Redalyc. On First Reading Gabrielle Roy . Revista Mexicana de ...

Revista Mexicana de Estudios Canadienses (nueva época) Asociación Mexicana de Estudios sobre Canadá [email protected]

ISSN (Versión impresa): 1405-8251 MÉXICO

2005 Margaret Atwood ON FIRST READING GABRIELLE ROY Revista Mexicana de Estudios Canadienses (nueva época), diciembre, número 010 Asociación Mexicana de Estudios sobre Canadá Culiacán, México pp. 13-19

Red de Revistas Científicas de América Latina y el Caribe, España y Portugal Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México http://redalyc.uaemex.mx

ON FIRST READING GABRIELLE ROY

Margaret Atwood

INTRODUCTION

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esdames et messieurs, bonjour. C’est vraiment un grand honneur de me trouver chez vous se matin —dans ce pays si chalereux, si plein d’histoire, avec beaucoup d’écrivains connus autour du monde. J’en suis très reconnaissant, et je vous remerci au fond de mon coeur. I thank you also for the establishment of this new Chair in Canadian Studies. Being a writer, when I first heard the word «chair» I began thinking – what kind of chair? The Spanish word “Cathedrale” sounds very grand to Anglophone ears – it conjures up images of cathedrals – so when I was first attempting to picture such a chair, I imagined a very large piece of furniture, with a lot of scrollwork and gold on it – a sort of throne, from which dogmas could be propounded. But Canadians are modest in such matters, so I dismissed the throne. If Gabrielle Roy were here, she might propose a kitchen chair – grouped with other kitchen chairs around a kitchen table, where various people would congregate to discuss their problems – financial problems, personal problems, political problems. Then I turned the chair upside down: perhaps it was less a thing to sit on – one person at a time – than a shelter. Perhaps it would be a sort of umbrella chair, where individuals with diverse backgrounds but mutual interests could seek shelter, for a while, from the storms that rage around us. I hope this is what it will be. It is of course a great honor to have a Chair in Canadian Studies named in part after me, here, at the University of Mexico — in a country and in a city so rich in culture and in history — and it’s an equally great honor to have my own name joined in this way with that of the eminent francophone Canadian writer, Gabrielle Roy. This sort of honor was unimaginable to

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me when I was younger: we didn’t really have Canadian writers then, or we did have a few of them, but we didn’t know very much about them. Gabrielle Roy was an exception. I never met her — she was of a generation of writers before mine, and her work is set in the thirties and forties — but I certainly read her, at an early age. Her short novel, La petite poule d’eau, was a set text for the French course when I was in the last year of high school, in Toronto, Ontario, in 1957; so I not only read it, I translated it, painfully, word by word — a different kind of reading altogether. I did not consciously think of Gabrielle Roy as a role model; nevertheless, in a writing world populated, then, mostly by dead people who were male and not Canadian, there she was — still alive, a woman, a Canadian, and important enough for me to be reading her in school. Little did I know then what courage she must have had, to pursue a life of writing, at that time, in that place. I hadn’t yet started to pursue such a life myself. But I was shortly to discover what I was up against, and therefore to be able to imagine the difficulties Gabrielle Roy must herself have faced. Every writer is a writer first. The fact of writing is primary – it comes before language, nationality, gender, and generation. Although these things may have something to do with the content and outlook of what is written, they do not determine the fact that a writer is a writer. All writers are citizens of a country without borders or passport or government, the centre of which is every writer and every reader and the circumference of which is as far as you can imagine; a country which has its own history and its own aristocracy, but which is nevertheless a republic — the republic of letters, where desire is the key to the gateway, and where all who wish may enter. When I began writing, it was however unusually difficult for people from colonies and ex-colonies of once-great imperial powers — such as England, France, and Spain — to become a writer; and, having become a writer, to publish; and, having published, to gain critical attention and a reading audience. Culture was not then a chief concern in such countries; and where there is no culture of writing, one must emigrate, or become a pessimist, or eventually fall mute. Thus, in the fifties and early sixties, most people either denied that there was such a thing as Canadian literature; or, of they admitted it, they denied that it could ever be a literature of quality. The English writer Wyndam Lewis, sitting out World War 2 in Toronto, was asked by a wealthy matron where he was living. He told her. “Mr. Lewis,” she said, “That is not a very fashionable address!” “Madam,” he


