A Country Without A Mythology? PART IV

by Mike Perschon - Copyright © Mike Perschon 1997

CANADIAN MYTHOLOGY

"Searchers for a Canadian identity have failed to realize that you can only have an identification with something you can see or recognize. You need, if nothing else, an image in a mirror. No other country cares enough about us to give us back an image of ourselves that we can even resent. And apparently we can't do it for ourselves, because so far our attempts to do so have resembled those of the three blind men trying to describe the elephant. Some of the descriptions have been worth something, but what they add up to is fragmented, indecipherable. With what are we to identify ourselves?

- Germaine Warkentin, "An Image In a Mirror"

So many cultures under one nation's flag; so many religions worshipping under the nameless deity from the verse of Canada's national anthem "God keep our land glorious and free." Which God, Goddess or gods? Is there one mythology and ritual practice which personify the Canadian identity? Do Canadians identify with one powerful dream which encompasses both temporal and spiritual goals, such as it's southern neighbor's 'American dream?' In the 1970's Hugh Hood, in his essay Moral imagination: Canadian thing, stated of Canadians; "We can't make myths as the. . . unprincipled salesman of the American Dream. Imagine a Canadian Dream. . . you can't." He shows that Canada refuses to allow any of its public figures to aspire to greatness; in the eventuality that they do, they leave to go to the United States. Even such cultural heroes such as Louis Riel are only recently coming into the area of mythology that politicians such as George Washington and outlaws such as Jesse James have in the United States. (1970, pp. 32-33) For the Americans, those folk heroes in some way embody ideals of the American Dream. Canada has no such national heroes. "Canadian independence was too cautiously won to produce figures with the glamour of Washington, Hidalgo, Bolivar." (Dobbs, 1970, p. 22) Again, the conclusion is a Canada devoid of national mythology, heroes, and ritual.

In a recent discourse with a seventeen year old honor student, the author heard the voice of a young Canadian desperately seeking Canadian heroes and a sense of Canadian identity, a Canadian mythology to cling to and uphold in the face of the world. Among his own Canadian heroes were writers such as Robertson Davies, Margaret Atwood and poet/performer Leonard Cohen. As Joseph Campbell stated, "The function of the artist is the mythologization of the environment and the world." (Campbell & Moyers, 1988, p. 107) His reverence for this particular milieu of Canadians agrees with S.M. Lipset's statement that "the art and literature of a nation would most reflect as well as establish her basic myths and values." (Quoted in O'Toole, 1993, p. 160, emphasis O'Toole's) and echoed the hope of "intellectual heroism" which Kildare Dobbs once wrote of in regards to men such as Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye. Dobbs hoped that men such as these would prick "the bubble of illusion" which Canada was in; a 'bubble' where people refused to see things for what they truly are, where "Our funerary rites are all designed to conceal the fact that death has intruded." Dobbs, contrary to David Mainse, felt that Canada, "far from being disillusioned. . . wallows in illusion and hysterically resists all attempts to show for what it is." (Dobbs, 1970, pp. 22 & 25)

It was Frye in particular who said Canadian literature was an "indispensable aid to the knowledge of Canada (which) records what the Canadian imagination has reacted to and. . . tells us things about this environment that nothing else will." (Frye, 1982, p. 15) Frye protested the concept of Canada being presented as a 'country without a mythology' and in the tradition of mythologists such as Mircea Eliade showed that it is through Canadian literature that Canadians can gain some sense of a national mythology. His studies revealed a dark, unrefined wilderness, inhabited by Native and Inuit spirits and monsters, a grand sense of the mysterious and "tragic themes of inexplicable death and. . .evil that are threateningly chaotic in the most profound sense." (O'Toole, 1993, pp. 161-163 & 165.) Interestingly enough, his main sources of discovery came from the pages of both Margaret Atwood and Robertson Davies.

Atwood published a book in the early seventies called Survival, which was a study of Canadian literature at the time. The entire thrust of the book is how Canadian literature deals with the individual against a giant in some form or another, striving for survival. The second chapter, "Nature the Monster," explains how Nature as an almost personified entity is a common theme in Canadian literature. "Not surprisingly in a country where such a high ratio of trees, lakes and rocks to people, images from Nature are almost everywhere. Added up, they depict a Nature that is often dead and unanswering or actively hostile to man. . ." (Atwood, 1972, p.49) Atwood's view corroborates with many people I spoke to during the course of this work. When asked for an image or concept that people felt embodied Canada, the idea of "the Land" as an nearly sentient force kept coming up. It is a frightening, awe inspiring concept; "This terrifying, icy wilderness of mountains, forests and bottomless lakes is also a magical, enchanted world inhabited by primeval beings whose existence is undreamed of in a rational world of regimented routine." In Canadian fantasy writer Charles DeLint's novel Spiritwalk, an entire city block is transported to a primeval time; the sudden intrusion of modern architecture on the ancient forest is devastating:

"There was a sudden roaring sound. . . the sofa they were sitting on tumbled over backward and to one side. . . The air was filled with a crackle and crunch of breaking wood and then a tree - a giant, full-grown. . .enormous old oak tree - came pushing up out of the floor, splintering floorboards and anything else in its way." (DeLint, 1992, p.207)

The concept of the Land is central to DeLint's writing. The Wild Wood deals with the destruction of the environment, and how a young woman's interaction with the nature spirits which inhabit a nearby wood allows her to keep the forest from complete destruction. The interaction of the supernatural with the Natural is still a common theme in Canadian literature, even it's popular forms.

