Alberta Review: Lament for a Literature
It's easy to look back with rose-coloured glasses...but sometimes, things really were better before
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I read Lament for a Literature the day Lloyd Robertson died. It was a sad, timely reminder of the importance of Canadians telling Canadian stories to their fellow Canadians.
Like the vast majority of people from any Western Country, I no longer watch the evening news. I don’t remember exactly when I stopped—it was a habit I picked up from my parents, as most do, so the less I spent time there, the less I watched. But I know when I said I wouldn’t watch it again, and that was when Robertson left.
Robertson was a Canadian giant (his autobiography is a wonderful read, by the way). But the death of Canadian broadcast news is just another example of the modern, digital world and the internationalization of our media consumption causing the slow, creeping death of domestic media and mediums. Literature, writing, and publishing are others. It’s a frustrating story, well-documented in Lament for a Literature by Richard Stursberg.
It’s timely because, as Stursberg points out, Canada is at a new inflection point in our search for identity, spurred on by threats to our sovereignty by the colossus next door. A clear identity was something we had in spades, and it was best reflected in our literature. There were Canadian publishers dedicated to supporting Canadian writers who themselves wrote novels, histories, and philosophical and political works that were distinctly Canadian. Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Pierre Burton, George Grant, and Peter Newman were published by Canadian publishers. Now, the book documents that foreign publishers sell Canadians books about elsewhere, and the few Canadians who are successful no longer set their novels here. Part of it is commercial and the reality of modern readerships, but Stursberg also documents that Canada is unique among English-speaking nations in that it has no significant domestic publishers and reads little by domestic authors. Twenty years ago, that was not the case, and the reason is primarily governments of all stripes refusing to uphold thier own laws and regulations designed to protect the Canadian publishing industry.
Stursberg proposes policy changes to rectify this, including tax policy that mirrors the highly successful television and movie industries, as well as pricing and publishing rules that give Canadian companies the ability to compete. Policymakers should take heed because they’re all based on successful policies from other rich-world countries.
The book, though, is at its best when it reminds the reader about the importance of a domestic, patriotic literature, both fiction and non-fiction. Now more than ever, Canadians must successfully answer the four key questions for understanding identity: who are we, who are we not, where are we, and what are we doing here. These four questions are best answered, for any nation, by its artists. And, Stursberg argues, “The ur medium is books. They provide the most thorough and immersive explorations of identity and often underpin all other media.” Cultural sovereignty is the most important type, and the best way to reinforce and strengthen it is through literature.
But that is being lost, he argues, partly because those at the top in government and cultural institutions began to hate Canada, defining it solely by its sins. Prime Minister Trudeau said Canada was the first “post-national” nation, and as a result:
Canada seemed to give up. American product flooded the market and crippled what was left of Canadian publishers, TV companies, and newspapers. English Canadians’ imaginations, dreams, and ideas became almost wholly dominated by US TV shows, social media, and books. Canada began to become invisible to itself.
This didn’t kill Canadian publishing and Canadian literature, but it might’ve been the death knell. And their death, not external ones, is the biggest threat to Canada:
The more that bestselling Canadian books, TV shows, and movies are set outside Canada, the more they validate the notion that real life and real culture take place elsewhere. They suggest that there is no “here” here. It takes Canadians back to the 1950s and early 1960s when it was generally assumed that the important stuff happened in New York and London, that they were, as Peter Newman put it in The Canadian Establishment, the “places where real power and real excellence” lay, “over the water and across the border” If there is no “here” here, there is nothing to defend, build, or protect. Why bother resisting the blandishments of the great power to the south if there is no here to begin with? What would be being saved? If there is no here, there is nothing to celebrate, nothing to mourn in its passing, nothing to get excited about, nothing really at all.
In the face of external and internal threats to our identity, Stursberg argues, “Saving Canadian media and, most centrally, Canadian books is essential to saving ourselves.”
Of course, when reading about the importance of Canadian stories told by Canadians, an Albertan—and presumably a Newfoundlander, or a New Brunswicker, or a BCer—would point out that during the “Golden Age” of Canadian literature and publishing the stories were largely told by those from Ontario (since Lament for a Literature concerns itself with English Canada, the Quebec industry being much different and much more successful). And so while the story is important and there is clearly a need to defend Canadian publishing and grow Canadian literature, it’s missing the regional lens. Like the nation itself, Canada needs a publishing industry in which regional players are equal, so that provincial and regional stories are patches in a national quilt. As we work to rebuild a national identity in the face of internal conceptual (those posed by the anti-Canadian crowd) and political (separatism) threats and external ones (the United States, and other, more overtly hostile powers), a Canadian literature is essential, yes, but one that has a strong regional lens.
Stories matter, not just because a publishing industry is important economically, or because people need to be entertained, and not just because, as Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan said, “the liberal world by definition is literate.” They’re important because without them, we don’t know who we are. That’s as important for individuals as it is for a nation, and right now, in an era of rapid change, it couldn’t be more imperative to grow Canadian literature.
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