Weekend reads: CanLit's sacred cows

A Q&A with author and philosophy professor Andy Lamey

“In Canada, we have sometimes been forced to choose between how we feel about our country and how we feel about good books,” Andy Lamey writes in The Canadian Mind: Essays on Writers and Thinkers. In this collection of musings on the Canadian literary landscape, the former journalist — who now teaches philosophy at the University of California, San Diego — takes a critical look at its history, from the heyday of cultural nationalism in the 1960s to the current moment.

In today’s edited and condensed Q&A, which was originally published in The Globe and Mail, Lamey meditates on the past, present and future of CanLit.

TH: You are both an insider, a Canadian invested in Canadian literature, and an outsider, an academic living in the United States. From that vantage point, how would you characterize the moment we are currently in in CanLit?

AL: In my book, I deliberately take a long-term view. I don’t want to say everything is hunky dory [right now] because it’s not. There’s issues around the selling of books, in particular, that remain a real, ongoing concern. But from that long-term vantage point, I think we’re in a happy period. I don’t think you hear things like you would hear 50 or 60 years ago, like, “Why should I teach Canadian literature when I could teach Shakespeare instead?” A lot of the anxiety and concern, and the stiff-necked advocacy around Canadian literature — I think we feel very historically distant from all of that now. And then, Alice Munro winning the Nobel Prize is the crowning touch.

TH: You attack a sacred cow in the very first chapter, rejecting the idea that themes of survival and victimhood define Canadian literature. Why was it important to you to make that argument?

AL: When [her book Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature] came out, I was surprised that Margaret Atwood — who I, of course, respect — would want to keep alive that view. Which, as I argue, was never very accurate to begin with, and was anachronistic by the time she was publishing that book. And, as I say in the introduction, there was a lot of reluctance on the part of critics, in that cultural-nationalist-Margaret Atwood mode, to criticize Canadian books. To point out their flaws. But of course, no literature is perfect.

I also wanted to make a larger point about the limits of a kind of thoroughgoing nationalism as a critical approach. Even though, as you can tell in the book, I end up adopting my own softer, more minimalist nationalism.

TH: A major issue in CanLit, in recent years, has been the debate over cultural appropriation. You write, “The anti-appropriators share with cultural nationalists a tendency to resist acknowledging just how naturally artistic influence crosses political and cultural boundaries. Proponents of both approaches view authors essentially as spokespersons for one particular aspect of their identities.” Can you unpack that?

AL: Looking at the debate around Joseph Boyden and other artists who’ve been accused of cultural appropriation, it’s striking how much of that rhetoric from their critics has in common with the rhetoric of sixties and seventies cultural nationalists. There was a lot of anxiety about American influence, and [there was] this idea that Canadian literature had to be approached as something entirely distinct, especially at the level of influences. The idea that Canadian writers might have American influences, those were — it’s hard, perhaps, to imagine this now — but those were fighting words.

You see something like that logic in the cultural appropriation debate. Some of the hottest controversies are around Indigenous subjects. There’s this idea, similarly, that these stories belong to Indigenous creators. But no artist is an island. And Indigenous creators have non-Indigenous influences and audiences and editors, much like Canadian writers have American influences and audiences and editors. So, the idea that we can draw this really sharp boundary [doesn’t make sense]. And I do think both approaches reduce writers to a spokesperson for one particular aspect of their identity. That’s a commonality that we still see.

TH: I’m glad you brought up Joseph Boyden. Your book includes a robust defence — not of Joseph Boyden and his actions, but of The Orenda. You write that the novel manages to resist old colonial narratives and the reverse impulse: writing “morally exquisite Indigenous heroes.” Walk me through why you think The Orenda is still worth reading and writing about.

AL: Nothing about the book has changed in light of Boyden’s ancestry scandal. I’m really glad you said I’m defending the book more than the person.

The book itself has not changed. There were many critics, including Indigenous critics, who singled it out as worthy of praise. I agree with them. It’s a respectable work of historical fiction. What it has going for it is that Boyden did his homework. He put a lot of energy into going back and reading people like Bruce Trigger and other historians. It’s clear if you read those sources that Boyden has a gift for dramatizing historical research — that really comes through in The Orenda.

Historical fiction is often, of course, a commentary on the present period. And his commentary is to document many injustices that have been done to Indigenous people for a long time. I think he manages to pull that off, without the downfalls that often accompany politically motivated art. The danger is that you end up being didactic; he pulls it off without being didactic.

All of those blurbs that appear at the front of my copy of The Orenda — from a wide range of readers who appreciate the book — the truth of those remarks is unaffected by facts about his ancestry.

TH: The future of the Canada Council is another issue that is raised in your book, in the context of John Metcalf’s stance that the Council needs to be abolished, that these subsidies distort Canada’s literary output. How do you think through that question?

AL: His solution to what he sees as the marginality of literature in Canada is to hope for a revolution in literary taste that will transform the interests of the public. I am skeptical that that’s going to happen. There is a case for the Council, and I think the case is that works of art don’t just speak to our own time. There have been works of art that have done a better job finding a posthumous audience than they have in their own time; Moby Dick is the classic example. Given that the Canada Council is not an especially extravagantly funded body, I think when you do a cost-benefit analysis — with every taxpayer chipping in a few pennies a year — it’s just a safety net against us not producing work that’ll speak to future generations.

TH: What do you see as the big challenges facing CanLit going forward?

AL: The reading habits of Canadians. I think most bestsellers in Canada are American books. And the institutional side of making a career as a writer in Canada. There’s a few superstars, but otherwise it’s very, very difficult. Also, a lot of the enduring trends around Indigo and Amazon and ownership of the presses — those things don’t help. On the economic side of things, there’s still big challenges there.