The devastating news is that Canada’s literary culture clearly hasn’t renewed itself. Consider, for example, how The National Post reported the above poll results:
Forty-seven per cent of Canadians were unable to name even one of the following Canadian authors, unprompted: Leonard Cohen, Robertson Davies, Timothy Findley, Margaret Laurence, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Alice Munro, Michael Ondattje, Mordecai Richler, Carol Shields.
Take a look at that list again. Now imagine it is 1989. Has nothing changed in the past 20 years?
Here’s another way of looking at that list:
- Leonard Cohen (1934- )
- Robertson Davies (1913-1995)
- Timothy Findley (1930-2002)
- Margaret Laurence (1926-1987)
- Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942)
- Alice Munro (1931- )
- Michael Ondattje (1943- )
- Mordecai Richler (1931-2001)
- Carol Shields (1935-2003)
The Post reported that the three writers Canadians were most familiar with were Margaret Atwood (1939- ), named by 22 per cent of the respondents; Pierre Burton (1920-2004), named by 8 per cent of the respondents; and Farley Mowat (1921- ), also named by 8 per cent of respondents.
It is difficult not to conclude that Atwood is Canadian literature. No one else need apply. No wonder the Globe and Mail is closing down its book section (and moving what’s left of it online). Literature in Canada is what happened in the past, unless it’s written by MA.
A massive cultural amnesia has blanketed the land. As far as the popular imagination goes, no writers followed the Sixties Generation. Not even the Mann Booker Prize (Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, 2002) or the Oprah Book Club (Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, 2001; Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees, 2002) have penetrated this willed ignorance.
And the situation appears to be getting worse. Almost two-thirds (62 per cent) of young people, the Post reported, couldn’t name a single Canadian author. Not even Robert Munsh.
The horror! (Okay, maybe things aren’t as bad as all that. We still have the Griffin and the Scotiabank Giller, right?)
Still, the National Post can’t name a single Canadian author born in the last 65 years?
Astonishing.
3 comments:
Well, this is all concerning fiction, right? (Just to clarify.) I echo your frustration here. I have been, in the past few years, attempting to map out an overview of Canadian fiction and it's very difficult. Partly this seems a problem of nourishment--the short story in Canada doesn't seem to have a way to get into the hands of common readers. Why is that? No New Yorker? I mean that in all seriousness: long term support of a certain level of writing that guarantees a wide spread, well read audience.
Random thoughts here, but it may also be symptomatic of globalization: there simply isn't the infrastructure and distribution to capture the imagination of large, national audiences the way the "birth" of Can Lit was able to do with the Atwoods, etc.
Again, random thots. My last one being, where are the great editors? Behind any great literary movement there are hungry, daring, visionary editors...
Well, funny that the two writers most named after Atwood were Berton and Mowat: non-fiction writers for the most part. Certainly not literary novelists. And Atwood's a "poet," in one of her incarnations. And the Post named Leonard Cohen among its cohort. So poetry is represented.
Should have added the Ondattje started as a poet, too.
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