinery, supportive
bookstores, networks of critics and commentators and writers’ organizations –
which would support a body of work about which judgements about quality could
emerge and be tested. Canon-building from the works available may have been part of that. Without the foundations having been built, Lamey would still have little
to write about. As one sardonic CanLit writer liked to say, “What makes a
work of literature universal is promotion and distribution.”
Many of the Canadian minds Lamey considers richly deserve and benefit from his attention. He mostly trashes Conrad Black, his essay on David Frum is entirely about Frum’s career in American political culture, and his take on Mavis Gallant considers only a single short story. That most of his chapters are reworked from previous journalism explains why ones like these barely fit the announced theme of the book. But I liked his considerations of the critic John Metcalf, the novelist Dany Laferrière, and the philosophers Charles Taylor and Will Kymlicka, are fresh and interesting.
Lamey, a philosopher by training, gives extensive attention
to the thought of Taylor and Kymlicka – the latter
a writer I hardly knew of, but whom Lamey puts forward as Canada’s leading intellectual
export. Both Taylor and Kymlicka use Canadian experience to offer the world
ways to think about accommodating group identities and collective rights within the traditional
liberal emphasis on individual rights. Lamey argues that Kymlicka (who was Lamey’s academic
advisor) has been more successful than Taylor in this project.
One long
essay, “The Orenda: A Defence” takes up Joseph Boyden and his novel of
seventeenth-century missionaries in the world of the Wendat and Haudenosaunee. Lamey
acknowledges that Boyden can no longer be included among indigenous writers, his claims to indigeneity having been conclusively dismolished. But Lamey defends “cultural appropriation” and
decries the “cancellation” of writers who attempt to cross cultures. Lamey argues quality is the vital element. He finds The Orenda to be good work, a novel not to be discarded, and takes that as evidence that it
is possible to write well about cultures
other than one's own.
I’m sure it’s
true in principle that cultural appropriation can be done well. (All historical writing may be cultural appropriation, since everyone in the past is a foreigner.) But in the same way that most non-indigenous
theatre about indigenous peoples pales in comparison to Thompson Highway, The
Orenda is put in the shade by, say, the novels of Richard Wagamese or Waubgeshig
Rice.
As part of
his defence of The Orenda, Lamey notes how Boyden drew on historians Bruce Trigger and Georges Sioui, who he says benefit from the attention the novelist bestows
on them. He might have been better to treat The Orenda as essentially a
novelisation of Trigger’s work. Bruce Trigger was a great scholar and a great
Canadian mind in his own right, as worthy of Lamey’s full attention as Taylor
or Kymlicka. (I never finished The Orenda.) Lamey’s instinctive preference for the novel over the history is evidence of how rarely Canadian critics consider any historical writing in Canada as intellectual or cultural work.
[Thanks to Sutherland House publishers for sending an advance reading copy.]