Yet it is not merely pantheism which inhabits Canadian literature as mythology. It is not Nature worship in it's pure form; nor is it traditional religion either, but rather, a merging of the two, with the concept of Nature running concurrent through it all. Louis MacKendrick concluding from his studies in Canadian literature that "the God of Canadian fiction is 'not a consistency but a diversity, a multifaceted deity'. . .a personal God formed and transformed in the eye of the beholder, a projection of the self no longer confined to the traditional symbolic forms of the Judaeo-Christian heritage." (O'Toole, 1993, p. 166 - emphasis mine) Many writers in Canadian literature are hostile to Christianity in it's traditional, ecclesiastical form, all the while writing stories and essays which extol Christian virtues. DeLint's characters are almost all pagans or atheists, who have "no fight with Jesus. . . or anything he tried to teach. The only problem I've got with him is what people do in his name." (DeLint, 1992, p. 336) Yet they are caught up in a constant struggle of good against evil, with the force of good holding greater sway. "The best of us try to leave the world a little better place than it was when we got here." (ibid, p. 336) Robertson Davies observed that this influence of Christianity in Canada is ingrained, even when people allegedly turn away from the faith.

"Oh this Christianity! Even when people swear they don't believe in it, the fifteen hundred years of Christianity that has made our world is in their bones, and they want to show they can be Christians without Christ. Those are the worst; they have the cruelty of doctrine without the poetic grace of myth." (Davies, 1983, p. 218)

He stated that it was "the simple truths of Christianity" which Canadians adhered to. (Davies, 1977, p. 275) Concepts such as "sacrifice, salvation, sin and redemption" still figure heavily into Canadian literature. (O'Toole, 1993, p. 165) Rather than explicit Christianity, one finds an 'implicit' Christianity, hidden within the lives of moral characters and parables.

Perhaps Frye was speaking prophetically, looking to the future which would be embodied in 'generation X'ers' looking for a sense of national pride. In the past, young Canadians tried to solve Frye's question of "where is here?" (regarding Canada's lack of national awareness) by going away to places that knew what they were, in the hope that there was a way to bring that sense of awareness home. However, today's youth seem bent on changing the country within the country; Canadian youth have a pride about their nation, largely due to their identification with artists and writers. In the past year, Canadian singer Alanis Morisette received international recognition for her CD, Jagged Little Pill. Like Bryan Adams before her, Alanis has brought a sense of national pride to our nation's youth. Charles DeLint was the recipient of the William L. Crawford Award for Best New Fantasy Author in 1985, and has also received international success, his fiction appearing regularly in the Year's Best Fantasy volumes, in addition to praise from some of the fantasy genre's best American writers such as Orson Scott Card, Roger Zelazny and Andre Norton.

Many books have been written in an area which is related to depth psychology, which encourage people to create their own myth, building on the classical mythological archetypes. This is used as a form of psychotherapy. (Pearson, 1991. P 295.) Perhaps this is what Canada needs to do: understand that it must create its own mythology from within. Just as this can be used as a form of psychological healing, perhaps it could also be a form of sociological healing.

Part of Canada's problem in finding it's own mythology and ritual, is that it has been looking for it's identity away from home. Canadians have in the past been so busy looking elsewhere for how Canada should be, that they forgot to look around them. Atwood wrote of this in regards to the poem A Country without a mythology.

We can believe with 'the stranger' that Nature has withheld all revelation. Or indeed that Nature is empty, has no revelation to give. . . Or we can take the hint that the poet gives us: perhaps the stranger has been given a revelation but has not been able to recognize it. There is an image of the divine present in the landscape - the 'manitou' which the Indians have carved. . .because the mythic figure, 'the manitou' is not a 'golden-haired Archangel' it is. . . rejected as impure and dangerous. . . the traveller's. . . European Christian fantasies are only wishful thinking, and of a destructive kind; they prevent him from making meaningful contact with his actual environment. Perhaps this is why he remains a stranger: he's looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place." (Atwood, 1972, p. 54)

It is a strong possibility that the reason Canada lacks a spiritual (not to mention national) cohesiveness is that it's citizens have been looking for a way to make faiths which come from different countries into the faith of the present nation. Canada is made up of Christians, but it is not a Christian nation. It is made of Muslims, but it is not a nation under Islam. I have heard Canada described as a pagan nation, but am uncertain this is an appropriate description either.

It is obvious that the nation cannot as a whole return to the practices which once made up the mythology and ritual of Canada prior to its settlement. Canada may be made up of Natives, but it is no longer made up solely of First Nations peoples. Robertson Davies made a great analogy to this problem when he described the United States and Canada as sisters, with Great Britain as the mother. The United States was the older sister who didn't do as she was told, and so fell out of grace with mother, while Canada was the obedient child, the younger sibling, who stayed at home. Unfortunately, when the older sister became successful in her endeavors, the mother once again took notice, and for the most part, the younger sister was forgotten. Davies made the point that while Canada was not a young nation, it was a nation which had "achieved adulthood comparatively recently" (Davies, 1977, p.274) Canada has only really just begun the journey to understand it's identity. The areas of mythology and ritual fall under this quest. Already, as has been shown, the writer's and artists of Canada have attempted to define a mythology for the nation. And it would appear that some cohesiveness is emerging.

PART V: CONCLUSION and BIBLIOGRAPHY coming soon!