Nowhere man
In the latest issue of The Walrus, Charles Foran reports on Noah Richler’s radio series, A Literary Atlas of Canada, which aired this past spring on CBC (and is coming out in book form next spring, courtesy of McClelland & Stewart). Richler travelled the country, chit-chatting with various authors about the role of landscape and place in their work in an effort to identify the unifying myth of Canadian literature.
Richler doesn’t get off to a good start with Wayne Johnston, who says, “It is extremely difficult and probably pointless to find a unifying idea or concept or even tradition.” Richler presses on. First, he tries out “nowhere,” as in the middle-of-nowhere, the bush, off the map. But Margaret Atwood, whom Richler describes as a purveyor of the “garrison mentality,” nixes that idea. “There isn’t really any nowhere,” she says. “There are only other people who think a place is nowhere.” Other adventures include 10 seconds of dead air while Rohinton Mistry thinks hard about the effect Canada has had on his novels.
Foran, for his part, supports the notion that the “most obvious quality shared among books by Canadians is a certain value system,” a “Canadian geography of values,” rather than Richler’s conception of a literary landscape. But Foran gives Atwood the final word. “Canada may be defined,” she says, “as the place where one is free to make up Canada.”
Related links:
Click on the link for Charles Foran’s piece in The Walrus
