Space as a Constitutive Element of Canadian Imagination and Its Rhetorical Articulations
Keywords:
literature and space, Canadian literature, national mythology, cultural identity, cultural imaginary, northern frontier, Frye, NorthropAbstract
The article is a case study analyzing space as part of the Canadian national myth. Common symbolic imaginary in Canada is in itself problematic due to the lack of historical personalities and events that could be acceptable to both “founding groups” (i.e., English and French). Use of space as one of the main constituents of the national imaginary is thus not surprising. By analyzing the poetry of John Newlove and E. J. Pratt, the author shows that both use the vastness of geographical territory as a means of Canadian cultural identification, but they are also conscious of language/rhetoric as an equivalent of spatial images and even as a means of domination over space. The imagery of Canadian space shows vast, unresponsive, or even actively hostile territory, but above all the landscape that challenges lyrical speakers and their fictive personas to endure. It is true that such is the imagery of the space and of the Canadian cultural myth as described in the famous critical interventions by Northrop Frye and as latter reiterated by Margaret Atwood in her Survival. It is also true that Frye’s and Atwood’s imagery was heavily indebted to Pratt’s poetry and its ambivalent relation to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution: it is possible to demonstrate both the close contacts between Pratt and Frye on the one hand, and Frye and Atwood on the other, as well as the ambivalent influence of Darwin’s theory on Pratt and on his predecessors (i.e., Archibald Lampman, Charles G. D. Roberts, and William Wilfred Campbell). Poststructuralist literary critics thus have to some extent rightfully attacked Frygian notions such as “garrison mentality”. Nevertheless, Frye never thought of his understanding of the Canadian imaginary as fixed and all-pervading. Even more so, he understood that, as always in the case of the imaginary, Canadian notions of space were co-shaped by symbolic language and stock responses used by different groups when inhabiting new space. The article provides a brief overview of these stock responses and their literary examples, and at the same time it rejects some of the accusations of the poststructuralist critics, especially that of the presumed environmental determinism of the Frygian notions of space.References
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