Worrying the Nation: Imagining a National Literature in English Canada.

Howells, Coral Ann

Worrying the Nation: Imagining a National Literature in English Canada.
By Jonathan Kertzer. (Theory/Culture) Toronto, Buffalo, NY, and London:
University of Toronto Press. 1998. xi+243 pp. $40; [pound]30.

Worrying the Nation, or more accurately, worrying about discourses of nationhood in contemporary Canada, offers a vigorous contribution to the latest phase of the debate about Canadian identity. Propelled by the 1988 Multiculturalism Act with its official emphasis on diversity and racial difference as fundamental characteristics of Canadian society, cultural and literary theorists (especially English-Canadians) have been anxiously engaged with questions of how Canadianness might be redefined to take into account these late-twentieth-century shifts of emphasis in traditional demography and ideology. As a literary critic and cultural historian, Kertzer focuses his attention on problems relating to English-Canadian literary traditions and Canadian history. His anxiety at times borders on the apocalyptic: 'What happens to a national literature when the very idea of the nation has been set in doubt?' (p. 5) or, echoing the title of E. D. Blodgett's 1993 essay, 'Is a History of the Literatures of Canada Possible?' (p. 11).

One of the major strengths of this book is what we might expect from someone interested in literary tradition, the appeal to history. Kertzer's research makes plain that debates over the possibility of a Canadian nation and a national literature go back to pre-Confederation days in fact, with E. H. Dewart's 1864 Selections from Canadian Poets. As he shows, the dominant anglophone literary tradition which defined itself in relation to nineteenth-century European Romantic historicism has always encountered problems in its attempts to formulate a discourse centred on homeland and national destiny. In his study of two mid-twentieth-century nation-building poems, E. J. Pratt's heroic epic about the building of Canada's transcontinental railway (1952) and Dennis Lee's Civil Elegies (1972), Kertzer demonstrates that they are at best ambiguously celebratory. Pratt's adventurers and politicians encounter the 'uncanny alienness' of the land (p. 76) while Lee's anguished quest for an authentic nation fails to discover any historical or contemporary grounds for such authenticity. Margaret Atwood's Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, also published in 1972, belongs to this English-Canadian tradition, though her wariness about the future now looks like a harbinger of the radical shifts that Canada's discourse of nationhood is currently undergoing. In a chapter entitled 'The Nation as Monster' Kertzer charts the revisioning of traditional Canadian themes and values in recent ethnic, feminist, and Native writing, showing that in multicultural Canada literature is (as it has always been) 'a vital but unreliable ally of ideology' (p. 118). His detailed analyses of Joy Kogawa's Obasan (1981) and Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic (1988), one a novel by a Japanese Canadian and the other by a radical feminist, illustrate just two of the alternative narratives that increasingly need to be taken into account in any redefinition of an English-Canadian literary tradition.

Having established the need for reimagining the nation and its representations, Kertzer in his conclusion returns to his original worrying about how the goal might be achieved in these postmodern postcolonial times of crisis. He makes the sensible point (not always obvious to post-structural theorists) that the concept of nation remains inescapable: 'The nation is both a historical reality and a discursive need' (p. 166), though it is in the area of discourse and conflicting needs that he runs up against the same intractable problems he has critiqued so persuasively in his book. There are no conclusions to the ongoing debate about Canadianness. Nevertheless, from his position as a liberal humanist and a Canadian nationalist, Kertzer succeeds admirably in helping readers to understand the parameters within which might be constructed an English-Canadian literary tradition responsive to contemporary Canada's version of multicultural nationhood.