replied, “Toronto is not a very fashionable address.” Nor was it then. The poet Earle Birney, writing in 1939 — a piece entitled, “Canadians Can Read — But Do They?” — said that if you entered the average literate home in Canada at that time, you’d be likely to find only three books in it — the Bible, a collected Shakespeare, and The Rubayat of Omar Khyyam. The novelist Morley Callaghan, writing in 1938, said that a young Canadian writer should cut his teeth by publishing in American magazines and then seek an American publisher, as the chances of making a living in Canada by writing were nil. They decreased to less than nil during the war, due to paper shortages, and right after the war things were much the same. In 1949, the author Gwethalyn Graham, who’d published an international bestseller, criticized the poor distribution and high prices of her books in Canada, and said that was why most Canadians read only magazines. And, with some very slight improvements, that’s the way things still were when I began to write, in the late fifties. At the beginning of the 1960’s, sales of poetry books in Canada numbered in the low hundreds. In 1961 there was a total of five Canadian novels published in the country, in English, for the entire year, and a sales figure of a thousand was considered very good. Mordecai Richler’s first novel, published in England, sold two copies in Canada, or so the rumor goes. But over that decade, things changed rapidly. The Canada Council began its grants to individual writers in 1965. In Quebec, the Quiet Revolution had generated an outburst of literary activity; in the rest of Canada, many poets had emerged, more novelists and short-story writers were becoming known, and Expo ‘67, the Montreal world’s fair, had created a fresh national self-confidence. Canadian literature, however, was still not highly regarded, and it was rarely taught in schools and universities, except — as in the case of Gabrielle Roy — as part of a French language course. By this time the “poetry reading” had become a minor institution. As I travelled around the country, giving poetry readings and toting cardboard boxes of my own books to sell afterwards because often enough there was no bookstore, the absence of views on the subject of Canadian literature was staggering. The two questions I was asked most frequently about it by audience members were, “Is there any Canadian literature?” and, “Supposing there is, isn’t it just a second-rate copy of real literature, which comes from England and the United States?” In Australia they called this attitude the Cultural Cringe; in Canada it was the Colonial Mentality. In both — and in many other countries around the world, as it turned out – it was part of a tendency to believe that the Great Good Place was, culturally speaking, somewhere else.

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In 1972 I published a book called Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, which attempted to answer these two questions. It became a runaway best-seller and also a scandal: it was praised for daring to tackle the unknown, and attacked for the same reason. I intended my book as a sort of handbook for the average reader — for all those people I’d met on my tours who’d wanted to know more about the writing in their own country, but didn’t know where to start. This book would not be for academics. It would have no footnotes; it would also contain lists of other books that people could actually go into a bookstore and buy. This was a revolutionary concept, because most Canadian literature of the past was, at that time, out of print, and that of the present was kept hidden at the back of the bookstore, well away from the “real” literature, in among cookbooks and the Beautiful Canadian fall foliage and snow-scene calendars. We now take it for granted that Canadian literature exists — or, like the electron, that it has a tendency to exist — and we spend our time talking about its sub-categories, and its sub-sub-categories, and about some mythical weapon or religious leader called the canon — but this proposition was not always self-evident. To have any excuse for being, the kind of book I had in mind would have to prove several points. First, that, yes, there was a Canadian literature — that such a thing was more than a joke or an oxymoron. Second, that this body of work was not just a shoddy version of English or American, or, in the case of Francophone books, of French literature, but that it had preoccupations that were specific to its own history and geopolitics. This too was a radical proposition at the time, although it was just common sense: if you live in a rocky, watery northern country, cool in climate, large in geographical expanse, small but diverse in population, multilingual from the very beginning, and with a huge aggressive neighbor to the south, why wouldn’t you have concerns that varied from those of the huge aggressive neighbor? Or indeed from those of the crowded, history-packed, tight little island, recently but no longer an imperial power, that had once ruled the waves? To justify the teaching of Canadian literature as such, you’d still have to start from two axioms: i) it exists, and ii) it’s distinct. This was the sort of thing that art historian Nicholas Pevsner had done in The Englishness of English Art, or that the American literary critics Perry Miller and Leslie Fiedler had done in their examinations of American literature: the identification of a series of characteristics and leitmotifs, and a comparison of the varying treatments of them in different national and cultural environments. For example: wealth as a sign of divine grace or providence is present in the literary tradition of the United States of America, from the Puritans


