The Search for the Great Canadian Novel | Hacker News Reader

The Search for the Great Canadian Novel

thewalrus.ca

17 pointspepys14 comments

> Why is it that in over a century of writing—much of it explicitly obsessed with questions of nationhood and identity—we have only a handful of novels that come close to representing the full sweep of Canadian life?

Being from Northern Ontario, I'd say the question kinda answers itself if you simply follow it by asking: which Canada?

Although Canada tends to be viewed as a homogeneously multicultural society (we all have our ideas of what any given country is like), Canada is (pardon my language) fucking huge. To ask for a novel to capture "the full sweep of Canadian life" is like asking for an American novel to somehow captures the essence of American life spanning California, Florida, New York, Texas, Utah, etc etc etc. America is best understood as union of otherwise unique states (you could call it... a united states). Canada is similar.

While you might reasonably expect a novel to capture the essence of living in France in a certain period of time, or in Spain, or in Italy, you could not reasonably expect a novel to capture all of the European experience. It's folly. And yet in Canada, we could fit most of Europe inside any one of our provinces or territories.

Canada may be a unified political entity, but it's not a unified cultural entity. There is a world of difference between the experience of growing up in Québec versus growing up in Alberta -- a difference as great as what I imagine it would be like to grow up in Utah versus New York, or Germany versus Britain.

It's a foolish idea to try and capture "the Canadian experience" because that experience doesn't exist. It's not a thing. Except maybe that it gets pretty cold in the winter and hockey is fairly universally liked for some reason.

I feel like Due South managed to give a good description of Canada:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryla4x-lQ58

Any population, even of a small town, will have many unique aspects. That won't stop people from generalizing, nor should it if we are to try and understand our environment.

And to be fair, Canada has a population close to that of California. So though it's spread out over an enormous area it may be easier to generalize than the U.S.

I think, on the contrary, it makes it harder. Americans are far more connected with each other than Canadians, even in the so-called flyover states. It's easier and cheaper for someone in LA to visit literally anywhere in the US or vice versa than it is for me in Alberta to go to Toronto.

Hell, it's easier and cheaper for me to go to the US than it is to go to most of Canada. For that reason and a bunch more our own perspective of our own country is often coloured by being seen through an American lens.

Our distance is very real and very practical and we are, imo, less closely knit than the US is in terms of cultural experiences, interpersonal relationships, and expectations of each other.

Fair criticism, but I think the author of the article does address your point:

"A Francophone biker in Lennoxville, a Cree lawyer in Manitoba, a Punjabi-speaking business owner on the Lower Mainland, and an anglophone trader on Bay Street may not share any basic ground of identity or culture, but all are, to varying degrees, united by practical bonds of jurisprudence, government, and economics. The novelist’s job is to shed light on the brute fact of those binding forces, and that usually means paying close attention to the institutions and individuals responsible for the country’s current state of affairs."

Personally, I would vote for something by Farley Mowat. ;)

That’s actually not true, just look at how the Quebec media vs Ontario media report about the federal government.

> And yet in Canada, we could fit most of Europe inside any one of our provinces or territories.

How do you figure? Europe is 10.18 million km2. Quebec, the largest province, is 1.54 million km2. All in, Canada is 9.98 million km2 -- so smaller than Europe.

I was thinking more I’m terms of the number of countries, I.e. you could fit, say, the smallest 70% or so of European countries into any given province.

But looking at a globe I don’t think that’s accurate either.

So I concede the point. Well played.

I stand by the rest of what I said though.

> Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes (published in 1945) and The Watch That Ends the Night (published in 1959) are valiant if flawed attempts to depict Canada’s struggle with its own identity in the middle years of the twentieth century.

I’d say the characterization applied to other works also applies to MacLennan:

> These novels omnivorously took in cross-sections of society...

Even with the apparent confusion around Canadian identity depicted in literature, there are plenty of examples in the article where the cross-sections are well described.

I enjoyed the article nonetheless.

Margaret Atwood has written several non-sci-fi novels that would qualify, in my opinion, as Great Canadian Novels - e.g. Alias Grace or The Blind Assassin.

Pierre Berton - The Mysterious North

I really enjoyed this historical novel. The guy had a way of telling the story that really pulled me in. I picked up the book at a book store in Edmonton years ago and liked it so much I loaned it out, never to see it again.

It was such a great book that I recently found it on AbeBooks and bought a replacement copy.

His Canadian histories are all excellent too and well worth reading.

Robertson Davies forever!

Lucy Maud Montgomery

Reply on news.ycombinator.com