through Benjamin Franklin through Moby-Dick through Henry James through The Great Gatsby. The theme is treated now seriously, now cynically, now tragically, now ironically, just as a leitmotif in a symphony may be played in different keys and in different tempos. It varies as time unrolls and circumstances change, of course: the eighteenth century is not the twentieth. Yet the leitmotif persists as a dominant concern – a persistent cultural obsession, if you like. The persistent cultural obsession of Canadian literature, said my book Survival, was survival. In actual life, and in both the Anglophone and the Francophone sectors, this concern is often enough a factor of the weather, as when the ice storm cuts off the electrical power. La survivance has long been an overt theme in Quebec political life, often manifesting itself as anxiety about the North American survival of the French language. In the rest of Canada, it’s currently likely to result in magazine articles about whether or not we will all be part of the United States in twenty years. Survival therefore began with this dominant note — survival. It then postulated a number of other motifs in Canadian literature — motifs that either did not exist at all in one of the literatures with which they were being compared (for instance, there are almost no “Indians” in English novels, and almost no icebergs, and almost no bears), or which did exist, but were not handled in the same way. The Canadian “immigrant story”, from fleeing Loyalists, to starving 1840s Irish, to Austin Clarke’s Barbadians, to the economic refugees of the 70s and 80s, tends to be very different when told in the United States: none of their novels is likely to say that the immigrants were really aiming to get into Canada, but had ended up in the United States by mistake. Canada has rarely been seen — historically — as the promised land, except for those fleeing slavery via the Underground Railway. It was too cold to be viewed as Paradise. Thus the tradition identified in Survival was not a bundle of uplifting cheer: quite the reverse. Canadian literature at least up until 1970, was on balance a somewhat dour concoction — not as violent and fate-laden as Mexican literature, but not as passionate either. Some critics who couldn’t read — a widespread occupational hazard — thought I was advocating this state of affairs. Au contraire: if this book has an attitude, it’s to be found in the last chapter, “Having bleak ground under your feet is better than having no ground at all... a tradition doesn’t necessarily exist to bury you: it can also be used as material for new departures.” Many things have happened in the thirty years since Survival was published. Toronto, which in 1960 was a largely Protestant provincial city of some 800,000 people, is now — officially — the most multicultural city

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in the world. In the last twenty years, there has been an unprecedented flowering, not only of good restaurants, but of Canadian writing. Mordecai Richler’s well-known quip, “world-famous in Canada”, has ceased to be such a joke — many Canadian writers are now world-famous, period, insofar as writers can be considered famous. They’re internationally published, they win prizes, they sign movie deals, they have careers. None of these things seemed very possible to me, when I first began, in the late 1950s. Survival, the book of 1972, has seemed quainter and more out-of-date as the years have gone by, and as — incidentally — some of its wishes have been granted and some of its predictions realized. Yet its central concerns remain with us, and must still be confronted. Are Canadians really all that different from anybody else? If so, how? In 1972, Survival concluded with two questions: Have we survived? And if so, what happens after survival? Politically at least, we’re still posing the same questions. People often ask me what I would change about Survival if I were writing it today. The obvious answer is that I wouldn’t write it today because I wouldn’t need to. The thing I set out to prove has been proven beyond a doubt: no one would seriously argue now that there is no Canadian literature. The other answer is that I wouldn’t be able to, because the quantity, range and diversity of the books now published would defeat any such effort. However, the very diversity of these literary outpourings can also cause confusion when it’s a matter of the box labeled “Canadian literature”. In what sense is a novel about Bombay, written by a person who grew up in India but is now a Canadian citizen – in what sense is such a novel “Canadian”? (A problem England faced earlier, with writers such as Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and T. S. Eliot.) Some say that national classifications have now become obsolete – that we are all now citizens of the world. Yet culture is more like an organism than an airport, and trees don’t grow in air. We all have roots, and these roots begin as local roots. I propose a more biological approach to classification: look at what’s there. For instance, in Canada there are many dandelions. But the most commonly observed dandelions are introduced species, which have now however become typical. There are also indigenous plants, both rare and numerous, and introduced species that are rare. No botanical account of Canada would be complete unless it included all. Once, in the Galapagos Islands, we came upon a field of shiny black lava on which a tomato plant was growing. How did it get there? A tourist’s sandwich? The tomato plant is not a representative plant of the Galapagos — the typical species would probably be the large cactus tree. Nevertheless, there was the tomato plant, bravely sprouting. Against all


odds, it was there. Which might be a good title for the history of Canadian literature, and for Canada itself: Against All Odds. Let me close on a positive note. Here is the speech made by an Indian shaman to Paul Le Jeun, one of the first Europeans to arrive on the northern shore of our mutual continent. It’s from his Jesuit-relations essay, “Winter Among the Montegnais” (1613).* “Do not be sad” (said the shaman). “If thou art sad, thou wilt become still worse; if thy sickness increases, thou wilt die. See what a beautiful country it is; love it; if thou lovest it, thou wilt take pleasure in it, and if thou takest pleasure in it, thou wilt become cheerful. And if thou art cheerful, thou wilt recover.” And so it is with our literature, and with your literature — the literature of Mexico — and with all literature, here in the Republic of Letters. Unless we can take pleasure in it, of whatever kind, literature exists to no purpose. The pleasures of reading and writing may be complex and devious, but they are real pleasures nonetheless. I hope that through this new Chair, here at UNAM, we may share more such pleasures together.

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